Middle East Eye: The trauma of children in Gaza exceeds the worst nightmares | Press Tour News

“War on Gaza“Being a Palestinian is a curse, not a blessing.” With this title, Behzad Al-Akhras, a Palestinian doctor and health policy researcher, began an article published by the British website Middle East Eye, in which he commented on 3 stories about the trauma of children in Gaza that go beyond anyone’s worst nightmares.

For many of us, the desire to experience the world again as a child, with all the innocence that brings, is common. Being a child is one of the greatest blessings in life, and childhood is where we begin to fall in love with this world. However, this is not the case for everyone, especially the children of Gaza who are suffering under the criminal Israeli bombing.

Little girl Fatima

Al-Akhras draws a picture of the feeling of a child in Gaza today under the Israeli bombing in the story of the little girl Fatima, when she does not wake up to the familiar smiles and embraces of her mother and father at home, but rather wakes up alone in the corridor of a hospital, confused, afraid, and shocked, with dust covering her small eyes, blood on her cheeks, and severe pain in her leg. Broken.

Fatima wonders what mistake she made to live this nightmare, and why her mother did not wake her up? Why is her father not there to console her, hug her, and reassure her as he always does when she is afraid?

Fatima says to herself, “I know that I am naughty sometimes, but that is no excuse for punishing me in this way.” The little girl waits, time passes slowly, and slowly she begins to get to know her new reality.

Her father is missing under the rubble, her mother is lying in the corridor cold and lifeless, and her brothers are among those in intensive care, in the operating room, or in the morgue.

The little girl begins to notice the features of the faces around her. They are human, but what happened to them to make them look like ghosts? Why are their faces without blood or life?

Meanwhile, she hears a voice announcing the arrival of her older sister, Bisan, who is training to be a family doctor. Finally, Fatima will see her beloved sister to give her nostalgia and some sympathy. You hear someone say again, “I arrived in Beit Shean,” but it was a charred corpse.

Ahmed, Fatima’s cousin

Fatima stares in amazement, believing that Bisan has arrived to treat and heal the wounds of her broken body. But she wakes up from her stupor and begins to cry and scream, filling this world with noise, in a final attempt to wake up from this nightmare in a way that exceeds her worst imaginations.

One of the paramedics begins cleaning Fatima’s face and wiping the dust and blood off her face, while another doctor examines her fractures and a nurse calms her down during this ongoing madness.

The writer moves to another scene, only hundreds of meters away, where Fatima’s cousin, Ahmed, who is her age, lies in complete darkness, screaming for help, but there is no answer. While he is stuck, disturbed and terrified, he does not yet realize that he is buried under the rubble of the 6-storey building.

He tries to calm himself down and console her, thinking that his father, his true superhero, who always protected him and protected him from fear, will find him in the end and save him. While he was waiting, he began to feel the features of the body of the person below him. He slowly began to remember what happened when the bombing occurred. He realized that it was the body of his father, who protected him with his body from explosions and collapses and died in the meantime, saving his child.

Baby tenderness

Nearby, 11-month-old Hanan was perhaps the first baby in the world to experience free flight from a four-story building. After she was with her mother on the roof of the house, which was supposed to be safe, the echo of the bombing explosions carried her through the air, like a kite, to a nearby farm, where she landed safely between the branches of a tree that served as her mother.

Al-Akhras commented on the scene that it was a true miracle in a time when miracles had passed, but it was the only miracle that happened to the family.

As for the rest, they died as a result of the air strike, and their bodies were destroyed and buried under the rubble, leaving their little angel the only survivor, a miracle and a massacre at the same time.

He concluded his article by saying that these stories are not fabricated, nightmares, or imaginary stories for children, but rather real and actual events from one night in one neighborhood in Gaza. These are the living realities of children’s lives in the Strip. The reader has the choice of reading them as real stories or disasters.