Gaza girl orphaned in Israeli strike rebuilds her life with severe burns

The last thing Elham Abu Hajjaj remembers from the Israeli bombing of her Gaza City home is that her mother held her and prayed.

When Hajjaj woke up, she found herself in a hospital with a machine on her stomach and her “whole body trembling,” Abu Hajjaj told media.

“I touched my body and it was all burned,” she said. “A doctor was speaking to me, and I asked him where my father and mother were. He didn’t answer me.”

The Israeli attack in Gaza City’s al-Saffaweh area had killed both her parents and left Abu Hajjaj – who is nine years old – with third-degree burns.

She is not alone in the horrific fallout from Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Nearly 42,000 people – about 2 percent of Gaza’s population – have received “life-changing” injuries, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated in September. As many as a quarter of them are children.

More than 3,350 people have experienced major burns, making them among the most common injuries the WHO has recorded. Children are “clearly disproportionately affected”, the organisation added. About 70 percent of people receiving burn surgery in Gaza were children, mostly aged under five, and many were burned during bomb blasts.

“When I look in the mirror, I say to myself: ‘Oh God, look at these wounds, they are very bad wounds,’” Abu Hajjaj said, scrolling through photos of heavy scarring on her neck, her arm and her leg. “I have wounds here and here, and on my hand as well.”

Still, she found it difficult to imagine the loss of her parents. Even when her grandfather explained that they were waiting for her in paradise, Abu Hajjaj said, she kept telling herself they must be alive.

“I finally understood they were not when my grandfather took me to live with him,” she said. “Then I realised that my father and mother had died and I started crying.”

More than 39,000 children in Gaza have lost one or both of their parents, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said in April, about 17,000 of whom have been parentless since Israel started its war on Gaza in October 2023.

Abu Hajjaj now lives with her grandparents and other relatives who survived, including her brother.

Speaking from outside the family home – surrounded by rubble from destruction to the neighbourhood – she said she felt “some joy” when she realised her brother was still alive.

“I also found my grandmother, my aunt and my grandfather. They are by my side,” she said. “When we met and I saw my brother, I felt a little happy, but my heart was sad for my father and mother who passed away.”

Now, the little girl has turned to drawing to express her feelings about the loss of her parents and childhood home.

“It helps me forget everything that happened,” she said. “The last drawing I did was of the house that was destroyed.”

She did not draw her home in its final state, however.

“I rebuilt it in the picture, and I put in a swing and a tree,” Abu Hajjaj said. “I drew the tree because my father had planted a tree.”