Beirut – British Palestinian surgeon Dr. For Ghassan Abu Sittah and his colleagues at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, the wounds they treat the children with are an all-too-familiar sight.
Since military operations resumed as the United States and Israel began their war with Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, child casualties from Israeli attacks targeting Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah have been mounting across Lebanon.
At least 687 people, including 98 children, died between March 2 and 12, Lebanon’s health ministry said on Thursday.
Abu Sittah told NBC News on Tuesday that he was treating young patients in the pediatric ward with “blast injuries, shrapnel, shrapnel, really devastating injuries.”
One boy “was a throwback to my time in Gaza, the sole survivor of his family,” said Abu Sittah, who volunteered with Doctors Without Borders during Israel’s war on Hamas and has worked in the Palestinian territories since the late 1980s. He has worked in other conflict zones including Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Israel has carried out regular attacks on southern Lebanon since reaching a US-brokered ceasefire with Hezbollah in November 2024, accusing the Tehran-backed militant group of trying to rebuild its capabilities. But Israel stepped up its military operation after Hezbollah fired rockets and drones across its northern border in retaliation for the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In addition to conducting ground offensives inside Lebanese territory, Israel has launched strikes across the country, focusing most of its firepower on southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, where it has ordered the mass evacuation of entire neighborhoods. More than 750,000 people in the country of 6 million have been displaced, sparking a humanitarian crisis, according to Lebanese government figures released this week.
Abu Sittah said he was operating on two of four sisters who suffered “terrible injuries” in the strike near their home in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. He said some of his bones were broken and his eardrums were shattered in the blast.
“One was killed outright and three ended up in intensive care,” he said, adding that he was hoping to find a bed for the third girl so he could move her from a small rural hospital near his home.
Abu Sittah said it was ironic that their treatment “cost less than the weapon that caused it all”, and that while there was little trouble finding money for such military hardware, “we have to constantly fight” to find money to treat the children.
The surgeon, who founded the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund in April 2024 to raise money for medical treatment, said his experience in Gaza had changed him forever. “If you’ve lived through floods, that doesn’t prepare you for a tsunami. The magnitude is just breathtaking,” he added.
“The sheer number of children killed in Gaza, nearly 30,000, has numbed the world and used the concept that children can be killed on such a scale,” he said.
Like many of Abu Sittah’s patients, 6-year-old Omar was transferred from Gaza to a Beirut hospital after suffering traumatic injuries in a December 2023 Israeli strike that killed his entire family in the Nuserat refugee camp in central Gaza.
The severely injured boy lost his left arm and was fitted with a prosthetic. He said he wanted to become a doctor to help the people of Gaza like those who helped him.
Abu Sittah said that although he did not show compassion for his patients like Omar, his anger at their situation kept him going.
“Outrage protects your humanity,” he said. “If these things are common to you, you are missing something very important. You must be constantly outraged.”
