Qatar, Doha | Tue May 14, 2024
Raneem Hijazi remembers how tightly she held her one-year-old son Azzouz before the Israeli airstrike hit. The drone flying over their building in Gaza was getting louder and she had a feeling that something bad was about to happen. “Whatever happens to me, happens to him,” she says of her reasoning in holding him so close to her baby bump.
Though she cannot recall the exact moment of hit, the aftermath remains ingrained in her consciousness. “You just open your eyes and you are under the rubble; you don’t feel the strike itself,” she explains.
She began feeling about right away, trying to find Azzouz, until her mother-in-law let out a terrified cry. She discovered him over my tummy. She carried him away. She remembers, “His head dropped on my belly and his body was in her hands.”
She has been doubting her will to live ever since that October 24 moment. At first, she begged her family to abandon her and let her die, but they went in search of assistance to pull her out of the wrecked Khan Younis house.
“My leg was hidden. There was just a tiny bit of tissue holding my arm to my body. I laid it across my stomach after attempting to tear it apart but failing miserably,” she recalls.
She claims that it was assumed she was dead by the time she arrived at the hospital. After a reexamination after eight months of pregnancy, the physicians delivered her daughter Mariam via cesarean section.
“I came back to life as soon as she inhaled for the first time. It was a miracle, the doctors informed me,” the woman claims.
In the capital of Qatar, Doha, Hijazi lies in a hospital bed and relates her story in a weak voice. Her legs were severely damaged and needed bone transplants to be repaired, and her left arm was amputated.
Critical delay
The comparatively calm hallways of Hamad Hospital’s Gaza unit in Doha, despite the occasional screams of anguish, are a far cry from the overcrowded medical facilities in Gaza. Every door conceals a tale of incredible survival marred by heartbreaking loss. After receiving treatment for injuries that may change their lives, mothers may finally start to cope with the death of their child and battle with their reduced capacity to care for their remaining children.
It was my daughter that came to my rescue. I was saying, “I don’t want her,” when I was initially hurt. “I desire my son’s return,” Hijazi declares. “I was unable to even raise my head. I was unable to see her, much less tend to her needs. She hopes that one day her daughter will give her the energy to carry on.
After her accident, Hijazi was taken out of Gaza for medical attention one month later. Mariam lives in Egypt with her grandparents. She is about as old as the war and shares her brother’s plump cheeks. Hijazi has observed Mariam’s development through video chats. Her last holding was more than six months ago. She leaves the hospital in Doha in between procedures, and the medical staff assures her that she will regain her ability to walk.
“I’ve been employed in the orthopedics field for around 21 years. Dr. Hasan Abuhejleh, a consultant orthopedic surgeon at Hamad Hospital, states, “The kind of injuries, the severity of the injuries, the types of bone loss, and the kind of infections we faced with the Gaza patients are beyond (anything) I’ve seen before.” He has had to tell many patients that their amputations, while necessary to save their lives, could have been avoided if there were more resources available to them in Gaza.
Since Israel began its military campaign in response to the October 7 bombings by Hamas, over 4,800 people have been evacuated from Gaza for medical care, and many more who are in critical condition are in line to depart. In an update released on May 10, the UN and relief organizations stated that 42% of requests for medical evacuation from Israel have been denied. “The closure of Rafah Crossing has abruptly halted all medical evacuations of critically ill and injured patients outside Gaza,” they continued, referring to recent events.
Medical evacuation delays have significantly impacted the volume of cases that arrive at the hospital in Abuhejleh.
Haunting photo
The hospital rooms are filled with varying frequencies of pain. Shaimaa Al-Ghoul sends a message from her isolation cell to the CNN crew. She has a drug-resistant infection that was acquired in Gaza’s underfunded facilities, just like many other patients leaving the area.
Two of Al-Ghoul’s four children and her spouse perished in an airstrike in Rafah in February. She remembers that as the family was sleeping in one room, “the bed was split in half and I fell onto the ground floor,” all of a sudden.
“Her 11-year-old son, Hothaifa, was begging the rescuers not to abandon him,” I overheard. I knew my husband, Jenan, and Mohamed were martyrs because I didn’t hear them,” she explains.
