Israelis shooting to kill

By Dina Lahlou

AMMAN Doctors in Amman are calling the human damage to Palestinian civilians caused by the Israeli army shocking. Dr Nasri Khoury, a neurosurgeon and director of Palestine Hospital in Amman, is keeping a detailed record of the kinds of injuries sustained by Intifada patients in his care.

I came across many different kinds of bullets that I extracted from my patients, the doctor explained. What are commonly referred to as dumdum bullets are in reality something else.

[The bullets] I've found are quite different [than the dumdum bullets] in the kind of scarring when they enter the body, he said. Khoury explained that although the internal damage by both the dumdum bullets and the type of bullet that he has encountered in his patients is similar, the scarring is much different, indicating that Israel is in fact using a new type of artillery.

When a dumdum enters the body it leaves a huge [external] scar, said Khoury. This new kind [of bullet] doesn't do the same damage upon entering the skin. It leaves a very little scar but the damage done to the organs or bones by the explosion of the [new] bullet is as bad as that caused by dumdum's.

There is nerve tissue damage, and the consequences of these injuries are tremendous, Khoury said. These are high velocity bullets with soft metal, therefore upon entering the body they scatter into tiny pieces and often permanently damage the organ they hit, the doctor said, exhibiting X-rays of injuries sustained by his patients from the West Bank and Gaza Strip showing fragments of metal that had scattered as far as 10 centimetres away from the direct injury.

Khoury has also accumulated a small archive of digital photos of many of the injuries he treated. The photos indicate that different metals were used, suggesting a new kind of bullet.

Some of these bullets were made in England, some are regular M16.A2 bullets, and others are metal, coated in rubber, quite heavy and over 1cm in diametre, about the size of a marble, but heavier. The rubber-coated ones travel at a lower speed but their heavy mass makes them lethal.

Samer Khrais' injury was lethal. The 20-year-old from Gaza was taken back home from the Surgical Amman Hospital last Thursday in a vegetative state. He is handicapped for life and will never be able to function normally again.

The doctors who treated him believe the Israeli military is applying a very specific method of targeting these young men.

The Israeli soldiers are told to shoot to kill, said Dr Yousef Arikat, a neurosurgeon who said he was outraged at the injuries he had to treat. The area targeted is above the nipples, where all the vital organs heart, lungs, brain, face and spinal nerves are housed in the body, he said.

At one point there were nine wounded in Palestine Hospital's intensive care unit, two of whom died.

The shooters seem only to choose, fit, young, healthy, brave-looking young men, aiming to fully destroy the finest among them. They target them by selection just like the way you would choose a sheep for slaughter.

Cases like Khrais are bound to die within a few years, sometimes sooner, either from chest infection, septicaemia or ulcers caused by their immobility.

Doctors Fouad Qawasmi and Ali Ayyad of Jordan Hospital expressed sentiments similar to that of their Palestine Hospital colleagues.

Dr Ayyad said that in his patients, he noticed unusual burned tissues and nerve and blood vessel damage, that are extensive in comparison to regular bullet wounds.

When we get a patient shot by accident with a regular bullet, never do we see what we have been seeing since the beginning of the Intifada, he said. Also the wounded are 99 per cent of the time shot with more than one bullet suggesting that once a victim falls, he remains a target.

According to the Palestinian National Authority, the number of injured at the hands of the Israeli army and Jewish settlers exceeds 10,000. Most of the injured are treated inside the Palestinian territories, but when Israel allows it, some are transferred to neighbouring countries.

Jordan, which is the conduit from Palestine to the rest of the Arab world, has admitted around 550 of the most critically injured for treatment at the King Hussein Medical Centre, Palestine Hospital, Jordan Hospital, the Islamic Hospital and several others. Hundreds of others have been transited through Jordan to Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Others were airlifted from Gaza to Morocco. The Jordan Armed Forces has set up a temporary medical facility in the West Bank.

The human crisis wrought on the Palestinians has been so severe that even European states have begun to accept the injured for treatment. Italy, Austria, Greece, along with Turkey have been the latest to join Germany in accepting them.