On the morning of June 8, Ahmed Damoo received a call. He was informed that his house, a small concrete building in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, had been hit by an Israeli army missile. When he returned to what was left of his home, he found his family buried under rubble.
Their neighbors had removed the bodies one by one: among the dead were Damoo’s two children, Hala (13 years old) and Mohannad (10 years old), who were playing in the living room when the missile hit the house, as well as his son. in-laws. His wife, Areej, and young daughter, Tala, were seriously injured but still alive.
They were unable to find their fourth daughter, Mazyouna, 12 years old. When Damoo finally found her, she was on the verge of passing out: “Her face was disfigured and her jaw was literally hanging off her face,” he recalls. “My precious baby girl was completely unrecognizable.”
At Al Aqsa Hospital, doctors used the few resources they had to suture Mazyouna’s face and hold what was left of her in place. Mohammed Tahir, a British doctor volunteering in Gaza, looked after her during his rounds of the ward. “It’s one of the most shocking cases I’ve seen,” he says: “half of his cheek was missing and the bones were exposed.”
“The doctors did everything they could, but in Gaza it is not possible to carry out the facial reconstruction work that the young girl needs,” concludes Tahir. So, since June, the family and FAJR Scientific (an American non-profit organization that provides free medical care to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank) have been trying to evacuate Mazyouna for treatment in the United States, where she is waiting a team of surgeons.
However, the Israeli military body responsible for the country’s border crossings with the Gaza Strip – the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) – rejected their requests five times without providing any explanation.
Five months later, the girl’s situation is desperate. He still has shrapnel in his neck and is in pain with every movement. He can neither eat nor speak. The platinum surgeons used to reconstruct his face is crumbling and his jaw is barely held together by a bandage. Doctors say his wounds are infected and there is little they can do to stop the infection from spreading.
If she is not operated on immediately, she could die. “Every day I look at my beautiful daughter, who can’t even stand to look at herself in the mirror,” laments Damoo. “There is nothing more difficult for a father than to see his child suffering and not being able to do anything to relieve the pain. I have already lost two of my children; “To lose another one would completely destroy us.”
Vital evacuations
According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), nearly 2,500 children in Gaza are in need of urgent medical care and must be evacuated immediately. Mazyouna is one of these boys and girls.
Last week, the organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) denounced the fact that the Israeli government blocked the medical evacuation of eight Gazan children in need of medical care, without providing explanations, including a child under the age of two years amputated with both legs. The children and their companions were unable to travel to Jordan, where they were able to be treated at the NGO clinic.
MSF says that of the 32 children it requested for medical evacuation from Gaza to Jordan in recent months, only six were allowed to leave. “Long procedures and inexplicable refusals are blocking the provision of medical care to seriously injured children in Gaza,” denounced Moeen Mahmood, director of MSF in Jordan. “It is completely outrageous and disgraceful that Israel is preventing children who need essential care from leaving Gaza. “Israel’s refusal to carry out urgent medical evacuations defies reason and humanity,” he added in a statement.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), lamented that since May, medical evacuations “have virtually come to a standstill.”
For its part, UNICEF says that the average number of children evacuated from Gaza is less than one child per day. James Elder, spokesperson for this agency, regrets that “the children of Gaza are dying, not only because of the bombs, bullets and projectiles that hit them, but because even when miracles happen and children survive , Israel prevents them from leaving Gaza. to receive life-saving emergency care.
“This is not a logistical problem: we have the capacity to transport these children out of Gaza safely. It’s not a capacity issue; In fact, a few months ago we were evacuating more children. The problem is simply that Israel is ignoring this situation,” according to Elder.
Israeli authorities have given no explanation to Mazyouna’s parents as to why their daughter was not allowed to evacuate to receive the help she needs. Other parents with children who are to be evacuated and who have been denied permission to leave Gaza told Tutor that the Hebrew authorities cited “security reasons”, without providing any other explanation. The British newspaper contacted COGAT and the Israeli army, but they did not respond to their questions.
Humanitarian organizations say that in many cases, COGAT approves the evacuation of children, but refuses to allow them to be accompanied by their parents or relatives. “No one can guarantee that they will be reunited with their children later,” says Somaya Ouazzani, co-founder of the British medical aid organization Children Not Numbers, which has so far helped evacuate more than a hundred children. wounded from Gaza: ” “This situation is totally unacceptable.
A generation of child amputees
In a room in a large military hospital about half an hour from central Cairo, Sadeel Hamdan, an 11-month-old baby, lies curled up in a bed normally reserved for wounded soldiers. Her small body is filled with tubes, and every few minutes her slow breathing is interrupted by the beeps of a monitor. “He only needs his mother,” explains Tamer Hamdan, the baby’s father, sitting in an armchair, exhausted: “No child in this situation should be without his mother.”
Sadeel was born two months before the start of the war in Gaza and was diagnosed with chronic liver disease. As the war raged and her condition worsened, a buildup of fluid in her abdomen left the little girl in agony and difficulty moving or breathing.
Doctors warned that without an urgent liver transplant he had only days to live. Her mother, Huda’s, request was denied; she breastfed her baby until the day he left. Authorities allowed the baby’s father to travel with her because he was her organ donor.
The war in Gaza has also led to the amputation of a generation of children. UNICEF says that between last October and January, at least 1,000 children in Gaza lost one or both legs, which equates to ten children undergoing amputations per day. This number undoubtedly increased as the conflict lasted more than a year. The Israeli offensive began in October 2023, after Palestinian militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacked southern Israel on the 7th of that month, killing around 1,200 people and taking 250 others hostage.
Since then, nearly 44,000 Palestinians have died, most of them women and children, according to Gaza health authorities. Nearly 90% of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million residents have had to move. Hospitals are filled with children known by the acronym WCNSF (injured child without surviving family). For children who have been allowed by Israeli authorities to leave Gaza for treatment in another country, it is unclear whether they will ever be able to return to their families.
In the El Shorouk neighborhood near the Egyptian capital, Layan al Atta sits in a wheelchair and looks out of a balcony window. Layan was injured in an Israeli airstrike on a United Nations school in Deir al Balah (central Gaza), where she had taken refuge with her family. He suffered serious injuries to his spinal cord and right leg, which later had to be amputated.
When she was evacuated to Egypt, her mother was allowed to accompany her, but her father and brothers remained behind. “Not only did I lose my leg, but I lost my family and my home,” laments the young girl. “I feel like everything has been taken away from me and everyone I love most.”
Translation by Emma Reverter
