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Home / World

Gaza's traumatised children

By Kate Shuttleworth
Other·
25 Dec, 2014 04:00 PM6 mins to read

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Bisan Daher lost both of her parents, four siblings and a niece in an attack in Gaza. Photo / Andrea Dicenzo

Bisan Daher lost both of her parents, four siblings and a niece in an attack in Gaza. Photo / Andrea Dicenzo

UN and extended families try to cope with hundreds of orphans and work to rebuild their shattered lives

There's only one proper chair in the cavernous waiting room aside from a tiny stool where a small girl with a bandaged head sits looking at her toes.

The tan and brown tiles of the busy waiting room of the Medecins Sans Frontiers clinic in central Gaza absorb 8-year-old Bisan Daher.

Nurse Nama Abu Khousa pulls Bisan out of her shell and even has her cracking a smile once she's sitting on top of the black vinyl treatment bed in a narrow curtained room off the side of square space.

She puts gauze mesh bandages on Bisan's legs and arms. Gradually Bisan is distracted enough to let the nurse touch the dressing across her eyebrow and head.

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Bisan lost her eyebrow and has a wound on her forehead requiring daily checkups and dressing.

The child lost both of her parents, four siblings and a niece in the 51 days of fighting between Islamic militant group Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip.

She lay unconscious and buried under rubble for six hours after an F16 struck her family.

Three months after the final ceasefire was reached and the assault on the coastal enclave came to an end the first large-scale project to remove rubble has begun.

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Workers have entered the Shujaiya neighbourhood and bulldozers scrape the heaps of rubble up.

The psychological and emotional wounds won't be easy to clear away for Bisan and her extended family. Her family home is gone.

She now lives in central Gaza with her remaining married sister Noha, 28, and her four children.

Inside the small third-floor apartment in a relatively leafy part of central Gaza, Bisan sits in the bedroom she shares with two nieces.

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"I really want to see my mum and dad again," she says weakly with her face towards a small plastic toy dressing table with a cloudy mirror.

She lacks expression.

"I try to keep her engaged playing with other children. I tell her stories and play with her. I do my best to keep her busy by asking her to arrange her toys," Noha says.

Bisan has been drawing lots of pictures of aircraft in the sky, tanks and ambulances but then she scribbles out the images and rips them up.

"What terrifies her the most is the sound of the ambulance. She will say the ambulance is coming to get us because they are going to strike the home, let's go and leave the home.

"When she's asleep she wakes up suddenly crying calling out to ask what has happened. Since the incident until today she hasn't been able to sleep well in the night," said Noha.

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The word in Arabic for adoption doesn't exist, but a word kefala does, which means a kind of guardianship.

Bisan's family have quickly taken care of her as adoption is not allowed in Islam.

Bisan is officially a yetim - or orphan - one of the 1500 children the United Nations say lost both of their parents during the 51-day war.

The same figures suggest 373,000 children in Gaza will need psychological support following the war.

One of the people providing support as a psychologist for Unicef is Mohemmed Abu Rayya, 28, which is a difficult task as he too lost a friend in the war and he and his wife and two children are homeless after their apartment was destroyed.

He said Unicef was targeting nearly 6500 children in Gaza, many of whom had lived in shelters or still were.

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He said some of the signs of trauma were only coming out now.

The symptoms in children were usually behavioural - anger, anxiety and often scratching, bedwetting and clinging to adults in fear.

The family of 2-year-old Jana Abu Jaber is arguing about who will take care of her and her brother Yamen, 4, after both of their parents were killed in Al Burej refugee camp.

In the spacious family home in the leafy Khan Younis section Sami Musleh said he would probably only get to have his niece on the weekends.

Sami, who was a former Palestinian Authority policeman before the violent Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, partly blamed himself for the death of his sister Somaya, 32, alongside the Israeli siege on the coastal strip.

"She lived in Burej in a two-room house. She was unhappy with the tiny space in her husband's house.

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"Here in Khan Younis we have a lot of land. My father allocated 500sq m for her to build a house but the siege meant building materials couldn't get through.

"If there was no siege and the construction materials had come through she would have been living here and she would have survived."

On the day of Eid on July 28 Somaya left their house with her husband, children and extended family after bombing in the camp. A brief ceasefire was declared so they returned to their home.

Sami says without warning his sister and her husband's house in a small apartment block was targeted and 22 people were killed from the same family.

He said Jana's father's brother Abnan Abu Jaber would be the sole carer of Jana and her brother during the week.

"Everybody wants to keep her.

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"Eventually she will be staying with her uncle from her father's side because he lost 18 members of his family - we here have only lost one - Jana's mother.

"On the other hand her grandmother is here, her mother's mother and she wants her granddaughter here because she reminds her of her mother. It's confusing for Jana, she calls everybody Mum."

Jana plays with her cousin Nourhan, 11, in a big, well furnished living room.

She has an array of toys - colourful Lego-like blocks and a doll. It is clear she will be well taken care of.

Her brother Yamen is still being treated in a hospital in Jerusalem for major burns he sustained in the bombing.

Jana was virtually unharmed after a pillar fell close to her and rather than crushing her it sheltered her, but her brother was thrown by the blast.

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