For a surgeon treating Lebanon’s wounded children, their horrific injuries bring back memories from Gaza
BEIRUT — For British Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah and his colleagues at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, the wounds he is treating on children are an all-too-familiar sight.
The number of pediatric casualties is mounting from Israeli strikes across Lebanon, targeting the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah, after military operations resumed when the United States and Israel began their war with Iran and its proxies in the Middle East.
At least 687 people, including 98 children, have been killed between March 2 and 12, the Lebanese Health Ministry said Thursday.
Abu Sittah told NBC News on Tuesday that he was treating young patients in the pediatric ward with “blast injuries, shrapnel, rubble, really devastating injuries.”
One boy “was a throwback to my time in Gaza, who was the sole survivor of his family,” said Abu Sittah, who volunteered with Doctors Without Borders during Israel’s war with Hamas and has worked in the Palestinian territories since the late 1980s. He has also worked in other conflict zones, including in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Israel has carried out regular attacks on southern Lebanon since reaching a U.S.-brokered ceasefire with Hezbollah in November 2024, alleging that the Tehran-backed militant group is trying to rebuild its capabilities. But Israel stepped up its military campaign after Hezbollah fired rockets and drones across its northern border in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
As well as carrying out ground incursions inside Lebanese territory, Israel has launched strikes across the country, concentrating much of its firepower on southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs where it ordered the mass evacuations of entire neighborhoods. More than 750,000 people in the country of around 6 million have been displaced, according to Lebanese government figures released this week, sparking a humanitarian crisis.
Abu Sittah said he was operating on two of four sisters who suffered “horrific injuries” in a strike near their home in eastern Lebanon’s Bekka Valley. Some of their bones had been broken and their eardrums had been ruptured in the blast, he added.
“One was killed outright and three ended up in intensive care,” he said, adding that they were hoping to find a bed for the third girl, so they could move her from a small rural hospital near their home.
Abu Sittah said there was an irony that their treatment “costs less than the weapon that caused all of this,” and while there was seemingly little difficulty in finding the money for such military hardware, “we have to struggle continuously” to find the money to treat the children.
The surgeon, who in April 2024 set up the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund to raise money for medical treatments, said his experience in Gaza forever changed him. “If you’ve lived through floods, that does not prepare you for the tsunami. The scale was just breathtaking,” he added.
“The sheer number of children killed in Gaza, almost 30,000, has numbed the world and made it used to the concept that children can be killed on such a scale,” he said.
Like several of Abu Sittah’s patients, 6-year-old Omar was transferred to the Beirut hospital from Gaza after suffering traumatic wounds in a December 2023 Israeli strike that killed his entire family in Nuiserat refugee camp in central Gaza.
Critically injured, the young boy lost his left arm and has had a prosthetic fitted. He said he wanted to become a doctor to help the people of Gaza, like those who helped him.
While Abu Sittah shows nothing but compassion for his patients like Omar, he said it was the anger about their situation that kept him going.
“The outrage is what protects your humanity,” he said. “If these things become normal to you, then you’ve lost something very important. You need to be continuously outraged.”
