Mohammed Mahdi Abu Al-Qumsan, 26, was in tears at the Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. The young father was barely able to stand from the shock of the news he had received.
Al-Qumsan was on his way to pick up birth certificates for his newborn twins when he received the call: Aysal, Ayser and their mother Jumana were killed in an Israeli strike.
The twins were just four days old.
“The phone rings, [they said], ‘The apartment you’re in has been hit,'” Al-Qumsan told CBC freelance videographer Mohamed El Saife. “They told me, ‘Your wife and children are at Al-Aqsa Hospital.'”
He held up his children’s birth certificates, trying to absorb the life-altering turn the day had taken.
“Here is their date of birth, Aug. 10,” he said. “They’re dead.”
Children in Gaza have been heavily impacted by the ongoing Israel-Hamas war — one per cent of the child population, or around 14,000, have been killed over the past 10 months, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
And of the nearly 40,000 total people killed in the strip, 115 were newborns, the ministry states.
The details of the Al-Qumsan family’s account as published “are not currently known” to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), the army told CBC in a statement.
It also said it is fighting Hamas in Gaza, and that it “targets only military objectives and employs various measures to minimize harm to civilians.”
‘We can’t even tell who’s who’
The same day, a strike in Khan Younis left five-month-old Reem Abu Haya an orphan.
“Her mom, her siblings — her entire family is gone,” her paternal grandmother Rashida Abu Haya told CBC’s El Saife. “Twenty people are gone.”
Rashida worried about how the child would manage after such a devastating loss.
“They were just having dinner until suddenly, a rocket struck them,” she said.
“They’re all mutilated into pieces. We can’t even tell who’s who.”
The current Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, when a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel killed around 1,400 and took about 250 hostage, by Israeli counts. Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza since then has killed nearly 40,000, by Palestinian tallies.
In June, for the first time, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres added Israel’s military and security forces, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to the list of parties committing “grave violations” against children.
The annual list covers the deaths of children in conflict, denial of access to aid and targeting of schools and hospitals, and a report is presented to the UN Security Council.
“I’m appalled by the dramatic increase and unprecedented scale and intensity of grave violations against children in the Gaza Strip, Israel and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, despite my repeated calls for parties to implement measures to end grave violations,” wrote Guterres.
Children pay the ‘heaviest price’
Children, defined as those under 18, make up nearly half of Gaza’s population, and they pay the “heaviest price” in the war, Dalia Al-Awqati, Save the Children Canada’s head of humanitarian affairs, told CBC in an interview.
“Children are more likely to be killed by the explosive weaponry that is used in the bombardment,” she said. “Their bodies are a lot more vulnerable to the violence that they experience.”
The effects of the war are not simply physical but psychological, too, she said.
“It has taken an immense mental toll on children.”
And even prior to the war, children’s mental health in the territory was already at “a breaking point,” she said.
Israel has blockaded Gaza since 2007 — when Hamas took over the region — citing the need to protect itself. But many children have not known life in the strip without such a blockade, which has largely cut Gazans off from the rest of the world.
Multiple escalations in violence before the war have impacted them, as well: In 2022, Save the Children found that four out of five kids in Gaza reported living with depression, grief and fear.
One last time together
Al-Qumsan’s screams filled the air, as he begged to see his wife one last time — her body along with those of their babies lay in white body bags in the hospital courtyard. Men held him up and whispered to him, trying to calm him, though most of these attempts proved futile.
Eventually, Al-Qumsan took his place among community members.
Through sobs, he began his prayer for the deceased. He wept for the deaths of his wife and children, killed after just four days together, in a war that continues to tear families apart.
Published at Wed, 14 Aug 2024 22:16:15 +0000
Talks aimed at ending Sudan’s shattering 16-month-old civil war began on Wednesday in Switzerland although the absence of the military dampened hopes for imminent steps to alleviate the country’s humanitarian crisis.
UN officials warned this week that Sudan is at a “catastrophic breaking point” and that there will be tens of thousands of preventable deaths from hunger, disease, floods and violence in the coming months without a larger global response.
Who’s participating in the talks
The U.S. special envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello, has led the push for the talks but has said direct mediation would be impossible without the Sudanese army present. Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, the United Nations, the African Union, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an East African regional body, and other experts would consult on road maps for a cessation of violence and carrying out humanitarian aid deliveries.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has seized broad swathes of the country, sent a delegation to Switzerland, but its enthusiasm for the talks is unclear.
