Safety Is When There’s No One Dying
Mary Turfah on the children wounded by Israel’s wars
Safety Is When There’s No One Dying
Mary Turfah
The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund is based in the Blue Building, a medical center across from the American University of Beirut, in the city’s Hamra district. Many of the children whose care it sponsors have come to Lebanon from Gaza, mostly by way of Egypt, after an intensive vetting process involving the Israeli state and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. They require surgeries currently unavailable in Gaza, where Israel’s genocide has obliterated large swaths of the health care sector. Some have lost limbs; others have neurological injuries; most have lost family; all carry the effects of the violence that has fractured their worlds.
Israel has created something unprecedented: the largest population of traumatic pediatric amputees in modern history. (A traumatic amputation is one caused by the force of an accident or attack—say, that of a blast.) These children’s injuries—physical, mental, emotional—are complex, and require a complex response; there are many hospitals in the United States that would be unable to tend to them. Waking up from hemorrhagic shock to find yourself maimed, to watch your sister bleed out in front of you, to learn your whole family is gone, to try to fathom what this means when you cannot yet steady a pencil enough to write out your name—all of this takes a psychological toll, by design. The mission of the fund is not only to gather the necessary medical experts, both surgical and nonsurgical, but also to ensure that the child is cared for as a whole human being, by people with whom they feel safe.
When a person has been permanently disfigured, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah explained to me, the goal of surgery isn’t to make them look how they did before, which is often impossible, but to restore a kind of recognition—to make them feel once again that their body belongs to them. Abu Sittah is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who, before 2023, was mostly based in London, traveling to Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere to see patients wounded in various wars. Since the start of the genocide in Gaza he has focused his attention on treating children injured by Israeli attacks. In 2024 he cofounded the fund in Beirut, historically a hub for medical care in the region. With the extension of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign into Lebanon, the fund has begun providing this care to Lebanese children as well.
Two days before I sat down with Abu Sittah, I spoke to a boy from Gaza with a spinal cord injury that had left him unable to move his legs. He was staying with his mother in a hotel a short distance from the fund that hosts many of the families who are in Beirut for treatment. At one point he pulled up a photo on his phone of what looked like the inside of a tent and a mattress covered in blood. This was where he’d been when the missile struck. His mother told me that others had taken him to the morgue and pronounced him dead. She had found him there and insisted that no, her son was alive.
Later in our conversation the boy talked about how he had been super into cars, fixing them, driving them, everything. He showed me a video of a boy driving a car, shot from the passenger seat. The face on the screen was full, looking from road to camera with a relaxed smile. I asked the boy earnestly who that was in the video. That’s me, he answered, beaming. I felt uncomfortable, as if I had inadvertently pointed out how much he had changed, and in an attempt to redirect his attention I said that I meant who was recording and talking in the background, who had added those two heart emojis to the corner of the frame? My friend took it, he answered, and then: he’s a martyr.
Abu Sittah had just seen the boy in clinic the day before; he was happy with how much weight he had gained. He was skin and bones when he got to Beirut, he said. The boy was, as far as I could tell, still quite thin. Still, the fact that he had shown me that video indicated that he was beginning to be able to recognize himself again.
I spoke with Abu Sittah about an aspect of the conversation with the boy and his mother that weighed on me. In an effort to begin with an open-ended question, I had asked the mother to tell me what happened to them, how they ended up in Beirut. She responded with her own question: “What hasn’t happened to us?” I didn’t know what to say, so we waited in silence until she was ready to pick up the conversation again. At some point I asked her if she was still in touch with family in Gaza and she responded that, really, they had no one left.
Was Abu Sittah familiar with this kind of strained communication, I asked, with what felt like the lack of a common scaffolding on which to build a conversation? The architecture of their lives is totally gone, he said. In a recent essay for The London Review of Books, the human rights researcher Eyal Weizman writes about the disorientation imposed by Gaza’s total destruction, how it leaves people with no point of reference. Weizman quotes an Israeli bulldozer operator who says that if a Palestinian tries to return home, they “will be returning to nowhere…. They will not know where their home is. All they will find is sand.” He then writes of one Palestinian asking another, “If we survive this war…what would be our meeting point?”
Reading the article, I recalled a family friend’s description of her return to southern Lebanon at the end of 2024, after the cease-fire that wasn’t—how she arrived in Bazouriyeh, the town where she grew up, and found that everything familiar was gone. Not just her parents’ house but the other houses, the street signs, the shops, the trees, anything that could tell her she was here and not there. She called out for help orienting herself. Someone from the town whose eyes had already adjusted came to her side and guided her.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
