Child victims of Gaza war lie close, but apart

By Rebecca Harrison

TEL HASHOMER, Israel (Reuters) - Child victims of the same war, the two young boys lie just meters apart in hospital, bruised, bandaged and fighting for their lives.

One is Israeli, the other Palestinian. They were wounded on opposite sides of a conflict fought out daily between the Jewish state and the Hamas Islamists who control the Gaza Strip.

Osher Twitto, eight, had his leg blown off last week when a rocket attack fired by Palestinian militants slammed into a street near his home in the southern Israeli town of Sderot.

A few weeks earlier, 6-year-old Yakuub Natil was dancing at an uncle's wedding in Gaza City when debris from an Israeli air strike crushed his legs and chest.

Now the two boys, both breathing by ventilators, lie in the emergency ward of Israel's Safra children's hospital near Tel Aviv. It is not in itself unusual for Israeli hospitals, better equipped than their Palestinian counterparts, to treat patients from the occupied West Bank and even from Gaza, whose borders Israel all but sealed when Hamas seized control there last year.

Many on both sides of the conflict hold up the quiet decency of Jewish and Arab doctors and patients, working and recovering alongside each other in Israeli hospitals, as a model of how the communities could be. But even doctors used to such cooperation have been struck by the poignancy of the two boys' stories.

"What's so unusual is that they are pretty much the same age with similar injuries," said hospital director Gidi Paret.

"It's the real story of life here."