Burned Fara is Now in San Diego receiving the treatment she needs. Her Grandmother accompanies her. These two articles by Philip Weiss
MONDOWEISS
Great news. Farah Abu Halima, a three-year-old who was badly injured by an Israeli white phosphorus attack that destroyed most of her family last January, has reportedly left Gaza and is in Egypt now with her grandmother. She has a visa to the U.S. and is to fly out on Saturday, headed for hospital treatment in San Diego.
In the photo above, you can see the burns on her chin and throat. The burns across her abdomen and legs are far worse and have already affected her growth. Her hand is also damaged.
Steve Sosebee of Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) and Felice Gelman of Wespac have been working tirelessly stateside to help this little girl, whom Gelman and I met in Beit Lahiya, Gaza. Kudos to them, and to PCRF, whose reps in Gaza and the West Bank apparently managed to get the Palestinian Authority to act on this desperate case.
And Gelman tells me that at Wespac’s urging, Nita Lowey, the powerful Westchester congresswoman, apparently put in a word to the U.S. State Department ~ even as Lowey worked to bury the Goldstone report (as an impediment to the peace process!).
Sosebee tells me that Farah will be accompanied by three other children from Gaza who need treatment. One with shrapnel wounds to the face, another with a gunshot wound to the leg, and a third child with a birth defect.
"Farah got out of Gaza on Sunday with her grandmother, they are both suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder."
It may take months or a year for the plastic surgery that Farah needs so that she can develop normally. She will live with her grandmother with a host family.
Sosebee fears the psychological wounds even more than the physical ones. This little girl and her grandmother have lost their whole family in a scorching horrifying blast. What can our country do to heal that relentless damage? Here is PCRF’s site, if you want to get them some money.
Gelman also speaks of the political work that is more important than the humanitarian work.
What does it mean that she has to go to our State Department to try and get pencils into the Gaza Strip?
What does it mean that these people need international permission to do anything?
As Taghreed El-Khodary of the New York Times told us last May, this is not a humanitarian crisis, it is a political crisis.
One in which our country
has recklessly taken sides in.
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of white phosphorus attack in Gaza.
By Philip Weiss
MONDOWEISS
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.
Fara's grandmother's body is as burned as this in many places. But just as painful are the things she witnessed.
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.
Related Posts:
- Farah abu Halima, victim of white phosphorus attack, is on her way to California
- ‘Almost every Palestinian I met in Gaza believes that Israel’s recent attack will only be followed by another bloodier and more deadly attack on Gaza that will exterminate the Palestinians once and for all.’
- I told my congressman, ‘keep the child’s picture in your desk and look at it the next time there’s a vote on Gaza’
- Gaza a year ago: My father says the Israelis are doing this to win an election
- National Lawyers Guild says one Israel soldier shot three sisters, executing the 2- and 7-year-old, and paralyzing the 4-year-old
Fara's Grandmother speaks of the horrors she and the child witnessed when the IDF attacked their home."Abed, 14 years old, was decapitated," she says. "Shaheed, one year and three months, was in my arms when the fire took her…"
Sabah explains that her husband and four of her children died when their house in northern Gaza was shelled during the recent Israeli offensive.
Many of the rooms in that house now lay dark and empty ~ blackened by fire.
The light fittings and power sockets have melted down the walls.
A shaft of light coming from the ceiling of the corridor, and mangled steel, marks the entry point of one of the missiles.
Scrawled, in Arabic, on the wall of a bedroom is the statement: "From the Israeli Defence Forces, we are sorry."
THAT is a first! Right decent of the lads, eh, folks. OK, you don't have to all applaud at once!
But on the next wall, there is a patch of white where, Sabah's 20-year-old son Mahmoud tells us, had also been the words "nice underwear". He says he scrubbed them off in anger.
Staring straight ahead and rocking steadily backwards and forwards in her hospital bed, Sabah Abu Halima lists the fate of each of her nine children.
"Abed, 14 years old, was decapitated," she says. "Shaheed, one year and three months, was in my arms when the fire took her…"
Sabah explains that her husband and four of her children died when their house in northern Gaza was shelled during the recent Israeli offensive.
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