‘Not just numbers’: Injured Gazans in France on agony of losing loved ones, nine months on
‘Every one of these human beings had their loved ones, their family, their memories’
RENNES, France: When Israeli air strikes hit his neighbourhood early on in the Gaza war, Palestinian social worker Tareq Abu Eita, 42, saw his whole life upended in seconds.
The bombardment on October 14 blew in the walls of his two-storey family home.
It killed his 77-year-old father Hamed, his wife of 15 years Muntaha, 37, and his 11-year-old son Ilyas.
It also took the lives of his two nieces, eight-year-old Mira and 14-year-old Tala.
“It’s all gone,” said Abu Eita, a tear streaming down his cheek in the French city of Rennes, after showing AFP pictures of his wedding and late son grinning on his phone.
He and another son, 14-year-old Fares, are among just a handful of Palestinians wounded in the war who have been flown over to France for specialised medical treatment.
The latest Gaza war started after Palestinian Islamist group Hamas on October 7 attacked Israel, which resulted in the death of 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli figures.
The militants also seized 251 hostages, 111 of whom are still in Gaza, including 39 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 39,550 people, according to health authorities in the Hamas-run territory, which does not provide detail of civilian and militant deaths.
“It’s not just numbers,” said Abu Eita.
“Every one of these human beings had their loved ones, their family, their memories.”
He and his son Fares were outside their home in the northern Jabalia refugee camp after receiving a water delivery when the strikes hit, and were both badly wounded.
Fares suffered a large skull fracture that plunged him into a coma for more than three weeks.
‘Going through hell’
Nine months on, with Israeli forces still pounding the ravaged Gaza Strip, both are recovering in France following extensive medical care.
But Abu Eita is terrified he could now also lose two other sons he was forced to leave behind without a mother in the besieged territory: 10-year-old Jud and 15-year-old Ahmad.
“It’ll be a disaster if anything happens to them,” the father said.
“I really couldn’t cope.”
Abu Eita says he has been promised that as soon as he is granted asylum, he will be able to apply to bring his children to France.
But he is still waiting, leaving him with too much time to agonise about the impossible choice he made.
“Fares was dying. If I had stayed, I would have lost him,” he said.
Israel’s offensive has wounded more than 91,000 people since October 7, the Gaza authorities say.
Among these, around 10 children in Gaza every day lose one or both legs, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees says.
Aspiring soccer player Asef Abu Mhadi, 12, is one of them.
He says he was playing football outside his home in the central Nuseirat refugee camp on October 16 when his neighbourhood was hit, reducing it to rubble.
“I thought there was debris on my leg,” he told AFP, sitting in a wheelchair with a Palestinian football scarf over his shoulder near a Paris suburb hospital.
“I sat up to remove it and I discovered my leg was severed.”
Asef was also flown to France for treatment with his mother Raja Abdulkarim Abu Mhadi.
But Abu Mhadi, a 47-year-old who lost her husband when Asef was an infant, was not allowed to bring her other five children - Enas, 13, Aisha, 15, Ahmad, 17, Moayed, 18, and Mohammad, 20.
The mother, who says she has lost three nephews in the war, is also wracked with worry as she waits.
“My children are going through hell and I’m terrified I’m going be told I’ve lost them,” she said.
She added her son, who has been deeply depressed, could not heal properly without his siblings.
The French foreign ministry says it has evacuated almost 300 people from Gaza since the war started, including 15 wounded Palestinian children and their chaperones.
But it added that, if some family members have not been able to come to France, it was not linked to asylum requests.
It was “either because they have not been allowed to by the Israeli authorities” or because the Rafah border crossing from Gaza into Egypt “has been closed since May”, it said.
‘No longer shocked’
Majed Abu Shamla, 26, was abroad when the war broke out, and watched horrified in the early months of the war as his family tried to escape the conflict.
He, his mother, seven brothers and three-year-old niece have now been reunited in France.
But an Israeli air strike on the southern town of Rafah on December 13 killed his father Ahmed Abu Shamla, a consular employee at the Gaza French Institute.
A video of the aftermath, which Abu Shamla shared with AFP but cannot bring himself to watch, shows frantic men carrying his father’s unconscious body out of the wreckage, a gash visible on his head.
He had been granted permission to leave Gaza with part of the family the previous month, but had stayed behind waiting for his last four sons to be allowed out too.
All four, including two who were wounded in the same strike, were finally able to leave in late December.
The family today live together in the Paris region, but Abu Shamla says moving on is very hard.
“They’re glued to the news all day. There’s still family over there,” the software engineer told AFP at a cafe in Paris.
He says he has lost an uncle and three cousins in the war, while his paternal grandmother died a few weeks ago due to a lack of medicine in the besieged territory.
Abu Shamla says he has lost touch with most of his school and university friends, and believes around 20 have been killed.
“Today people are no longer shocked that someone is dead, but that they survived. That’s how bad it’s become,” he said.