It is breakfast and I reach for a painkiller dropped off by a Boots delivery van. The sleep apnoea machine by the bed is beeping and I plug it in to the mains to charge. I can’t stop thinking about the disabled and ill people in Gaza; the dialysis patients who were halfway through their treatment when the power stopped, the children surviving off animal feed who can’t find bread, let alone a wheelchair.
I scroll social media and see the bodies of babies decomposing in an abandoned hospital, milk bottles and maggots next to their beds. I wonder had they been permitted to live, how much longer they would have survived. If they would have died in pain when the morphine ran out, or gasped for air when the ventilator batteries went to red. And I wonder if a quick death is what counts as mercy nowadays, in a place where no amount of suffering seems to matter.
One year on from the Hamas-led attacks on Israel and the subsequent military assault on Gaza, it feels almost impossible to know how to measure the horror. The number of Palestinians who have been killed (more than 40,000). Or how many Israeli hostages are still unaccounted for (97). Perhaps the percentage of Gaza’s buildings that have been damaged or destroyed (about 60%).
There is one aspect that is rarely talked about: what is happening to disabled Palestinians. That adults and children with disabilities are often the worst affected by conflict is an atrocity as old as war itself. If you are paralysed, you cannot run from shrapnel. If you are deaf, you don’t hear the sirens warning you to take cover.
More than a decade of Israeli restrictions on imports and travel mean disabled people in Gaza were living without treatment and equipment long before the first missiles fell. Over the past year, Israel’s humanitarian blockade has further stripped disabled civilians of what they need to survive, from assistive devices to medication and specialist food. Others have lost their mobility aids in the bombing and have no way to escape.
When her neighbourhood was attacked in the early days of the war, 14-year-old Ghazal – who has cerebral palsy – fled with her parents to her aunt’s house. When they returned, their home was nothing but rubble. Ghazal’s wheelchair and walker had been inside.
“I was a burden [to my family]”, she told Human Rights Watch (HRW). “I gave up and sat in the middle of the road, crying. I told them to go without me.”
The sheer scale of the Israeli onslaught means it is not simply that disabled people such as Ghazal are in danger – it is that more people are being made disabled every day. About 95,500 people have been injured in the conflict, with the World Health Organization estimating more than 22,500 of those will have lifelong injuries. The Gaza war is a mass disabling event, where the casualties are not only those who die but those who survive.
Research this week by HRW into the plight of disabled children in the region lays out this devastating reality: Israel’s use of explosive weapons in densely populated areas is causing more children to become disabled. The injured are being forced to endure lengthy waiting times for urgent medical attention. Many children have undergone surgery without anaesthetic. One teenage boy who can’t walk due to cerebral palsy reportedly had to sit in a horse’s cart to flee the bombing. The father of a nine-year-old girl with a severe hip and leg injuries said her trauma has changed her entirely: “She is not the same child.”
In the first few months of the war alone, more than 1,000 children in Gaza are estimated to have lost one or both of their legs. That equates to more than 10 children losing a limb on average every day.
After an Israeli evacuation order, Leila fled with her three children to what they believed was a safe zone. Instead, an airstrike hit their refugee camp. Leila was knocked unconscious by the blast next to her 13-year-old son. “I woke up and I was still holding my son’s hand, so I started running,” she told HRW. “I felt like my son was light … So, I looked and didn’t see my son anywhere near me. That was when I discovered I was holding only his arm.”
I do not know exactly when “self-defence” began to involve blowing off children’s limbs. Perhaps it was around the time journalists could be killed with impunity. Or when a school became a fair military target.
It has become standard to say the wider Israel Palestine issue is complex, and of course it is. But the war, on one level at least, is deceptively simple. No state has the right to massacre civilians. No soldier has the right to use a blockade to withhold anti-seizure drugs from a five-year-old, or to watch their dog bite a man with Down’s syndrome and leave him to die alone. There are lines that even the shadow of war should not cross and yet Israel has, over and over and over again. The actions of its allies, including Britain, have provided the cloak of legitimacy it has needed for a war with no limits. If the consequences of this approach were still not clear, we need only look to the dead bodies in Lebanon.
“From the day the war broke out, they destroyed what was inside us,” Ghazal says from a makeshift camp in the Gaza Strip. “They demolished my house and my room, which held all my memories. They took everything that helped me to live, like my wheelchair. How can I go back to how I was without all this?”
How can any of us? I unplug my sleep apnoea machine and I wonder if the real darkness will come when any of this seems normal.
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Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
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