An American surgeon who volunteered in Gaza sent me a photo that struck me with its overwhelming grief: a woman mourning her young son.
I have known the surgeon, Dr. Sam Attar, a professor at Northwestern University School of Medicine, for a decade. He has worked in war zones around the world, from Ukraine to Iraq to Syria, but Gaza has been particularly painful for him, in part because so many children have suffered or died.
He recently performed amputations and other orthopedic surgeries at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. One day, he was preparing to enter the operating room when a woman called him and asked him to photograph her young son, Karam, in his bed in the intensive care unit. Sam came and then realized the boy was dead.
“Every time the staff wanted to cover him completely with a blanket, she would turn it over and say, ‘No! “, Sam told me. “And she started talking to him, asking him where he had gone.”
Nurses and other doctors who were in the intensive care unit that day said Karam died from complications related to malnutrition. The United Nations confirms that children in Gaza have die of hunger.
Nurses wanted to remove Karam’s body after he died an hour earlier, but his mother wouldn’t allow it. In her grief, she told Sam that Karam was a prince and she wanted Sam to share the boy’s photo. Perhaps she thought it was a way to commemorate her son.
I have critical the way Israel has waged the war in Gaza and President Biden’s strong support as a child is killed or injured in the war every 10 minutes, according to the United Nations. More than 14,000 children have been killed during the war, according to Gaza health authorities. But it’s a number; this photo captures a preventable tragedy.
While I argue that it is time to end this war, I believe this photo has greater persuasive power than my words, which is why I dedicated my column to this image. As we discuss Gaza, let’s keep in mind that the war is fought through lives like Karam’s.
Here is the photo, to remind us of all the issues.
