The Riverside Press-Enterprise
The orphan
At first, rescuers thought Melisya Joudeh was dead.
They pulled her inert body from the rubble of her family home, 10 hours after the building was crushed by a devastating strike Oct. 22. At the hospital, she was put in a tent filled with corpses.
But an hour later, 16-month-old Melisya began to whimper and splutter. A clamor erupted, and she was rushed into the hospital for emergency treatment, said Yasmine Joudeh, an exhausted aunt who was keeping a bedside vigil for the girl days later as she dozed in a pink bunny shirt.
She was one of just three survivors from what relatives and local journalists said was an Israeli airstrike.
Her mother, expecting twins, had gone into labor hours before the strike on their house and was pulled dead from the ruins still clutching her belly, Yasmine said. Melisya’s father and brother were also killed, as were her grandparents, five uncles, two aunts, their spouses and dozens of cousins, she said — in all, about 60 people from the Jarousha and Joudeh families who had lived in that housing compound for decades.
Children account for about 40% of those killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to Gaza authorities and international organizations. Melisya cheated death but instead joined the 19,000 children that the war has left with no parents or with no adults to look after them, according to UNICEF.
And she will be scarred for life. Weeks earlier, Melisya had taken her first steps, her aunt said. They were probably her last.
Bomb fragments severed her spinal cord and paralyzed her from the waist down, doctors said. But a few weeks after she was wounded, Melisya was discharged. Doctors said they lacked medicine to treat her and needed her bed for newer casualties.
Yasmine took Melisya home. She considered the orphan a blessing from God, but caring for her was still difficult.
Melisya screamed when her wounds were being washed. And at night, she woke from her sleep crying out “Mama!” or “Baba!”
The mother
Oct. 7 began as a day of joy for Safaa Zyadah.
Just hours before midnight Oct. 6, she had given birth to her fifth child — a girl she named Batool — at a hospital in Gaza City.
But as she cradled her newborn, the noises of war crashed into her ward. Zyadah, 32, who had lived through several wars in Gaza, hoped this one might end quickly. But as she returned home later that day, it became clear this time was different.
The walls of her home trembled as Israeli warplanes roared overhead, dropping bombs in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack that Israel says killed about 1,200 people Oct. 7. Zyadah and her husband gathered their five children, the eldest age 13, and began to run.
In the early weeks of the war, they changed houses several times, sheltering with relatives until fighting or Israeli warnings forced them to move on. As the family scurried through the streets, she said, they saw fighter jets firing on targets and spotted corpses strewed on the roadside.
They finally halted at a makeshift United Nations-run camp in the city of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. It was crowded and dirty, but supposedly safe. Cramped into a tiny tent, her family members began to organize their lives as best they could. A few days later, she cradled Batool as she spoke to the Times, grateful they had survived. “We are tired of running,” she said. But their respite was short-lived.
In early December, Israeli troops entered Khan Younis, hoping to flush out the Hamas fighters they said were hiding among civilians. Fighting raged around the perimeter of the U.N. camp, which housed 43,000 people, sometimes piercing it.
On Jan. 24, several shells hit a U.N. shelter in the camp that housed about 800 people, killing 13, the U.N. said. The White House said it was “gravely concerned” by the episode.
It was unclear whether Zyadah and her family were affected. They could not be reached by phone recently.