Surviving Gaza strike, father and daughter fear for future

FEATURE

10/21/2007

JERUSALEM — Six-year-old Maria Aman is paralyzed from the neck down, confined to a wheelchair she steers with her mouth and is sometimes forced to ask others to lift her head when it leans too far forward.

Her father Hamdi is usually the one to gently push it back. She and her younger brother Momen are all he has left. The rest of the family — his wife, mother, two uncles and oldest son — were all killed in the air strike.

On May 20, 2006, the family was driving through Gaza City when an Israeli missile struck a car carrying two Islamic Jihad leaders one lane over.

The targeted strike killed both militants, but it also wiped out five members of Hamdi’s family, pelted him and his younger son Momen with shrapnel, and paralyzed his daughter for life.

Now Maria — who used to love running up and down Gaza’s sandy beaches — breathes through a ventilator attached to a wheelchair she operates by moving her mouth and chin.

“I haven’t told her the truth, that she will live like this forever. I told her the condition is temporary,” Hamdi says. Having informed her of the deaths of her mother and oldest brother, he wanted to spare her further shock.

Maria is also unaware of the legal battle underway between her father, who is struggling to keep her in a Jerusalem hospital, and the Israeli defense ministry, which wants to send her back to the Palestinian territories.

The ministry is paying for her rehabilitation at the Alyn pediatric rehabilitation hospital in Jerusalem and for her to attend a special school for disabled children where she studies both Arabic and Hebrew.

But the defense ministry, which insists it has no legal obligations to Maria, has recently decided to return her to the Palestinian territories, to another center in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

“The hospital informed us that hospitalization is not needed anymore and that Maria can be released from the hospital and return to the community, back to her natural surroundings,” defense spokesman Maayan Malkin said.

Hamdi is working with a group of Israeli volunteers and lawyers to appeal his daughter’s case before the Israeli Supreme Court, arguing she must remain in Israel where she has constant access to emergency care.

“Because she suffers from a disorder related to her breathing, she needs to remain in a place that is close to a hospital and an emergency room,” said Eddy Lustigman, the family’s lawyer.

To send the family back to the Gaza Strip — which has been virtually sealed off from the outside world since the Islamist Hamas movement took control in a bloody takeover in June — is out of the question.

But for a case as serious as Maria, the West Bank — with more than 500 roadblocks and frequent closures — could be equally treacherous.

“If they send her to Ramallah, she will find it difficult to go to the hospital because of the Israeli roadblocks — we will be sending her to her death,” Lustigman says.

The ministry says the decision was taken following a joint examination by medical officials from the Palestinian authority and that Maria’s needs will be met in Ramallah, but Lustigman says the decision is a political one.

“The defense ministry’s attempts to send her to Ramallah are an attempt to avoid its responsibility for this child,” Lustigman said.

At present, the Amans are awaiting the court’s decision — expected in another three months — in the small room in the hospital where they live.

Every morning, Hamdi wakes up, bathes his two small children, wires Maria into her chair, and gives them breakfast. Maria has grown closer to her younger brother, knowing that her older brother Mohaned is gone.

“He died, God have mercy,” she says.

Hamdi, having lost his home in Gaza and nearly all his loved ones, now lives for his two children.

“God gives and God takes, and it is not for me to question His will,” Hamdi says.

But then the tears come, as he remembers those he lost. “What will I do?” he asks. AFP

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