In the middle of the night, a panicked scream from among the graves broke the silence of one of Gaza’s cemeteries. Six-year-old Halima had awoken to the face of her deceased grandmother beside her in the same grave. With her brain protruding from her skull, Halima had been presumed dead and spent her night in the mortuary refrigerator. She was buried in her grandmother’s grave because of the overcrowding of Gaza’s cemeteries and the lack of space for new graves. The workers would have already closed the grave had they not found some extra space to bury bags of remains and gone to fetch more. This delay was long enough for Halima to regain consciousness and scream. Her story, as harsh and exceptional as it may seem, resembles those of countless Gazan children and is a testament to the brutal genocide that Israel is waging against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. Through the eyes of these innocent survivors, we can see all the elements of the systematic violence aimed at eradicating not only individuals but an entire future.

 

On the evening of that day, an Israeli missile had targeted the family home, severely wounding both of Halima’s brothers and her mother Zarifa. The medics found the six-year-old girl with a broken skull and her brain protruding. She was not moving and appeared to be dead. Her mother’s heart broke for her daughter, but she did not have the luxury of mourning as she was preoccupied with the rescue of her four remaining children. Her only request was, “Please don’t bury her before giving me a chance to say goodbye”. Once she had confirmation that her other children were alive, she impatiently awaited a chance to see Halima one last time. At that point, the medics came in bearing the good news that her daughter had returned from death. Zarifa arose in disbelief. She braced her wounded feet to give thanks in a prayer to her lord.

 

Today, in a house in Beirut, after the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund managed to transport Halima to Lebanon for treatment, the girl smiles and nimbly shows us the dancing she has learned, which in reality consists of random jumps and sways. The doctors had not expected her to live. They had told her mother that her life might be difficult as the severe brain injury may have damaged all her vital functions. “Pray for mercy. Death might be a mercy for her,” one of them said.

 

Halima is part of the second batch of children that the team of the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund managed to extract from Gaza and bring to Lebanon, which consists of seven children. Another child – Adam – arrived last March, accompanied by his uncle. Halima, her sister Siwar, and her brothers Muhammad, Ibrahim, and Mahmoud arrived accompanied by Zarifa, while twins Muhammad and Abdallah were accompanied by their mother Azza, who had herself been severely wounded in her feet and throughout her body. The fund, which relies on donations, provides the children and the adults accompanying them with medical and social care throughout their stay.

 

The grave injuries and urgent need for treatment brought the children and two mothers to Beirut. With them came their individual stories, wounds, and invisible scars, which constitute living testaments to the genocide being inflicted upon Gaza’s people.

 

In this article, we are shedding light on the stories of the wounded and surviving children. Elsewhere, we will cover the testimonies of the two mothers who accompanied the children and were themselves wounded. The stories of the children, who are bearing the full brunt of the events all at once at a time when they are still developing psychologically and physically, document the innocent way they interact with the barbaric genocide. As for the mothers, whose husbands are missing and who were unable to escape with their families from Israel’s comprehensive targeting of Gaza’s people despite the impossible choices they were forced to make, their stories reflect a different side of humanity in the face of genocide, as we will later see.

The Children’s Wounds

 

Gaza’s doctors managed to put Halima’s brain back inside, but the gap in her skull remained because of the inability of the destroyed Palestinian medical sector to perform the other operations required. Today, after the latest operation in Beirut (a bone graft), the surgical scars remain visible, and bandages hug her hair. With this surgery, Halima’s treatment is complete. She is a living martyr and a witness to the barbarity of the genocidal war that Israel is waging against Gaza’s people, but she is also her mother’s little miracle.

 

“I saw my grandma,” the child repeats, although she does not remember the other events that night. She talks of the Israeli army’s brutalization of Palestinians in Gaza throughout the war and of witnessing arrests, starvation, and attacks on displaced people. These memories come sporadically and scattered. She speaks about them with much emotion, and anger supplants the gentleness behind her eyes. Her little face also betrays another feeling: great astonishment at the scope of the atrocities she saw. “They make the people stand on one leg all day. I swear, that’s what they do,” she says.

 

Halima’s 15-year-old brother Muhammad keeps calm. He seems older than he is, and he carries the additional burden of his deteriorated health. Throughout the war, the kidney disease patient was deprived of his right to access treatment due to Israel’s systematic destruction of the Palestinian medical sector. Consequently, his health declined dramatically. The shock also caused blood clotting and an intracranial hemorrhage. From the night of the airstrike to his arrival in Beirut, he suffered severe headaches and eye fatigue. The boy has now resumed his treatment in Lebanon.

 

On the night of the strike, Ibrahim’s – the nine-year-old middle brother – head was covered in blood. His mother would have also believed him to be dead had the medics not noticed him trying to pluck some of the fragments from his head. He was rushed to hospital. As Gaza’s hospitals are at maximum capacity and have minimal resources, he had to wait for the doctors to get to him as they struggled with emergency cases of children fighting for their lives. By the time his turn came, he had already removed most of the fragments himself without any anesthetic.

 

Perhaps the nine-year-old child had acquired his equanimity from observing the continuous operations to recover the wounded after every massacre. He was not perturbed by the sight of blood the day that the massacres reached him and his family. For months, Ibrahim had, along with his older brother Muhammad (11 years old), been venturing out into the streets with plastic bags to collect victims’ remains. Muhammad explains to us that he would rise to the task whenever he heard meowing, as he knew that the cats had come to eat the remains.

Dreams Forged by Genocide

 

Although Muhammad was not physically injured by the strike, the two close-knit brothers share the same emotional trauma. Before they shared the task of collecting remains, they shared a passion for playing football. In the neighborhoods of the Gaza Strip’s cities and camps and on its broad sandy beach, the sight of children playing football was very common. The people of Gaza, who have been blockaded in their strip since before these children were born, have a special connection to the game. To the two boys, football is more than just a game: it is a professional dream that has been postponed. Today, they have returned to playing football, but they say that “Gaza is different [from Beirut]” and are in a hurry to return.

 

Fifteen-year-old Siwar takes care of the house and acts as her mother’s right hand. She lived through the war fully conscious of it, and she does the heavy lifting now that her mother and siblings have been wounded. She feels attached to the sea and sandy beach in Beirut. The sonic booms above the Lebanese capital do not disturb her musings in front of the sea: “If only you saw what it’s like in Gaza,” she says. The girl seems far older than her age, as can be said about all the children here.

 

Siwar’s dream for the future is to be a photojournalist. Her younger sister Halima’s dream is to be an engineer, not just because she is “free” (as she responds resolutely to whoever asks about it) but also because she wants to rebuild “our home in Gaza”. This desire reflects the childlike, innocent way that she handles the destruction of her home. However, older Siwar has a deeper awareness of the depth and brutality of the conflict. She chooses to document, to perform a role that she is capable of. The problem is not the destruction of her home but the presence of an army destroying it – an army whose crimes should be documented in order to preserve the memory. Another reason that Siwar gives is her desire to document Gaza’s beauty. In fact, she is now collecting pictures of Gaza – its streets, people, homes, trees, and sky – before the war. This desire is an authentic reaction to Israel’s ravaging of her city and its past, and its attempt to deprive the city of its future by turning it into nothing more than a land of destruction and genocide.

 

These children represent the living memory of a people that Israel wants to erase. The genocide has forever changed them, but their human yearning to break free from the shackles of reality in order to continue dreaming reflects the story of a people whose Nakba has lasted eight decades and continues to resist with its existence and imagination.

 

This article is an edited translation from Arabic.