Amidst the devastation, young survivors in Gaza shared their firsthand accounts of escaping death and the profound impact of loss. Writing for Al-Jazeera, Yusra Al-Aklouk reports from Gaza.
With one bleeding eye and two broken legs, Ghassan Dardouna crawled, ignoring his injuries, searching for his young daughter, In’am, who had been thrown by the airstrike more than 20 meters away from their home.
While engrossed in crawling, trying to listen for his infant daughter’s cries to locate her, he heard no sound. The man continued crawling for several minutes, during which he bumped into his daughter’s feet; her head and upper half of her body were buried in the sand of the garden adjacent to their house.
Ghassan began digging until he managed to pull In’am out.
“I work as a nurse, and my specialization helped me deal with the suffocation that caused my daughter to lose consciousness for a while,” he said. Eventually, Ghassan managed to revive his daughter and remove the sand from her mouth and nose.
He then proceeded to pull his injured parents from under the rubble of their targeted home, after the ambulance had taken his daughter to receive treatment at the Indonesian Hospital in Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip, where she was suffering from burns and fractures all over her body.
Stalked by Death
As for the child Muhammad Al-Muqayyed, 15, a mere meter stood between him and death, while it claimed his mother, siblings, grandmother, snatching them all at once, as the missile hurled him away from them.
While Muhammad was drowning in his grief, staggering between the shock of losing his family and the shock of what he had experienced and witnessed, the airstrikes gave him only 24 hours to comprehend what had happened to him, until another raid struck, killing his grandfather. His grandfather had chosen the mosque as a place to stay after losing his home, and the mosque was bombed, collapsing on those inside, only about five minutes after Muhammad had left.
The two consecutive escapes did not give Muhammad a sense of safety from the threat of being targeted. Instead, they reinforced his feeling of being pursued by death, making his fear of potential martyrdom at any moment immense. He said, “I feel that I could join my family and become a martyr at any time. I am waiting for my turn, and just because I survived death twice does not mean I will survive every time.”
Despite months having passed since Muhammad’s survival, he lives in a trauma from which he has not yet recovered. With a trembling voice, he said, “It took me months to comprehend what happened to me, but I still cry over their loss as if it happened today.”
Children as Men
The traumas that Muhammad and thousands of children like him have endured have turned them into small men. Children in Gaza have aged beyond their years in understanding and awareness. What they used to read in schoolbooks and learn in institutes and mosques about death and the tenets of faith has today become a tangible reality they live, not just read or hear about.
“I believe that God wrote this for me and chose this destiny for me, and I believe that this is good for me even if I do not know its nature,” the boy said. Muhammad also sees that what he went through in terms of loss has made him appreciate the blessing of family. “There are blessings whose true value we did not know because we were accustomed to their existence.”
He continued, holding back tears, “There is no objection to God’s decree. God will compensate us for our patience, our hardship, and our hunger, and we will find that in the bliss of Paradise with my mother and siblings, whom I miss.”
Revolutionary Spirit
The war also overturned the children’s concepts of the things around them, redefining them and giving them remarkable eloquence. The supplication of the child Ilya Abu Teir, 12, captivated the hearts of the doctors around him. He recited it in a melodious and loud voice, even though he was under the influence of anesthesia and unconscious after undergoing surgery at the Belgian Hospital in Al-Zawaida city in the central Gaza Strip.
He recited the Quran at times, prayed to God for mercy for the martyrs at other times, and appealed to the Arab and Islamic nations at yet other times.
Ilya appeared to be an articulate child, his eloquence stemming from his memorization of the Holy Quran, according to his mother. We spoke to the child while he was on a hospital bed in the same hospital. He recounted the details of the targeting of their tent, which they had set up next to their destroyed house in the Abasan area in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip, two weeks prior.
“I was playing marbles at the entrance of the tent with my brothers. I saw fire and a bright light, then the flames engulfed me, and I did not wake up until I was in the hospital,” he said.
After waking up, Ilya learned of the death of his brother Elias and the serious injury of his brother Adi, a fact that constantly makes him cry. “Its pain is greater than the burning of my body,” he said.
Ilya was taken aback by the question, “Do you wish you could live like the rest of the children in the world or enjoy playing like them?” He quickly replied, “Play?! Certainly not. Rather, I wish to fight with the resistance fighters, to fight for Palestine.”
Tears welled up in Ilya’s cheeks, which were scarred by burns, and his eyes looked like burning embers as he said with emotion, “By God, if I saw a soldier, I would kill him with my own hands, by God, I would kill him with my own hands.” His mother calmed him down, and he took a breath before continuing, “The whole world stands with our killer, whose crimes have surpassed the actions of Pharaoh. We are alone. They have all united against Palestine, they have all united against us.”
Although In’am, Ilya, and Muhammad miraculously survived certain death that would have claimed their lives, Israel believes that its targeting instills fear in the hearts of the children of Gaza. However, a simple conversation reveals how revenge has been nurtured in their hearts.
(Al-Jazeera Arabic Website – Translated and prepared by The Palestine Chronicle)
This ongoing sadistic genocide is beyond compare. I wish the worst for all those committing it, those supporting it and those who choose to look away.