When the F-16s come, it is really scary and traumatic. You hear them and then the hiss of the missile and then the big blast, and then you can smell the gunpowder,” a British doctor trapped in Gaza with his young family was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
The doctor, who did not want to be named for fear of being targeted by the Israelis, arrived in Gaza with his wife and three teenage children to visit his parents three days before Hamas launched its murderous assault on 7 October, in which it killed about 1,300 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages.
Speaking hours before the Israelis imposed a communications blackout on Gaza on Friday (October 27, 2023), the doctor told the Observer that his and many other children who were all living in the same house had become so traumatised and terrified at night that they talked about wanting to be hit and killed by the next strike rather than have to wait until morning for the bombing to die down.
“The children are there, terrified, saying exactly this: ‘Let them just kill us for this to end.’ They were saying this, including my daughter – they were talking and they were all agreed.” He said his own parents’ home had been destroyed early in the bombing and that his sister had grown so desperate during the nights of shelling that she had talked of imagining the deaths of family members and having to search for their body parts, The Guardian said.
The doctor said he felt the people of Gaza “were being held hostage” and were in even greater danger than the Israeli hostages being held underground.
The doctor, according to The Guardian, called for UK parties to unite behind an immediate ceasefire, saying the way UK and world leaders were permitting the killing of Palestinian civilians, including children, would go down in history as “a stain on humanity”.
The UN chief António Guterres on Sunday (Oct 29, 2023) reiterated his call for ceasefire to end “this nightmare for the people of Gaza, Israel”.
Almost 40 percent of the more than 7,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes are children, Al Jazeera reported.
