Plestia Alaqad is one of a handful of young Palestinians in Gaza whom millions of people began following on social media for eyewitness accounts from the besieged coastal strip last year, after Israel launched its military campaign in response to the Hamas-led attack of October 7th.
Sitting at a cafe in Beirut, Alaqad tells The Irish Times that her family was proud of her for reporting at the start of the war “the truth and what’s happening in Gaza”, but also “terrified of what would happen … that I will get targeted, or they would get targeted”.
Amid heavy bombardment and a succession of Israeli military evacuation orders, the 22-year-old journalist and her family were displaced several times in Gaza before leaving the war-torn enclave last November. After a relative secured her family visas for Australia, Alaqad spent much of last year in Melbourne, before moving to study at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in August.
The Lebanese university awarded her a scholarship to pursue a masters in media studies named in honour of Shireen Abu Akleh, the American-Palestinian journalist shot dead while covering an Israeli military raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank in 2022.
In an Instagram post marking her arrival at AUB, Alaqad said: “While Israel has destroyed every single university in Gaza, Palestine, it will never stop young women like me from learning in the pursuit of justice. When times get overwhelming, I remember Shireen’s words: ‘it takes endurance; keep your spirits high’.”
Just over a month after that post, Alaqad found war again calling at her doorstep, as Israeli troops crossed the Lebanese border, after ordering a swathe of mostly impoverished towns and villages to evacuate. UN representatives have criticised the heavy toll being exacted on civilians by the military operation that Israel says is necessary to dismantle the infrastructure of the Iran-backed militant group Hizbullah.
Lebanon’s government says more than 2,000 people have been killed in Israeli attacks since last October, while more than a million are estimated to be displaced in a crisis-ridden country ill-equipped to deal with their needs. “It breaks my heart to see people being displaced in Lebanon, especially knowing first-hand what it feels like,” says Alaqad.
Alaqad’s lectures have been suspended as Israel repeatedly strikes Beirut’s southern suburbs and, increasingly, central neighbourhoods. “I’m beyond angry and frustrated at how Israel consistently manages to ruin my life and the lives of millions of people,” she says. “I’m tired of living in a world where I don’t know if the next hour I’ll be alive or not, where I call my friends not knowing if this is the last time I hear their voices and where the displacement is endless.”
Near AUB in the Beirut neighbourhood of Hamra, another Palestinian woman from Gaza is lying in a hotel bed after recovering from surgery. Ibtissam Zinati’s right leg was shattered by an Israeli strike last October which hit her parents’ home in Jabalia, north of Gaza city. The attack killed 22 members of Zinati’s family including two of her children, her parents and her siblings.
“I have only three children left and my husband in Egypt,” says Zinati, as her daughters Layan (10) and Leen (5) quietly play with a plastic tea set in the next room. Their older brother Hamza (14) arrives a few minutes later. He was not home when the air strike killing two of his siblings struck, but Leen lost 1½ fingers, while Layan had to have her liver and part of her spleen removed due to her injuries.
Over the summer, the Ghassan Abu Sittah Fund offered treatment for Zinati’s children at AUB’s hospital, where four other families from Gaza are receiving treatment. Dania Dandashli, a psychoanalyst who works with the fund founded by British-Palestinian surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, says the focus was initially on children but it quickly became apparent that many had injured mothers who were struggling to care for them. “All the mothers here have serious leg injuries,” says Dandashli.
In Gaza, medical workers removed shrapnel from Zinati’s stomach but she received no other treatment for her wounds, other than occasional cleaning, and “very little” pain relief, she says. She received the first in a series of surgeries when she left Gaza for Egypt in January. Dandashli says many of the children and their mothers fleeing Gaza have arrived in Beirut with serious infections because their wounds have been left untreated since last October.
Zinati’s surviving children are all expected to make a good physical recovery but their mother is worried about the mental scars they bear. Leen is most affected, she says. The five-year-old once tried to throw herself out of a window, screaming that she wanted to meet her siblings. “I don’t want what happened to Gaza to happen to Beirut,” says Zinati, who tells her children that the sound of Israeli air strikes hitting southern Beirut are fireworks.
“It’s disorienting being in a war situation now,” says Dandashli. The fund probably won’t be able to treat more Gazan children in Beirut until there is a ceasefire in Lebanon, where more than 120 children have been killed by Israeli strikes since last October, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
There is no dedicated paediatric intensive care unit in southern Lebanon, so the fund has shifted part of its focus to helping a hospital in the city of Saida establish such a unit so that children seriously injured in the south have a higher chance of surviving. “The war is destroying the future of the region,” says Dandashli. “It will have no winners.”
[ Gaza humanitarian crisis: For the people still alive, things are getting worseOpens in new window ]
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