American doctors in Gaza see up-close toll of war weapons on children

Battle wounds and grisly injuries don t often faze Adam Hamawy. The 53 year old reconstructive plastic surgeon and US Army veteran who served as a com...

Battle wounds and grisly injuries don’t often faze Adam Hamawy. The 53-year-old reconstructive plastic surgeon and US Army veteran who served as a combat trauma surgeon in Iraq has seen the burned skin of children after a firework exploded, and a soldier whose legs were blasted away by a rocket-propelled grenade.

Two weeks at the Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis have brought together a harrowing combination of the two as Hamawy and a skeleton crew of doctors on a volunteer mission with the Virginia-based Palestinian American Medical Association see a steady stream of child patients wounded by weapons of war.

"Think of the injuries that you see in war, with blood everywhere, with shrapnel that’s supposed to kill soldiers and military personnel and take out tanks and bunkers,” Hamawy said. "Now think about that going through a child’s body.”

Hamawy and his colleagues from a two-week volunteer medical mission to Gaza are urgently calling for a cease-fire and for the US government to halt arms sales to Israel and use its leverage as an allied nation to get Israel to reopen the vital Rafah crossing.

Israeli forces seized and closed the border May 7, marking its first ground incursion into Rafah and cutting off desperately needed food, water and medical supplies. With a relief team in Cairo unable to enter Gaza, the closing had also trapped Hamawy and his colleagues less than 10 miles from the crossing, even though the World Health Organization had pre-coordinated an exit for them on May 13.