Deir el-Balah – Around 4 a.m. one night during the second week of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Yasmeen Joudah woke up to her cell phone ringing nonstop.
Stunned, she realized that people were calling to offer condolences for the murder of her entire family.
Horrified, she ran through the streets before dawn to where her parents’ house once stood and threw herself onto the rubble, scraping away at the broken concrete with her bare hands.
The Joudahs were sleeping when an Israeli missile targeted their four-story home, burying dozens of them under rubble.
Yasmeen looked around helplessly as body after body was pulled from the rubble.
Then 16-month-old Melissa, her sister’s happy daughter who had just taken her first steps a few weeks earlier, was pulled away, completely still and silent. Everyone thought she was dead.
Shrapnel from the Israeli airstrike lodged itself in Melissa’s spinal cord, paralyzing her from the chest down.
Weeks later, Yasmeen’s grief wavers in her voice, her tears streaming down her face.
“Everyone has left,” she said from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. “My five brothers and sisters were killed. My mother. My two aunts. Their daughters, their sons. My brother-in-law.
“I want them to come back. Bring them back to me,” she sobbed.
Among her immediate family, Yasmeen counted 32 members killed, most of them women. Melissa’s father, parents, sisters and their children were also killed, bringing the total to 68 members of the Joudah family.
A dark future
Melissa desperately needs medical treatment abroad, according to the head of the orthopedic department at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
“She has several pieces of shrapnel stuck in the T12 vertebra, as well as spinal cord fractures,” said Dr. Ayman Harb, adding: “Unfortunately, this means she cannot use her lower limbs.”
“The little girl is physically stable, in the sense that she is paralyzed from the chest down,” he continued. “But physiotherapy and moral support should be the next step.”
Harb pointed out that because the shrapnel remains in Melissa’s body, she could be at risk of infection and complications, which could in turn lead to multiple organ failure.
“We are now working on cases that we have never seen in our medical textbooks,” he said, adding that so far he has had 12 patients paralyzed by Israeli attacks.
Asked about Melissa’s chances, Harb was pessimistic.
“His future will be one of suffering,” he declared bluntly. “She will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.”
The hospital, like the rest of the medical facilities still operating in the Gaza Strip, barely functions on solar generators and is severely lacking in medical supplies and staff.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs is not a large central hospital like al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which is currently under attack by the Israeli army. It was built to serve only the town of Deir el-Balah and has only 16 doctors.
Regardless, due to the ongoing offensive, its patient population increased and the facility had to treat far more patients than its capacity.
“We don’t have time to cry when we see patients whose lives are ruined,” Harb said. “Every day, we work on 30 major cases plus 15 minor cases from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m..”
‘All I have left’
Melissa’s mother was nine months pregnant. The Associated Press reported that she went into labor during the attack and was found dead under the rubble, the heads of her lifeless twins protruding from her birth canal.
The Israeli offensive has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians, including 8,000 children and women. Since Israeli attacks on hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip intensified, leading to the collapse of services and communications, the death toll was not updated for Friday and Saturday.
According to Ismail Thawabta, director general of the government media office, 11,180 Palestinians, including 4,607 children, have been killed so far.
More than 3,000 people remain under the rubble, including 1,700 children, he added during a press conference on Sunday.
Melissa, who now lives with her aunt Yasmeen in Deir el-Balah, is waiting for permission to leave Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt to receive further medical treatment.
“I will put her in my heart,” Yasmeen said. “She’s all I have left.”
She also has another wish: “I want Melissa to walk.” I don’t know how she will live.