Early in the morning of October 8, 2023, Israeli forces bombed the family home of nine-year-old Joud Younis in central Gaza. The explosion threw the little girl from her bed into the street.
When doctors treating her at a nearby hospital tried to reach her family, they realized they could not; Because no one else survived from her family, which consisted of her mother, father, and five siblings.
Thus, Jude became one of what is now known in Gaza hospitals as “T M B A H,” meaning “an injured child without a living family,” as reported by the Daily Telegraph newspaper today, Saturday, from Jerusalem.
The British newspaper report stated that this horrific abbreviation, which was highlighted in the genocide case filed by South Africa against Israel in The Hague, reflects the extraordinary toll that the war has had on the children of Gaza.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 40% of the 24,000 people killed in the war are children, according to the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip.
Today, Joud lives with her aunt, Donia Bardawil, who accompanied her from the hospital after arriving there, and she recovered from the shrapnel that injured one of her feet.
Donia Bardawil told the newspaper, while Joud was sitting sullenly on a nearby sofa, “She was sleeping near the window and the explosion wave threw her outside the house while she was sleeping. I am now trying to make up for what she missed by living her old life before the accident.”
recognized term
The newspaper referred to the discussion by Dr. Aldo Rodriguez, a Mexican surgeon working with Doctors Without Borders, earlier this week about the appearance of the abbreviation “MM B A H” in a certificate issued by the organization.
He said, “Some of the most difficult moments for me in Gaza were during the surgeries I performed every day, the number of which ranged between 20 and 25. Given the large number of children who arrived alone without any family members, we began using this abbreviation.”
Dr. Imad Al-Hams, who treats patients with minor injuries in a tent on the grounds of Kuwait Hospital in Rafah, said that “T M B A H” is now a widely recognized term.
“This is the abbreviation we use and we have come across it a lot recently. This is the first war in which we have witnessed such ferocity and atrocity, and we have many cases that have come to us with their entire families lost,” he said.
The Telegraph report concluded with what Dr. Rodriguez, who spent 3 weeks in Gaza Hospital last year, said that many of the children on whom he operated on were allowed to remain on the hospital grounds, as if they were in a kind of limbo.
“Every day I saw these children alone and devastated,” he said. “It is a tragic situation because it is not just a surgery that is performed, but everything that follows after it.”
He added, “Even if they leave the hospital, they will wander because they do not know what to do and have nowhere to go. They may improve physically, but they are psychologically devastated.”