Another 16 children and adolescents injured in Gaza arrive in Italy: the stories of Abdel, Shaymaa and Sarah

Another 16 children and adolescents injured during the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip have arrived in Italy to receive urgent medical care in our hospitals. Their stories and their conditions show just as the conflict does not spare even the youngest.

Abdel Rahman Al Naasan is only 5 years old and suffered a fractured skull when he was hit by shrapnel from a bomb during an Israeli air raid in northern Gaza at the beginning of December. Today he is hospitalized at San Gerardo in Monza, where he is cared for by his grandmother Rehab who lost her other 8-year-old grandson, Abdel's brother, during the bombing. When he arrived at the hospital in Lombardy, the child still had three fragments in his skull, which were only removed thanks to an invasive surgery.

Shaymaa Shady is also 5 years old and in January she was injured by an explosion that hit her house, killing her grandmother and seriously injuring both her and her grandfather, in the village of Al Mawasi, in southern Gaza. She was urgently transferred to the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, which ran out of anesthetics or disinfectants and suffered the amputation of a foot. But only in February was she able to leave the Strip with her aunt Lina Gamal to reach Egypt: today she is hospitalized at the Rizzoli hospital in Bologna, where she had to undergo a further amputation of the same limb to avoid the spread of a infection.

At the same age, Sarah Yusuf suffered several burns, a broken leg and a fractured pelvis when Israel bombed her hometown of Zawaida, near Deir el-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip in November. The explosion partially paralyzed her pregnant mother and killed her 2-year-old brother, while her father is still missing. Sarah, accompanied by her father's cousin, Niveen Foad and her three daughters aged 3, 9 and 13, is also hospitalized at Rizzoli in Bologna. Today it is Niveen who takes care of the little girl, found in desperate conditions at the European Hospital in Khan Younis.

Abdel Rahman Mady, on the other hand, is 19 years old and was partially paralyzed due to damage to his spine caused by an air raid that killed around twenty of his relatives. He too was welcomed into our country to be treated. All of them need a long period of convalescence to recover, at least physically.

In fact, the damage of war is not only physical. According to Unicef, living conditions in the Gaza Strip are so desperate that the youngest people even hope to “get killed” to put an end to the nightmare of conflict.

Italy has promised to welcome around a hundred minors who were seriously injured in Gaza: at least around sixty have already arrived together with their companions and are being treated in our hospitals.