LITTLE ‘IRON MAN’ FROM GAZA
5 years after war, Yamin, 8, finds new life with adoptive parents
IT was the summer of 2014, when a deluge of steel fell on Gaza. Yamin screamed from his hospital bed with bursts of shrapnel trapped in his body.
It was during yet another war between Gaza militants — led by Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the enclave and Islamic Jihad — and the Israeli military.
On Aidilfitri, an Israeli plane dropped a bomb on a building where Yamin’s family had gathered in the centre of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military maintained it housed a Hamas command centre with militants inside.
Nineteen people were killed, including six children. Yamin, just 3 at the time, and his sister Geina, only several months old, survived. But they are orphans.
Five years later, AFP found Yamin. His uncle, Adnan, has become his father and his aunt, Yasmine Abu Jabbar, who was his mother’s best friend, became his new mum.
“Yamin cried night after night. For a year, he asked me ‘where is my mother? How to get to her?’ The concept of death is already difficult to an adult. Imagine for a 3-year-old boy.”
Yasmine teaches at a primary school in Al-Nuseirat. She tried everything to help Yamin find some form of normality.
“The first step was to tell him, ‘Yamin, look around you. You are not alone. Many children have lost their parents and their families, but you still have a family. We are your family’.”
Yamin now lives with his new parents and five siblings. He attends the primary school where his adopted mother teaches.
He likes Galaxy chocolate, Lionel Messi and playing combat video game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (also known as
PUBG). He likes school, too, but not too much.
His back is scarred, his skin still burns sometimes and his left forearm remains deformed, which has occasionally led to mockery.
“One day, he came crying ‘I don’t want to wear t-shirts anymore.’ I ran to the preschool and I asked the children: ‘Which one of you has super powers?’
“No one said a word. Then I said: ‘Yamin has them. He has an iron arm. He can fight a rocket with his bare hands.’ After that, Yamin began to believe that he was a superhero like Iron Man,” said Yasmine.