... AND NOW THE LIFE OF A CHILD
Gaza must've passed the point at which 18 months of exposure to the foulest things on Earth are rolling over into crippling disease: Amjad's niece – whose name I don't know, but I've seen her a few times, and she can't be more than 5 or 6 – has an infection of the blood and respiratory system, they've taken her to the only accessible hospital, and the combination of medicine, supplies, around-the-clock monitoring, etc., will cost $5,000.
This is a child who has never known anything like the components of what you and I would call "a world." She's lived more in tents than in houses, more on the run than as a settled "citizen" of anywhere or anything, more starving than fed, more wounded than safe, more sick than healthy – how else can I tell you, what else could I say. She doesn't even have a world yet.
I've known that she was ill for a long time, but in an uncertain way, since she was exposed to all the fumes, pollutants, and poisons of one of the major Gaza camp relocations; I knew she'd had breathing problems and some kind of skin disease, but I hoped those were symptoms of a particular incident of exposure. They were not.
I don't know anything else about the illness, just that it's been gestating for a very long time, and it's so severe that the doctors would have to use drugs that normally aren't given to children. That's a big part of children's medicine, not using remedies that are too powerful and risk causing their own problems; we are now past that point.
I think of "Gaza," the abstraction, the political football, and I think of "the conflict," some bullshit discussed by Europeans at a hot spring, and I think of "the news," which is nothing to no one – and when I think that none of them shows THIS, none of them will bother to say However many Gaza Palestinians are left, they've all been exposed to such wretched toxins for so long that even the little children can't breathe, I want to tear my teeth out with a clawhammer.
She's a little girl, very small for her age even in Gaza, and she's never lived outside a prison, and she is quite literally sick to death of growing up in hell.
https://chuffed.org/project/125154-humanitarian-appeal-help-my-family-survive-genocide-war-in-gaza
Thank you all forever
M