GAZA CITY // Fadi Abu Al Foul recalled how the Israeli airstrike that smashed into the street outside his family’s house flung his two-year-old daughter, Ne’ma, into the air like a rag doll.
“It sent her as high as the second floor of the apartment,” he said.
It was the fall back to the ground that left her with a smashed nose, cracked forehead and badly swollen black eyes that she has not been able to open since the incident on Sunday. She was admitted to Gaza City's Al Shifa Hospital.
Still, while watching their daughter squirm in pain in her hospital bed, Mr Abu Al Foul, 32, and his wife Dunia, 21, know that the result could have been worse.
Ne’ma was fortunate to be alive.
“Thank God, the doctors say she’ll be back normal. We still have her with us,” he said.
Many other child victims of Israel’s bombardment of the Palestinian territory have not been so lucky, and health officials and rights groups say this may be because, unlike Ne’ma, they were indoors when the bombardments rained down.
The number of children killed in Gaza since fighting between Hamas militants and Israel erupted on July 8 reached 154 on Tuesday, with another 1,250 wounded, said Ashraf Al Qedra, spokesman for Gaza’s health ministry.
With just over 600 Palestinians killed so far, the death rate among children in Israel’s latest assault on Gaza is roughly the same as during the devastating three-week offensive that began in December 2008, when there were 354 child casualties out of a total 1,400 Palestinian deaths.
Mr Al Qedra said the high child death rate was because the Israeli air strikes and shelling have levelled entire homes. Human rights groups and Gaza medical officials say the attacks have deliberately targeted civilians, while the Arab League has accused Israel of committing war crimes.
“They’re destroying homes with families in them — mothers, fathers, their children, everyone inside them — so of course you’re going to see many, many martyred children. It’s deliberate!” Mr Al Qedra told reporters at Al Shifa Hospital.
Some speculators think the rate those children killed and wounded in attacks during the current fighting will likely far exceed that witnessed during the eight-day war in 2012 between Israel and Hamas that killed 34 children among a total of 180 war dead.
“Israel is using extreme force by using powerful weapons that literally collapse four-storey homes and tear apart bodies,” said Mohammed Abu Rukba, a Gaza field researcher for the Geneva-based Defence For Children International.
Still, the fighting appears to be far from over, and he and other researchers in the territory say casualty figures are changing daily.
But doctors say the wounds children have suffered have been severe, with head injuries, severed limbs and crushed bodies, a common result of entire houses crashing down on top of them.
Nabil Al Haddad, a paediatric surgeon at Al Shifa Hospital, said many children died soon after being admitted because of the severity of their wounds. Some of these were caused by a special kind of shrapnel that he described as “a thousand tiny needles” penetrating their bodies, which often cause a painful but not immediate death.
“You see these kids and you try to operate on them, but in a lot of cases, if they make beyond the surgery, they just die later,” he said.
He said the needlelike shrapnel was “something I haven’t seen” in previous wars, including the 2008-2009 and 2012 conflicts, as well as in the two intifada, or uprisings, over the past 25 years.
A report by Britain's Guardian newspaper on Sunday described Israel's acknowledged use of what are known as "fléchette shells", which scatter thousands of metal darts about four centimetres in length.
Although not prohibited under international law, the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem told the paper, the use of the shells in Gaza was “illegal” because they were imprecise weapons that did not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.
The Gaza death toll may be even higher than reported because fighting between Hamas and Israel problem has prevented the retrieval of bodies from some areas. One of those is Shujaieh, in eastern Gaza, which was practically levelled by Israeli strikes on Sunday. The shelling, along with Hamas reprisal attacks, forced thousands to flee and leave behind belongings and dead loved ones.
The bodies of eight-year-old Besan Dhaher’s family, including her mother, father and a younger brother, are still somewhere under the rubble of their family home in Shujaieh.
But lying half-conscious in her bed at Al Shifa Hospital, her face burnt and badly bruised, Besan had no idea. The family fear that telling her the news now.
“She’s suffered so much,” said Heba Dhaher, 30, a cousin who was acting as Besan’s guardian.
Ms Dhaher especially fears telling Besan the fate of her 11-year-old sister, Narmen, who also perished. “They were so close that you couldn’t find them away from each other,” she said.
The current round of fighting is poised to elevate the enclave’s already acute issues of psychological trauma, brought on by seemingly unending war with Israel.
“According to an assessment by aid workers on ground at least 107,000 children need psycho-social support for the trauma they are experiencing such as death, injury or loss of their homes,” said Jens Laerke, spokesman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Rawia Abu Joma’a, 17, also has not been informed that two Israeli rocket attacks had killed her four-year-old sister, Rahaf, as well as three cousins: Assem Ammar, four, his sister Eman, eight, and their brother Ibrahim, 12.
“Their bodies were completely cut up. It’s just too hard to tell her,” said Rawia’s aunt, Randa Abu Joma’a, describing the attack on the family home.
Rawia barely survived the attack, which broke her right hip, perforated her face and right leg with shrapnel and burnt the flesh off her right forearm.
Mrs Abu Joma’a cried at Rawia’s bedside.
So did Ne’ma’s parents. But they were also hopeful that she would soon have a new sister to play.
“My wife is pregnant,” said Mr Abu Al Foul, smiling.
hnaylor@thenational.ae