The Electronic Intifada Podcast 3 March 2025
The group estimates that in 2024, an average of 475 children each month – or 15 children a day – were left with potentially lifelong disabilities, including amputated or severely injured limbs and hearing impairments.
These injuries, Save the Children adds, have been worsened due to the decimation of the health system and destruction of health facilities in Gaza, as well as the restricted flow and low availability of medicines, which has made treatment, therapeutic or rehabilitative care inside Gaza near impossible.
We invited Dr. Mimi Syed, a US-based emergency physician, back to The Electronic Intifada Podcast to talk about the current state of Gaza’s healthcare and how she and her medical colleagues are appealing to both US lawmakers and the United Nations to address the health catastrophe in Gaza.
Syed also recounted how she treated two – of many – children while she worked in Gaza, including Mira, a 4-year-old girl shot in the head by an Israeli sniper drone. Mira survived, but will need specialized care that she cannot receive in Gaza.
“She’s been waiting for a medical evacuation, and since that time that we’ve been working at it, her mother has actually been injured because of another air strike [in January] and she now has a traumatic amputation to her limb,” Syed says.
Mira’s mother is her primary caregiver. “So not only does Mira need medical evacuation, but her companion, who would have been her mother, is no longer a candidate to be her companion because she herself needs medical care outside of Gaza,” she explains.
This video of Mira was shared by Syed on social media: Syed also treated 19-year-old Medo Halimi, who was killed in August 2024 after an Israeli airstrike. Halimi had a wide social media following and documented his personal experience of the genocide. She shows The Electronic Intifada Halimi’s brain scans and says he was most likely shot by a quadcopter sniper drone that Israel routinely sent in after airstrikes to execute anyone that remained alive after the initial bombing.“Medo, unfortunately, was one of those people,” Syed says. “He was brought in, and it was reported in the news as a shrapnel injury, but he had two wounds in his head and one was on the one side, and the other was on the exiting side. And this was a bullet, most likely.”
She examined him, she adds, and spoke to witnesses who saw what happened. “They told me that this was a quadcopter.”
Syed also talks about a new report by an international team of physicians and human rights advocates that documents the “two-pronged attack” on healthcare workers in Gaza and around the world to silence critique of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The report was submitted to the United Nations in January.
But the primary concern of healthcare providers in Gaza and their colleagues around the world is rebuilding the medical infrastructure and forcing Israel to abide by its obligations to allow aid, medicine and construction materials that were agreed under the ceasefire terms.
“We need to be able to rebuild everything that’s been destroyed,” Syed says.
“When you go into Gaza, you see how the roads are just completely ripped apart, the electricity grids, the water system, all of it has been completely annihilated. … Those type of things need to be rebuilt, and they need to allow the equipment needed to rebuild that, and the staff, the people, the trained professionals – they should be allowed in.”
Israel’s refusal to let these essentials in, she says, “is another level of inhumanity. It needs to stop. It has to stop.”
Produced by Tamara Nassar.
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