Heartbreaking news report from Gaza - Dr receives bodies of her children

[Applenation]

Many of you will already have read about this. Paediatric specialist Dr Alaa al-Najjar was on duty when the bodies of nine of her 10 children were received by her in the hospital, after a strike in Khan Younis hit her home.

This report just stopped me in my tracks. I don't know what to say beyond this. I cannot stop thinking about this poor woman tonight.

er children killed by a strike in Khan Younis. Guardian link

Sorry I thought that I had clarified that I didn't accuse you of antisemitism in my previous post. Apologies if that wasn't sufficiently clear. By the way, look at the recent reference to the "lobby" - couldn't get any more classic.

Free Palestine from this atrocious genocide and stop the bombing and starvation of people!

@YourOnMute I think you are minimising the suffering of the hostages by saying that according to "an interview" (no source provided) all civilian hostages have been returned to Israel by Hamas so the remaining ones are all soldiers.

Even if that were true, they weren't soldiers in this war at the time of being taken hostage were they? So I don't know why you would dismiss the issue of them being held hostage for over 600 days just because of their job.

And it doesn't appear to be true anyway. According to the Times of Israel, in fact only 4 were active duty soldiers:

Israel believes 24 hostages are still alive in the Strip — 22 Israelis, one Thai and one Nepali. All of them are young men who were kidnapped on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and abduct 251, sparking the war in Gaza.
The group includes four active-duty soldiers and several people who had been working security at the Nova music festival, some of whom Hamas has claimed were soldiers as well.
Several of the other hostages were also kidnapped from the Nova rave, where they had been partying before the early morning attack began. A number of others were kidnapped while sheltering in their kibbutz homes or trying to protect family members from the deadly massacre carried out by Hamas that day.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-next-24-these-are-the-remaining-hostages-presumed-alive-in-gaza/

@Twiglets1 you are posting links from times of Israel all over this board. Do you believe everything they write? You are certainly rabid in your support of them.

Thank you @Twiglets1 . It was an interview I overheard on the radio where one of the interviewees (two side debate) said all civilian hostages had been returned under the agreements and the remaining hostages were soldiers. This wasn't challenged. There was next a debate on Palestinians arrested and detained without charge.

posters on these threads spend every day minimising the suffering of Palestinians. Yesterday we were being told that Palestinians looked quite happy and not scared whilst trying to get aid.

There is no doubt that Palestine’s died yesterday - what isn’t known is who killed them, I didn’t see a post from the ‘but Hamas’ posters saying how awful that was.

Wow when the rhetoric has been that it is okay to bomb civilian houses because Hamas live in residential areas you can not then say that IDF soldiers don’t count as military targets because they weren’t on active duty. That is a complete contradiction! Hamas don’t stop being Hamas when off duty!

I feel awful for Israeli hostages, they should never have been taken but I also feel awful for the Palestinians held without charge in barbaric conditions- including Doctors, women and children.

At least two Doctors were tortured to death (with one being raped) in an Israeli prison and according to WHO at least 297 Doctors, Nurses and medics were taken by the IDF and 160 are still being held by Israel.

Some Quotes from the Guardian article about the hundreds of Doctors and Medicas taken by Israel:

“According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 297 doctors, nurses, paramedics and other healthcare workers from Gaza were detained by Israel during the war.
Palestinian medical NGO Healthcare Workers Watch says it believes the number is slightly higher and that it has verified that 339 healthcare workers from Gaza have been detained by the Israeli military, with at least 160 still inside Israeli prison facilities.”

“We have just witnessed a war in which hundreds of medical staff, including some of Gaza’s most experienced medical staff, are dragged away from their patients and thrown in prisons for months at a time and tortured with impunity in breach of the Geneva conventions and other humanitarian laws,” Professor Nick Maynard

“Israel must immediately release all those held arbitrarily, including medical staff, and end all practices that amount to enforced disappearances, torture and other ill-treatment,” the UN said in a statement given to the Guardian. “Those responsible for crimes under international law must be held to account.” UN Human Rights Office

Various Testimonies

“During interrogations, he says he was tortured and beaten. “They would throw me on the ground. One would hit me on the head while the other opened my ear and poured water inside,” he says.
“There was a bathroom [in the interrogation room] … [they] would take a toilet brush and tell me ‘today we are going to brush your teeth.’ I was tied up, blindfolded and three or four of them held my face, pinned it down and kept scrubbing.”
Abu Ajwa says they broke his teeth: “They have no humanity.””

“”One of the senior interrogators had given instructions that because I was a senior consultant surgeon they should work hard to make sure that I lost [the use of my hands] and became unable to perform surgery,” he says.
He says he was handcuffed for 24 hours a day and interrogators used planks with chains to restrain his hands for hours at a time. “They said they wanted to make sure I could never return to work.”
None of the senior doctors interviewed say they were given an explanation for their detention. All were released without charge after months of imprisonment.”

““Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened,” says Abu Selmia.
“I am talking about being clubbed, being beaten with rifle butts and being attacked by dogs. There was little to no food, no personal hygiene, no soap inside the cells, no water, no toilet, no toilet paper … I saw people who were dying there.
“Every day is a humiliation, every day is degradation. There you are just a number, you are not a hospital director or a human being. I was beaten so badly I couldn’t use my legs or walk. No day passes without torture.””

”A doctor told the Guardian and ARIJ that he witnessed sexual assaults while in Israeli detention and tried to help treat a healthcare worker who had been raped by prison guards.
“A prisoner … had a baton inserted into him,” said Dr Khaled Serr, a surgeon at Nasser hospital, who was detained in Israeli prisons for more than six months before being released without charge.
“The assault was so violent that it caused severe muscle tears in his rectum. Even after his release, he continues to suffer. We performed multiple surgeries on him, but they have not been successful.””

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/feb/25/israel-gaza-doctors-surgeons-healthcare-detention-international-law

Some other links with details of Doctors held hostage by Israel, raped and tortured in prison:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/palestine-doctors-israel-torture-gaza-war-b2725438.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2yylgze4ro

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7vje365rno

That's very very sad...
I'm so sick of all this inhumanity. Every way!

Try & debate politely please. It’s not that hard to make a point without using insulting words.

I started using Times of Israel because they were one of the few not to present the Hamas version as fact when this story first unfolded. I don’t trust the Guardian or Al Jazeera anymore as I find them completely biased. The BBC are better so I will read their accounts and quote them where relevant to the discussion.

Only 4 of the remaining live hostages were on active duty at the time of being taken hostage @RandomWordsThrownTogether so that is way off what @YourOnMute said she heard & then repeated as fact.

Apologies if i insulted you @Twiglets1 , that wasn't my intention.

But you are repeating as fact information from the times of Israel which i find completely biased and dehumanising to the Palestinian people.

Israel need to let journalists into Gaza from outside so we can at least get a less biased report, although I agree the bbc verify is good.

@kirinm I think it’s fair to say that minimising the suffering happens on both sides.

It needs to be called out where we see it (& people did call it out with regard to a few of us saying yesterday that photos of people collecting the aid yesterday did not look scared at the aid distribution points).

Equally I’m calling out someone who implied that all the remain hostages are soldiers which turns out not to be true. I could also note that the comment was made with no mention of feeling sorry for the hostages, dead or alive, military or not.

Thank you, I appreciate that 😀

I am too. Its beyond heartbreaking. That link posted by @RandomWordsThrownTogether is truly sickening.

I’m not repeating it as fact and neither is the Times of Israel if you actually read their reports. They are merely saying this is what the IDF and GHF say. So we get a broader sense of different groups saying different things which shows us that we don’t actually know the truth of what happened, not yet anyway.

I’m genuinely at a loss as to how humans cannot accept what is happening to other humans in plain sight. The minimising of the treatment of Palestinians by Israel, the IDF and GHF is beyond belief. It is depraved.

It was an interview I heard on BBC at some point because it's the only radio I would have on!
I do try my utmost to show evidence if at all possible as I have shown in my previous posts in good faith. I actually said "I heard an interview".... because I was surprised to hear it myself. I didn't hear it before. But it wasn't challenged either.
So please don't misquote me thank you.

Can I just say, and I'm sure this applies to all of us on this thread, I'm just so depressed at ALL the killing, the horror, everything.
And yes that includes hearing that protesters were shot yesterday (now I did hear this on the radio half asleep so bear with me!).
I'm just so down and depressed over mans inhumanity to man.
No sides please! I mean for EVERYONE.

And I do feel for the hostages. I feel for all those suffering. Please don't assume about me. Enough has assumed about people on this thread.

I feel the posters who are in support of Israel dont show much humanity towards the horror stories coming out of gaza on a daily basis. The response is usually well we cant trust hamas and that's the end of the discussion. Yet so many of us who are pro Palestine have said time and time again how awful and brutal oct 7th was and how the hostages must be released. I've never read anyone on mn saying they support hamas. Yet the accusations of being a hamas supporter are on here a lot. As are the accusations of antisemitism i see on here all the time. Its continuous and so very wrong. It denigrates real antisemitism which is unfortunately growing in the world.

Anyway, that's how i feel. Im sure I'll get told im wrong very soon....

Good to know.

You said it in rather a throwaway comment that you heard that all the remaining hostages were soldiers. You heard it on the radio and didn't have the interest in the hostages to question it.

Whichever side we are on, I would guess it always seems like the other side don't show as much empathy as they could towards the other side's innocent people caught up in this horrible war.

It didn't come across as a throwaway comment to me.

I 100% agree with your sentiments.

Well here it comes...

What all of us? We're all identical are we? I think that is too much of a sweeping statement to day "posters who are in support of Israel don't show much humanity..."

It is that sort of comment that some will feel is bordering on anti semitic because it's uncomfortably close to thinking people who support Jews don't show much humanity.

I have never accused anyone of being anti semitic btw.