Gaza Civilians Blown Apart—Including Children—Have Injuries Typical of Battlefield Soldiers: Study

A new study has found that Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from injuries inflicted by the Israeli military that are typically seen in soldiers on battlefields.

The study, which was published in the British Medical Journal on Thursday, found that explosive injuries to Gaza civilians accounted for two-thirds of injuries they studied, which it said was roughly the same percentage of explosive injuries suffered by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In total, the study collected data from 78 healthcare workers employed across 22 different NGOs stationed in Gaza.

The report notes that this rate of explosive injuries is more than double the 31% typically suffered by civilian populations in war zones.

"The resulting injury profiles resembled those reported in combat settings among trained military personnel, highlighting the burden of trauma among civilians in Gaza," the study explained. "Explosive weapons, designed for open battlefields, are increasingly being deployed in densely populated urban areas."

The study also found a higher than average incidence of burn injuries among civilians in Gaza compared to other conflicts, with 30% of these burns extending "into muscle and bone, resulting in complex, high morbidity wounds with limited options for definitive care, consistent with the use of incendiary and fuel-air munitions."

In addition to examining traumatic wounds, the researchers found that Gazans are suffering from a severe public health crisis with widespread incidences of infectious and chronic diseases, as well as thousands of instances of malnutrition. They said these conditions have come about due to "the systemic collapse of healthcare due to the blockade, fractured pathways, and loss of facilities" in Gaza.

In an interview with The Guardian, study co-author Bilal Irfan, a bioethicist who conducts research at the University of Michigan, said that the research may be underestimating the severity of civilian suffering in Gaza simply because it only studied wounds of people who survived long enough to be taken in for medical treatment.

"This is data for the patients who made it to hospital and so survived," he said. "We don’t even have a full profile of the serious injuries of those who died without any medical attention."

The study describes this in more graphic terms, as it notes that its data "excludes the victims of high explosive weapons whose bodies were obliterated or rendered unrecognizable, those incinerated in fireballs, torn apart by aerial bombardment, or reduced to fragments in the epicenter of 2,000 pound munitions."

Such excluded victims, the study continues, "never entered hospital records and thus remain absent from our body atlas of injuries. They are the disappeared: the thousands of missing people, many of them children, whose remains could not even be identified. Their absence is itself a reminder of the scale of destruction and the limits of what clinical data can ever capture."