Bedridden and equipped with a respiratory assistance system, Zahra, 12, has a deformed face and a sad look. Eager to reassure her, her mother, Ghalia (like most of those interviewed, she asked that her last name not be mentioned), murmurs affectionately: “Dear, everything will be fine and you will be even more beautiful than before. » The girl remains impassive, as if she does not believe it, in the studio where the family is temporarily installed, in Hamra, a district in western Beirut.
Zahra was left disfigured and wounded in the arm when a missile hit where she lived in Deir Al-Zahrani, a city in southern Lebanon, on the first day of Israel’s war against Hezbollah. He has years of surgeries ahead of him. According to the Ministry of Health, civilians make up the majority of the more than 2,700 people who died in the bombing campaign that began on September 23.
Transported nearby, to a private hospital in Nabatiyé, overwhelmed by the influx of patients and without specialists in reconstructive surgery, the young woman “They bled for two days. One more and I’d be dead.”He returns to his mother in fear. She was then transferred to the American University of Beirut (AUBMC) hospital, thanks to Palestinian-British doctor Ghassan Abu Sittah. The doctor created a fund, financed by members of the Palestinian diaspora and Westerners, that covers the living expenses of the family – the parents, Zahra, her younger brother and sister – and the interventions that the young woman must undergo. An artificial lower jaw will be implanted.
Launched in December, two months after the start of the Israeli war in Gaza, on October 7, 2023, carried out in retaliation for the Hamas attack in the south of the Jewish State, which left 1,200 dead, the fund was intended, initially, to offer, in Beirut, reconstructive surgery care and support to young Palestinian survivors of the enclave. Lebanese children now also benefit from this help. Specializing in facial reconstruction, Ghassan Abu Sittah had “repaired” dozens of “broken faces” injured in the wars in Syria and Iraq during the 2010s.
In the fall, after rushing to Gaza as he does during every Israeli offensive, he did not leave the emergency department for forty days, continuously operating on victims of the Israeli bombings. These shots caused the death of more than 43,000 Palestinians in thirteen months and transformed the Gaza Strip into an immense field of ruins. When the first beneficiary of the fund, a young man from Gaza named Adam, with his left arm shattered, arrived in Beirut in May, Lebanon was unstable, but few believed in an all-out war. Western diplomats then consider that Hezbollah is satisfied with the low-intensity conflict it has opened against Israel, in support of Hamas, and is ensuring that this confrontation does not extend beyond the border area.
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