‘Nowhere Is Safe in Gaza’: Clarissa Ward Gains Unprecedented New Access to Gaza’s ‘Humanitarian Catastrophe’ in Harrowing Report

CNN chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward has been reporting on the scene since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War. In a stunning report that aired Thursday on CNN, Ward gave viewers an even closer look inside the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, going inside a field hospital that was set up by the United Arab Emirates for an unflinching story of human suffering. CNN was the first Western news outlet to be granted this kind of access.

Ward’s report begins on a dour note: “You don’t have to search for tragedy in Gaza. It finds you on every street strewn with trash and stagnant water, desolate and foreboding.” And the misery continues once Ward is off the street and inside the hospital. At times, Ward becomes visibly emotional while speaking with severely wounded patients, including young children and babies, but the most prominent emotion on display from the reporter and the people around her was frustration:

…Twenty-year-old Lama understands it all too well. Ten weeks ago, she was studying engineering at university and helping to plan her sister’s wedding. Today, she is recovering from the amputation of her right leg. Her family followed Israeli military orders and fled from the north to the south. But the house where they were seeking shelter was hit in a strike. “The world isn’t listening to us,” she says. “Nobody cares about us. We have been dying for over 60 days, dying from the bombing, and nobody did anything.” Words of condemnation delivered in a thin rasp. But does anyone hear them?

Even after painting such a stark picture of the horrors taking place as a result of the Israel Defense Force’s indiscriminate strikes in Gaza, Ward provided sobering numbers to provide context of the extent of the civilian cost of the war:

Now the death toll in Gaza as a result of Israel’s frenzied bombardment currently hovers at roughly 18,000. If you do the math, extrapolating as the U.N. says, that two thirds of the casualties, roughly, are civilians, that is about 11,800 civilians who have been killed in just over two months. To give you a comparison, in the first year of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to an independent research organization, some 7,700 civilians were killed by U.S. Forces. In 20 years in Afghanistan, according to independent research groups, some 12,000 civilians were killed.

So in just two months, you’re now approaching 12,000 civilians, and that’s the same amount who were killed in 20 years during the U.S.’s war in Afghanistan. So this is truly staggering and unprecedented.

Watch the full video via CNN.