'Most horrific of surgeries on panadol': Australian doctor recalls operating on Gaza child

The biggest thing that struck me, and I'll tell you a story about a young child, and this was it, still breaks my heart. There was a 10 year old kid who was caught in a bomb blast. He had a large piece of shrapnel that went through his abdomen and came out his right buttock. He presented with his intestines hanging out because his abdominal wall had been disrupted and he was unstable. So I quickly rushed him to the operating theatre. I had to open his abdomen. He had lots of holes in his small intestine. His penis was blown off, his bladder was blown off, his rectum had disintegrated and his intestine was hanging out through the whole in his buttock behind him. So I had to control his bleeding and had to staple off all these bits of bowel to control the infection and had to pack away his pelvis where there was a lot of bleeding that was originating from trauma to the veins in the area. And I remember whilst I was operating I was sitting there thinking am I doing the right thing for this kid? Is this kid going to have a good life if I save him? And a part of me just wanted him to die peacefully and. Anyway, we finished the surgery. He was stable and it was in Australia. We would have these children intubated. We'd keep them asleep for pain relief purposes, for stability purposes. There's no ICU beds, so he got sent to the ward with the tube taken up so he was wide awake. And along with that, there's no morphine. So this young kid is there with his abdomen open and his intestines just under a bit of dressing. Having gone through the most horrific of surgeries on simple Panadol, that's it. Something that we would take for a headache. And that child passed away later that night and I never thought I'd think this, but in my head I was sitting there thinking, I'm actually glad because what kind of life would that child have lead?