GAZANS STILL SUFFERING DESPITE UN REPORT…..

October 17, 2009 at 8:41 am (Gaza, Health Crisis, Humanitarian Aid, Israel, Palestine, War Crimes)

Treatment is sought in U.S. for 3-year-old victim of white phosphorus attack in Gaza

Philip Weiss

The Goldstone report is not an abstraction for me. My delegation was in Gaza at the same time as Judge Richard Goldstone was last June. We saw things that he also saw. I used the word “persecution” at the time; so has he now. One day human-rights-worker Fares Akram brought my group to a house in Beit Lahiya in the north of Gaza. He wanted to show us the hole in the roof made by a white phosphorus shell. It was smaller than a manhole, and throughout the apartment building the walls were still blackened and the studs charred.

The matriarch in that house was Sabah Abu Halima, 45. Today she is a psychological wreck. In the few instants in which the long tentacles of white phosphorus were trapped in her house, she lost her husband, three sons, and her only daughter. Relief workers from the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund say that Sabah is plagued by “nightmares and deep feelings of sadness.”

Sabah also lost a daughter-in-law. The woman, whose name I don’t know, died in Egypt, being treated for her burns after the war. When this woman whose name I don’t know died, her badly-burned daughter was alongside her: 3-year-old Farah Abu Halima. The Egyptian hospital sent the girl back to Gaza before long, not fully treated. Her picture is below. An uncle is holding her. Farah is also psychologically damaged. She can’t remove her fingers from her mouth when people come to visit, and she clings to her uncle.

Our group saw Farah clinging to her uncle in the charred house, and we saw the horrible spectacle that her uncle is about to present in the image above. He takes off her pants– or lifted her dress, when we were there– to show the third-degree burns on Farah’s legs. Her face is also burned, under her chin, and her hand too. You can see the burns on her abdomen.

“I felt so many conflicting things,” our delegation’s leader, Felice Gelman, later told me. “The idea that a little child like that had been in constant pain for months– that was unimaginable to me…. And I know what happens to people with untreated burns. The older she grows, the more deformed she will become. And the idea that the only way that anyone could do anything for her was to display her. It was horrible.”

Gelman speaks for me and the other 11 members of our delegation. As I left the house, I shoved all my money into the uncle’s hand. (A friend back here had given me $200, to use as I saw fit.) As Gelman left she made a commitment to do what she could for Farah Abu Halima. “I will try to get help.” Gelman got back and called Steve Sosebee, the head of the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund in Kent, Ohio; and Sosebee has thrown himself into the case. Those scars are contracting Farah’s body. They are already deforming her development. She needs surgeries, many. She needs psychological help, an escape from the blackened shell of a house where she still lives.

Sosebee has been trying to get Farah out for months. Next week, maybe, or maybe the week after– he is crossing his fingers– he thinks she might get a visa into Egypt, along with three other children, two of them with war injuries, who need treatment. And maybe then they will finally get to the U.S. Four children were gotten out in September in this way. The Egyptians finally let them go (the Israeli border– you can’t get anything across there). And of those four, the two teenage amputees are already back in Gaza. Two others are still here, including a ten-year-old, continuing vascular surgery for shrapnel wounds.

There’s an NGO with a chapter in San Diego that has said it will treat Farah Abu Halima for free there, Doctors Offering Charitable Services (DOCS). Sosebee has been at this 20 years, getting children out of Palestine for treatment, or teams of doctors into the occupied territories. He has gotten treatment for 1000 Palestinian children. It is his way of addressing the core injustice behind the conflict. He couldn’t command sympathy for adults under occupation, or even get them treatment. But the children, that is different. And 300 children were killed in the Gaza slaughter, and many many more injured.

Farah will need months of surgeries, and steady psychological assessment. Her grandmother would be the natural relative to accompany her, but the grandmother is a wreck. An aunt will come with her. (Farah is dependent on her uncle, but Sosebee’s fund has learned that they can’t bring Arab men into the U.S. for a number of reasons.)

A lot of people are now pushing to get Farah out. Gelman, Sosebee, even Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian P.M. in the West Bank, he understands the urgency of the case. Those who are reading this, you might call the State Department, to remind them about this little girl.

Sosebee has another agenda. He hopes that if Farah gets to San Diego, there will be media coverage of her case, and an American community will learn about how she was so grievously injured. “Our media is not showing this. If she comes here and people see this, it educates people and that is a positive thing. It gives the San Diego community a chance to be involved, and to help a child,” Sosebee says.

Today the U.S. is in official denial, enabled by our media, about such basic assertions of the Goldstone report as its uncontradicted allegation that the Israelis, in a war crime, used white phosphorus in civilian areas. Farah Abu Halima is living proof of that. If we can heal her maybe we can start to heal ourselves.

Source Via Uruknet