Unicef calls on Government to help evacuate injured children from Gaza hospitals
Orphaned children are experiencing the "repeated horror" of being targeted and bereaved multiple times under Israel's bombardment, forced starvation, and denial of water to Palestinians.That is according to Unicef's James Elder, who has called on the Irish Government to press for the emergency evacuation of thousands of wounded children who are now being treated without pain relief.Mr Elder raised the harrowing story of a six-year-old girl he met in recent weeks, whose pink painted nails struck him amid "all the horrors" of Gaza."This little girl, I saw her because her fingernails were perfectly painted, perfectly manicured. It just struck me, so I walked over to speak to her. "Dana's story was that in November 2023, so more than 18 months ago, there was a missile strike on her home — horrifyingly standard," he told the Irish Examiner."That missile strike killed Dana's mum and dad and it killed her siblings. She went to live with her aunts and uncles, but such was her level of trauma, she didn't speak for six months, but such was their level of care that they started to bring back a little bit of childhood in this little girl, and she started coming back to life in all forms of a child's life. "Now she was in hospital, and I saw her just a few weeks ago because the home she was staying in was struck by a missile in the middle of the night — just like her home had been 18 months ago — again, killing 10 members of her family, cousins and aunts and uncles. "She had escaped injury in her first home, had great degrees of mental trauma, but escaped physical injury in her first attack. Now she had shrapnel in her head."I suddenly realised that all these horrors that have occurred to children that I never thought I would see at this scale, those children who somehow survived them, they're not safe. They can now have a repeat experience of some unimaginable event."Mr Elder, who is on a three-day visit to Dublin as Unicef's global spokesperson, acknowledged the compassion of the Irish public, but made a plea to the Government to put pressure on international counterparts to allow aid to flow and to increase medical evacuations from the enclave."I met children who needed medical evacuation several weeks ago, and by the time I left Gaza, they had died utterly unnecessarily."There is such a severe lack of painkillers that you would hear children as well as see them and that's a very difficult thing, particularly for parents who are beside themselves with grief as to how they help a child who literally has had 5mls of painkiller an entire day and has fourth-degree burns on their body."
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