Shrapnel bombs gravely injure children of Gaza

With his ceasefire proposal in the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza not gaining traction, US President Biden this week approved the resumption of shipping 227-kilo bombs to Israel, while holding back on supplying 907-kilo bombs over protests over their use in densely populated areas.

This tells us that the US continues to back Israel’s war.

In May, the US stopped shipping both types of bombs. One 907-kilo bomb can rip through thick concrete and metal, according to a US official, who said their particular concern is the “end-use” of such large bombs in the ongoing siege on Rafah, where more than one million Palestinians had taken refuge.

But there’s another source of concern.

Last Thursday, The Guardian came out with a detailed online report on Israeli-made weapons designed to spray high-levels of shrapnel that cause “horrific injuries to civilians in Gaza and disproportionately harming children.”

Doctors who worked in Gaza hospitals in recent months, as well as weapons and explosives experts, were interviewed.

Many of the deaths, amputations and life-changing wounds to the children they have treated, the doctors averred, came from the firing of  missiles and shells – in areas crowded with civilians – that are “packed with additional metal designed to fragment into tiny pieces of shrapnel.”

Volunteer doctors at two Gaza hospitals said that most of their operations were on children hit by small pieces of shrapnel that leave “barely discernible entry wounds but create extensive destruction inside the body.”

A trauma surgeon from California, Feroze Sidhwa, who worked at the European hospital in southern Gaza in April, observed:

“Almost half of the injuries I took care of were in young lads – we saw a lot of so-called splinter injuries that were very, very small to the point that you easily missed them while examining a patient. Much, much smaller than anything I’ve seen before but they caused tremendous damage on the inside [of the body].”

Weapons experts told The Guardian that the shrapnel wounds are consistent with Israeli-made conventional weapons used to destroy buildings. The experts questioned why these were being fired into civilian areas.

Amnesty International has said that the weapons appear designed to maximize casualties, the UK paper noted.

Altogether, The Guardian spoke to six foreign doctors who have worked at the European and the al-Aqsa hospitals in Gaza, in the last three months. All of them described encountering wounds caused by “fragmentation” weapons, which they said had contributed to the alarming rate of amputations since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023. They found the injuries in both adults and children, but the damage done was likely to be more severe in the young ones.

“Children are more vulnerable to any penetrating injury because they have smaller bodies. Their vital parts are smaller and easier to disrupt. When children have lacerated blood vessels, their blood vessels are already so small it’s very hard to put them back together,” explained Dr. Sidhwa. “The artery that feeds the leg, the femoral artery, is only the thickness of a needle in a small child. It’s very, very small. So repairing it is very difficult.”

Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina who worked at the same hospital as Sidhwa, noted that the most common wounds were one-or-more-millimeter entry and exit wounds.

“X-rays showed demolished bones with a pinhole wound on one side, and pinhole on the other, and a bone that looks like a tractor trailer drove over it,” he said. “The children we operated on, most of them had those small entrance and exit points.”

He observed that children hit by multiple pieces of tiny shards often died. “Most of the kids that survived had neurologic injuries and vascular injuries, a major cause for amputation,” Dr. Perlmutter explained. “When blood vessels or the nerves get hit, and (the injured person) comes in a day later, the leg is dead or the arm is [already] dead.”

Sanjay Adusumilli, an Australian surgeon who worked at the al-Aqsa hospital in April, recovered shrapnel made of small metal cubes about three millimeters wide while operating on a young boy. The wounds from fragmentation weapons, he said, are distinguished by shards of shrapnel destroying bone and organs while leaving just a scratch on the skin.

Explosives experts who reviewed pictures of the shrapnel and the doctors’ descriptions of the wounds said the shrapnel were consistent with bombs and shells fitted with a “fragmentation sleeve” around the explosive warhead in order to maximize casualties.

They noted that the use of these weapons has been documented in past Israeli offensives in Gaza.

The M329 shell is one of several weapons used by the Israeli army with added fragmentation. An illustration of the projectile shows that the M329 contains six sub-munitions, each of which contains explosives wrapped in a “fragmentation liner” made of tungsten cubes. When it explodes, the liner breaks apart and those cubes shoot out in all directions, covering a 20-meter radius.

Trevor Ball, a former US Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, explained that the explosive sprays out tiny cubes and ball bearings that are far more lethal than the blast itself.

“The balls and cubes provide the main fragmentation effect from these munitions, with munition casings providing a much smaller portion of the fragmentation effect. Most traditional artillery rounds and bombs rely on the munition casing itself rather than the added fragmentation liners,” Ball said.

He added that the cubes recovered by Dr. Adusumilli are typically found in Israeli-made weapons such as common types of Spike missiles fired from drones. Amnesty International affirmed that the identified ammunitions packed within metal cubes were used in Spike missiles on Gaza in 2009.

Another weapons expert, who declined to be named because he sometimes works for the US government, questioned the use of such weapons in Gaza areas crowded with civilians.

Why can’t human intelligence and resources be better employed than inventing, developing and using such deadly things?