On the morning of June 8, Ahmed Damoo received a call. They informed him that his house, a small concrete building in the Nuseirat refugee campin central Gaza, had been hit by an Israeli Army missile. When he returned to what was left of his home, he discovered that his family had been 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 in-laws. His wife, Areej, and young daughter, Tala, were seriously injured but still alive.
They could not find their fourth daughter, Mazyouna, 12 years old. When Damoo finally found her, she was on the verge of fainting: “Her face was disfigured and her jaw was literally hanging from her face,” he remembers. “My precious little 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 who volunteers in Gaza, attended to her during her rounds of the ward. “It is one of the most shocking cases I have seen,” he says: “Half of his cheek was missing and the bones were exposed.”
“The doctors have done everything they can, but in Gaza it is not possible to carry out the facial reconstruction work that the girl needs,” Tahir concludes. Therefore, since June, the family and FAJR Scientific (an American nonprofit organization that provides free medical care to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank) have attempted to evacuate Mazyouna for treatment in the United States, where a team of surgeons is waiting for her.
However, the Israeli military body in charge of the country’s border crossings with the Gaza Strip – Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) – has denied their requests five times without offering any explanation.
Five months later, the girl’s situation is desperate. He still has shrapnel in his neck and suffers every time he moves. He can’t eat or talk. The platinum used by surgeons to reconstruct his face is falling apart and his jaw is barely held together by a bandage. Doctors say his wounds are infected and there is little they can do to prevent 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 in the mirror anymore,” Damoo laments. “There is nothing harder for a father than to see his child suffer and not be able to do anything to alleviate his pain. I have already lost two of my children; “Losing another would destroy us completely.”
Vital evacuations
According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), nearly 2,500 children in Gaza need urgent medical attention and require immediate evacuation. Mazyouna is one of those boys and girls.
Last week, The organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) denounced that the Israeli Government blocked the medical evacuation of eight Gazan children who need medical attention, without offering explanations, including a child under two years old with amputations in both legs. The children and their companions could not travel to Jordan, where they could be treated at the NGO’s clinic.
MSF says that of the 32 children whose medical evacuation from Gaza to Jordan it has requested in recent months, only six have been allowed to leave. “Long procedures and inexplicable denials are blocking the provision of medical treatment to seriously injured children in Gaza,” denounced Moeen Mahmood, MSF director in Jordan. “It is completely scandalous and outrageous that Israel is preventing children who need essential treatment 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), has lamented that since May medical evacuations “have practically 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, spokesman for this agency, regrets that “Gazati children are dying, not only because of the bombs, bullets and projectiles that hit them, but because, even when miracles occur and the children survive, Israel prevents them from leaving. from Gaza to receive urgent care that would save their lives.”
“This is not a logistical problem: we have the capacity to transport these children out of Gaza safely. It is not a capacity problem; In fact, a few months ago we were evacuating a larger number of children. The problem is simply that Israel is ignoring this situation,” according to Elder.
Mazyouna’s parents have not been given a reason by Israeli authorities for why their daughter has not been allowed to evacuate to receive the help she needs. Other parents with children who need to be evacuated and who have been denied permission to leave Gaza have explained to Guardian that the Hebrew authorities alleged “security reasons”, without providing further explanations. The British newspaper has contacted COGAT and the Israel Defense Forces, but they have not responded to their questions.
Humanitarian organizations affirm that in many cases COGAT approves the evacuation of children, but rejects them being accompanied by their parents or relatives. “No one can guarantee that they will later be reunited with their children,” explains Somaya Ouazzani, co-founder of the British medical aid organization Children Not Numbers, which has so far helped evacuate more than a hundred injured children from Gaza: “ “This situation is completely unacceptable.”
A generation of children with amputations
In a room at 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,” says 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 war broke out 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 having difficulty moving or breathing.
Doctors warned that without an urgent liver transplant, he only had a few days to live. His mother, Huda’s, request was rejected; she had been breastfeeding her baby until the day she left. The authorities allowed the baby’s father to travel with her because he has been her organ donor.
The Gaza war has also led to a generation of children with amputations. UNICEF says that between last October and January, at least 1,000 children in Gaza lost one or both legs, equivalent to ten children undergoing amputations a day. That number has undoubtedly increased as the conflict has surpassed a year in duration. The Israeli offensive began in October 2023, after Palestinian militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad assaulted southern Israel on the 7th of that month and killed about 1,200 people, and took another 250 hostage.
Since then, nearly 44,000 Palestinians have died, mostly women and children, according to Gaza health authorities. Nearly 90% of the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Strip 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 area near the Egyptian capital, Layan al Atta sits in a wheelchair and looks out a balcony window. Layan was injured during an Israeli airstrike against a UN 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 obtained permission to accompany her, but her father and brothers stayed behind. “Not only have I lost my leg, I have lost my family and my home,” laments the girl. “I feel like everything has been taken from me, and also from all the people I love the most.”
Translation by Emma Reverter
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