Aussie doctor shares chilling, heartbreaking videos from Gaza
A chilling video shared by an Australian doctor from inside a hospital in Gaza reveals the devastating reality of what’s happening. WARNING: Confronting.
WARNING: Confronting.
A small boy, who lost his entire family in seconds as bombs rained down on Gaza without warning, sits on a hospital bed staring at a wall for an hour.
He is in shock, unable to move because of the horror that he has witnessed.
Behind him, on the same bed, children with various wounds await treatment in a hospital where there are no painkillers.
The carnage nearby is hard to fathom. Seven girls have had their legs amputated without anaesthesia. Others have had their skin torn open by shrapnel wounds, been “burned from head to toe” and are still waiting for surgery or adequate dressings.
This is the reality in Gaza where Israel broke the relative calm of a January 19 ceasefire with rockets fired into civilian areas, including one school.
Australian doctor Mohammed Mustafa has been documenting the horror as one of three Australians volunteering with the Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association.
When reached by news.com.au this week, a spokesperson for Dr Mustafa said he was “only a few days in” to his work when the bombing started.
His first-hand account of events is harrowing and news.com.au has chosen not to share many of his videos and images because of their graphic nature.
“We’ve worked throughout the entire night, we haven’t stopped,” he said on Wednesday.
“The bombing has been non-stop. We’ve run out of ketamine. We’ve run out of (the anaesthetic) propofol. We’ve run out of all painkillers. We can’t sedate anyone. We can’t give them any analgesia.
“When we intubate people, they wake up and they’re choking because we have no sedation. There are seven girls getting their legs amputated (with) no anaesthesia. The bombing is still going on. The room is still shaking.
“We went to bed about 1am and about 1.30am the bombing started. I’m lightheaded, I’m dizzy. It was just mostly women and children, burned head to toe, limbs missing.
“I don’t know what to tell you. I was here in June, (the bombing was) nothing to this intensity. This is unbelievable and the bombing is still going on. The screams are everywhere. It’s insane. My legs are shaky. The smell of burnt flesh is still in my nose.”
His video of the little boy staring at the wall for an hour after losing his entire family has been shared around the world.
Speaking to Australian media this week, Dr Mustafa said the little boy was brought into the hospital by a woman.
“She took him out from under the rubble and she said his whole family are dead,” Dr Mustafa said.
“There was no-one left. She was injured herself and had her children to look after as well so she just left him on the bed and this kid was in such a state of panic that he was just staring at the wall.
“Initially, when he came in, I checked on him. He was conscious. In a mass casualty event, that’s good enough for us to move on to the next patient. I left him there and when I came back he was still staring at the wall.”
He says it’s only part of the daily terror those in Gaza are feeling.
In one video from Dr Mustafa, the body of a four-year-old boy can be seen with a bullet wound in his neck.
He was “shot in the neck by a drone while in his home with his family,” Dr Mustafa wrote.
“His father was killed at the start of the war along with one of his other siblings.
“Left carrying him was his 14-year-old brother and his mother the only surviving family members.
“We see this presentation everyday. When he arrived into the emergency department he was choking. And died minutes later.”
Dr Mustafa, operating on less than an hour of sleep each night, says a school was bombed this week and hundreds of patients arrived during the mass casualty event. The majority of them were children — a theme shared by other doctors working in Gaza.
The offensive by Israel has drawn widespread condemnation. Talks on extending the truce reached an impasse, and Israel resumed intensive bombing of Gaza on Tuesday.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said 504 people had been killed since Tuesday, including more than 190 under the age of 18.
The toll is among the highest since the war started more than 17 months ago.
In Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, Alaa Abu Nasr said 17 members of his family were killed in an air strike.
“They are targeting civilians, not fighters,” he said among the rubble.
Military spokesman Avichay Adraee said on X that Israeli troops “have begun a targeted ground operation in the central and southern Gaza Strip in order to expand the security zone between the northern and southern parts”.
Movement along Salaheddin Road between northern and southern Gaza is prohibited “for your safety”, he said.
Palestinians were seen fleeing south along a section of Salaheddin Road still open, near central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, atop donkey-drawn carts piled high with belongings.
In Gaza’s south, the army warned people to evacuate Bani Suheila before a strike on militants “firing rockets from populated areas”.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that began the war resulted in 1218 deaths, mostly civilians, according to Israeli figures.
The overall death toll in Gaza since the start of the war is 49,617, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
— with AFP
Originally published as Aussie doctor shares chilling, heartbreaking videos from Gaza
Trump envoy: ‘Putin is not a bad guy’
A White House official has praised Vladimir Putin after meeting with the Russian leader - who he also said described Donald Trump as his “friend”.
Why you only see Elon with same child
Elon Musk’s four-year-old son Lil X has become a Washington star, even hanging out with the president, but the full picture is unsettling.