Abu Dhabi:
A Palestinian child holds an inflated surgical glove as a makeshift toy and is placed on a plane to Abu Dhabi – one of the first evacuees during the Gaza war to the United Arab Emirates for emergency medical treatment.
In the dead of night at Egypt’s El Arish Airport, near the Rafah border crossing from Gaza, the child is carefully carried from the back of one of six yellow ambulances waiting at the runway, with blue lights flashing .
A hydraulic platform lifts the wheeled stretchers to the back of a plane until eight children in various stages of injury and distress, some accompanied by family members, are on board.
These are the lucky ones, whisked away from the dangers and trauma of the war between Israel and Hamas to quiet, well-equipped hospitals in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the oil-rich UAE.
After Hamas gunmen attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people, Israel vowed to destroy the militants and has hit back with a punishing air and ground offensive that Hamas says has left 12,000 dead in the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli officials.
In the Hamas-held area, Gaza’s dead include 5,000 children — an average of about 122 per day — and 30,000 people have been injured, according to the health ministry.
The first group of evacuated children, who arrived in Abu Dhabi early on Saturday, are the first of an expected 1,000 children to be flown to the UAE for medical care.
One of the children has a broken spine and the other has a broken leg. Others have burns and one of them needs urgent treatment for cancer.
Two more with serious injuries did not board and were expected to join the next flight. The humanitarian airlift for children could now take place daily, an aid official told AFP.
‘Losing lives’
“We would like to carry out evacuations on a daily basis because there are injured people, hospitals are out of order and there is a shortage of medicine,” said Mohammed Al Kaabi of the humanitarian organization Emirates Red Crescent, describing the situation in Gaza as “catastrophic”.
“God willing, by the next week we will have evacuated everyone we can because time is precious and there are lives we are losing.”
Upon arrival in the morning light of Abu Dhabi, a boy with a tied and bandaged leg and a tired expression on his face flashes two fingers in a “Victory” sign as he is carried to a waiting white ambulance.
Another young boy, about three years old, with a white bottle of milk in his hand and his right leg in a bandage, cries as he is pushed across the asphalt in a wheelchair.
The airlift is part of a number of humanitarian initiatives by the UAE, one of the few Arab states that recognizes Israel and works to show solidarity with the Palestinians.
The UAE has sent 51 planes carrying 1,400 tons of food and relief supplies as part of a $20 million aid package, a foreign ministry statement said.
Gaza’s hospitals, already poorly equipped, are running low on basic supplies and are largely unable to cope with the huge numbers of wounded in the ongoing war.
On Saturday, hundreds of people fled on foot after Israel ordered the evacuation of Gaza’s main hospital, Al-Shifa, where it is searching for the Hamas operations center beneath it.
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