By Donald Macintyre in Khan Yunis.
The moment that changed three-year-old Mohammed Kulab's life for ever came
when he was buried in the rubble of his home after an Israeli shell exploded
during an incursion into Gaza's southernmost town of Rafah in March 2004.
It
wasn't only that both his parents were killed; it was also that trapped and
starved of air, Mohammed, until then a normal, healthy one-year-old, suffered
brain damage. By the time he was pulled out of the wreckage of his house he was
in a coma.
Mohammed only came out of the coma after being transferred for
three months to the Israeli Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv.
Mohammed suffers
from cerebral palsy as a result of the oxygen shortage that terrible day, and
requires constant attention from his grandmother, Etas, 47, a woman who lives in
one of the poorest areas of the Khan Yunis refugee camp.
"It's no more than
my duty," she explains without fuss. She talks to Mohammed, who has a slightly
crooked, winning smile, without ceasing. "What's four?" she asks. Mohammed holds
out four fingers. "What does Arafat do?" In cheerful imitation of the late
Palestinian president, he puts his outstretched hand to his forehead in a
military salute. "What happened to you?" Here Mohammed points his index finger
at the side of his head and makes a mock-angry face.
The exact nature of the
disaster which crippled and orphaned Mohammed isn't clear even today. Local
health workers and his extended family say his father, Awni Kulab, was a
Palestinian policeman and the house was hit by Israeli shells. Reports at the
time said that Mr Kulab was a leader of the armed militant Palestinian
Representatives Committees faction and the Israeli military said an accidentally
exploded Palestinian bomb was to blame.
Across town, 23-year-old Fawzia Abu
Ims'ad lies in Nasser hospital with her right leg bandaged below the knee. She
says that four years ago she was walking home when two Israeli soldiers started
shouting at her. "They said dirty words," she says. "I don't look at them or say
anything. I just kept walking." Then, she says, the soldiers shot at her
twice.
The first bullet missed her, but the other hit her leg, smashing into
the bone. Ms Ims'ad was also transferred to Israel, and spent 22 days in Tel
Hashomer hospital where she says she had 15 separate operations. With the
prognosis looking grim, doctors there secured her written permission to amputate
the right leg. Then when she was under the anaesthetic and they could see more
clearly the nature of the injury, they changed their mind.
When Ms Ims'ad
came round they had the greatest difficulty in persuading her the leg had not,
after all, been amputated. "I was very happy," she says. "I couldn't believe
it."
Not that it has been easy since. Ms Ims'ad, a lively and attractive
young woman, whose marriage prospects in a deeply conservative society have
nevertheless almost certainly been impaired by her injury, is back in hospital
because her leg had developed an ulcer. She badly wants to be transferred back
to Israel - or possibly Egypt - because she has little confidence that the
doctors here can treat her leg as well as those in Tel Hashomer.
But she
complains that Nasser medical team aren't even bothering to fill in the forms
for a transfer because they say the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority wont be able
to refer her out of Gaza because of the international boycott. This may mean,
she fears, that her leg could still, after all, be amputated.
But if
Mohammed's life, and Ms Ims'ad's leg, were saved in Israeli hospitals, it is a
project for rehabilitating the war disabled which has helped to give them hope
of living anything like a normal life.
Using the skills of paramedics at the
Al-Wafa Medical Rehabilitation hospital in Gaza City, the Gaza Community-Based
Rehabilitation Programme (which is funded by the Welfare Association, one of the
three charities in the current Independent Christmas appeal) started up soon
after the second intifada in September 2000. It serves those disabled by the
conflict. At the same time, it provides Al Wafa physiotherapists and
occupational therapists with something valuable to do.
They had previously
been prevented from getting to work by the Israeli-operated Abu-Houli checkpoint
in central Gaza.
Now the project provides support for between 375 and 500 war
disabled people a year in southern Gaza and hopes to extend to the north of the
Strip. It gave Mohammed a walker; and provided vital training for his
grandmother and her family to look after him. Its therapists helped Ms Ims'ad to
walk despite the "dropped foot" problem resulting from her injury.
The
project's occupational and physical therapists also worked hard with
brain-damaged Sari al-Bardaweel, badly injured, and initially paralysed, by
shrapnel from a tank shell. His unemployed father, Khaled, says the shell struck
Sari's head and neck as they were both sitting one evening three years ago with
friends in the yard of a house a few doors down from their own.
Sari, who is
now 13, has no memory of the attack. He was one of the brightest and sportiest
members of his class until his injury. After brain surgery at Gaza City's
hospital he was gradually coaxed back to being able to walk and talk by the
paramedical team. Now, although Mr Bardaweel says his son still has learning
difficulties and easily gets irritable, he goes regularly to school and can
think about the future. "I want to be a policeman in the national security
force," the boy says without hesitation.
Al Wafa's Akram al Satari, who
co-ordinates the programme, says it adopts a "holistic approach" to its clients.
It provides aids in the form of wheelchairs, and training in basic needs such as
dressing and going to the lavatory. It also offers health education for the
patients and the carers.
But above all, he says, both its therapy and its
campaigning in the wider Gaza community is aimed at ensuring that the disabled
victims of the conflict are being rehabilitated "not as an act of charity but
because it is their human right".
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