‘Will he lose his leg?’: Thousands of Gaza protesters facing life-altering injuries from Israeli high velocity bullets

Israeli army appears to be moving from shoot to kill to shoot to maim policy, writes Sarah Helm

(Getty)

“An 11-year-old child with his leg hanging on by a strip of skin was in one operating theatre where we were attempting a vascular repair, with an eight-year-old shot in the groin in a holding bay, when seven more arrived, also critically injured by sniper fire.”

These are the words of a top British orthopaedic surgeon, normally operating in a state of the art theatre at a London teaching hospital. He was reporting on a typical day of work at Shifa Hospital in the besieged Gaza Strip, where along with scores of other international surgeons, he volunteers to save the lives of Gaza protesters – and, increasingly, their limbs.

The limbs have been shattered by high velocity bullets, fired by Israeli snipers ranged along the barrier which separates Gaza from Israel, keeping 2 million Palestinians penned inside the strip, most of them refugees.