The army has said its absence from the talks arises from the failure to implement previous U.S.- and Saudi-brokered commitments to pull combatants out of civilian areas and facilitate aid deliveries. Mediators say both sides disregarded that accord.
“Military operations will not stop without the withdrawal of every last militiaman from the cities and villages they have plundered and colonized,” Sudanese armed forces chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said late Tuesday.
The current talks will also focus on developing an enforcement mechanism for any deal.
How we got here
Sudan was already struggling before the latest round of fighting erupted, dragged down by sanctions and isolation under former leader Omar al-Bashir.
To put down a rebellion in the Darfur region in the early 2000s, the Bashir government used the so-called Janjaweed militias, a precursor to the RSF. An estimated 2.5 million people were displaced and 300,000 killed in the conflict, and the International Criminal Court prosecutors accused government officials and Janjaweed commanders of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.
Bashir was toppled in a coup in 2019 after weeks of pro-democracy protests with scores of activists killed in demonstrations by government forces. Bashir was imprisoned and in 2023 Sudanese officials said he had been moved to a prison medical facility, though specific details were not given. Now 80, he’s still wanted by the ICC.
Sudan was removed in 2020 from the United States list of state supporters of terror, opening the door for badly needed foreign loans and investment. But late the following year, Sudan’s army and the RSF toppled the embryonic civilian government.
The Current19:34They lost everything fleeing Sudan, but they can’t go back
At the Chad border, there’s a steady stream of donkeys pulling carts piled high with people’s belongings, everything they’ve been able to carry as they flee the brutal conflict in Sudan. The Current’s Liz Hoath went there to speak with refugees, and the aid workers struggling to help.
War erupted in April 2023 between the army and the RSF, amid disputes over how to transition from military rule to free elections.
The RSF has continued operations in several areas of Sudan, heavily bombarding the cities of Omdurman, El Obeid and Al Fashir, as well as pushing through into the southeast, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, has denied many accounts of fighters attacking civilians.
Famine at northern refugee camp
The Sudanese face myriad longstanding issues. The rainy season is in full swing, damaging homes and shelters across the country and threatening a wave of waterborne diseases. Over the last week, 268 cases of cholera were reported in Sudan, the Health Ministry said.
The world’s worst humanitarian crisis has ensued since war erupted last year with half the 50 million population lacking food, and famine taking hold in part of the North Darfur region.
Aid agencies say they have faced huge logistical, security and bureaucratic problems. They say the army has blocked humanitarian aid, and the RSF has looted it in areas it controls. Both have denied impeding humanitarian operations.
Local volunteers have tried to fill the gap, but have often been treated with suspicion, targeted, or struggled to raise donations.
A global hunger monitor — the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification — said in July that restrictions on aid deliveries have caused famine in North Darfur’s Zamzam camp for internally displaced people.
“Without treatment, children with severe malnutrition are at risk of dying within three to six weeks [at Zamzam camp],” Médecins Sans Frontières added on Aug. 4.
Sudan’s government has rejected the characterizations of famine at the camp.
Massive displacement
More than 10 million Sudanese, or 20 per cent of the population, have been driven from their homes since the war there began, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in July.
More than 2.2 million people have fled to other countries since the war began.
“All refugees I met said the reason why they fled Sudan was hunger,” Dr. Shible Sahbani, the World Health Organization’s representative for Sudan, said while visiting a refugee camp in Chad.
The Current23:40Helping Sudanese women fleeing sexual violence
Women fleeing civil war in Sudan are falling victim to sexual and gender-based violence, even as they seek refuge in neighbouring Chad. The Current’s Elizabeth Hoath brings us the stories of four women — and the staggering challenge for aid workers trying to help.
Almost 7.8 million Sudanese have fled to other parts of the country, the IOM said in its latest bimonthly report. An additional 2.8 million people were already displaced by previous conflicts in the country.
As the RSF has expanded its reach in the southeast of the country in recent weeks, more than 150,000 people were displaced from Sennar state — many for the second or third time — after RSF raids on markets and homes in the state’s small towns and villages, the IOM said.
Many displaced are now in Gedaref state, which hosts 668,000 people who face heavy rains with limited shelter, and where RSF units have staged incursions.
The conflict and displacement have left women particularly vulnerable, Human Rights Watch said in a report in late July.
The RSF have committed widespread acts of sexual violence in the capital Khartoum, including gang rape and forced marriages, the report alleged. It cited accounts of the RSF holding women and girls in conditions that could amount to sexual slavery.
The Human Rights Watch report said some attacks had also been attributed to the army.
Published at Wed, 14 Aug 2024 17:43:52 +0000