She believes the shrapnel that struck her abdomen killed her unborn son as well because she was nine months pregnant. The next day Abdullah was delivered stillborn.
Following a widely shared image of her daughter Jenan’s body with her lower limbs severed and driven by the blast to hang from a window by the scarf she wore to bed, Al-Ghoul posts happy photos of her children taken prior to the war. She wishes to depict the atrocities of the war as well as the memories that haunt her and the other patients in this hospital.
On crutches, her son Hothaifa wanders the hospital corridors. He can’t even bear weight on his wounded leg. His face muscles don’t seem to be used to laughing, unlike his 6-year-old sister Mariam, who wasn’t with the family that evening and was taken to the hospital unscathed.
Mariam walks into a room that previous patients had warned us included people with horrifying tales of suffering and loss. When some patients leave the hospital in their wheelchairs to get some fresh air at dusk, she plays on the empty beds.
Life after loss
Shahed Alqutati, 23, has just concluded his physical therapy in that room. Her shattered bones are held together by an external fixator, a metal frame, while her left leg was amputated. She was left on the streets with her 26-year-old husband Ali after a strike on October 11 destroyed their third-floor residence in northern Gaza.
She opened her eyes, shell shocked, to discover her leg ripped and blood all over the place. My spouse was standing in front of me. He sustained injuries as well. He lost his hand and both of his legs. I yelled, “Ali, Ali,” at him. He yelled “Shahed” as soon as he heard me. “Where is my arm?” he said, glancing at his amputated arm.
These were their final exchanges of words. Although both were brought to the hospital, Ali did not make it. Both the love of her life and the impending baby were taken from her.
“We bought all of the baby’s outfits and t-shirts a week before the battle. Pink, pink, pink (sic). We were ecstatic,” she remembers. Two days after the strike, two months before her due date, her daughter Sham was stillborn.
Her pain didn’t stop there. After being sent to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Alqutati received medical attention there. However, in November, the hospital was under Israeli blockade, leaving patients and staff without food or water and with little medical supplies. The Israeli soldiers compelled her and the others to leave the hospital after two weeks.
In a wheelchair, her father pushed her over potholed roads. She claims that Israeli “soldiers shot in the air and told people to go back” at a checkpoint. Where did you go back? There’s nowhere else to go. We spent far too many hours walking,” she claims. Their grueling journey through the streets was made much more difficult by that impediment.
Alqutati claims that even though her wounds were infected and bleeding by the time they arrived in Rafah, she was still terrified to go into the hospitals that were already having trouble with the surge of casualties from the fighting every day. “I won’t be able to recover or heal if I go to the hospital,” she declares. Far from the hospitals, her father bandaged her wounds.
After receiving medical evacuation from Gaza, treatment was provided, giving her time to grieve. One of the several videos she posts on social media shows her late husband Ali pacing around a store, at a university function, and smiling sheepishly when he realizes she’s filming him again—this time from the backseat of a car.
“No one is going to experience my agony. With these folks, I am joyful, laughing, and strong. However, she points to her heart and says, “I feel something painful here when I’m alone.” She responds, “I cannot recover from that.
I will always carry this with me. Burns, fractures, amputations, nerve issues… I don’t have a new leg. This is something that people will remember. Furthermore, how am I supposed to forget? I lost my baby and my loved one,” she continues.
Both Alqutati and Hijazi describe a similar sadness that binds them to the horrors of the Gaza War, despite the fact that their pregnancies ended differently. They worry about their family members who are stuck in Gaza and are unsure about their future and where they will finish up, just like many other medical evacuees.
“Life is over. Joy no longer exists, according to Hijazi. “When I close my eyes, the memories flood back to me.” When I saw the infant formula I had been using for my son at the mall, I thought I was going to die. It was also just infant formula. “Imagine the chaos that ensues when I lay eyes on his photos, videos, toys, or clothes,” she exclaims. She records Azzouz laughing on camera, and as she sees the clip, tears fall down her face.
“There is no turning back the agony. Things like that are immutable, she explains. “We bear them, and then we lose them.”
