A photo of a girl in Gaza goes viral after she died in her roller skates
Whatever happened to the Gaza neurosurgeon who faced a wrenching decision: NPR interview with Amiteev Abukhedeir
He doesn’t allow his children to watch the news because it will affect them, but when they’re away, he and his wife tune in. It is unbearable. He says that we really cannot turn away from it.
Last time NPR spoke to Abukhedeir, it had been just a month since he left Gaza. The exhaustion and emotional wounds of the death and injury that he had to deal with as the chief neurosurgeon of the enclave’s largest medical complex were still fresh. But he still had passion –– and hope –– in his voice.
When the Israeli forces surrounded Al-Shi fa, Abukhedatar realized that he could not serve his patients because of the lack of medical resources. So, he made the difficult decision to leave his homeland with his young family – taking advantage of their foreign passports to depart.
His wife and five young children, including a then 6-month-old baby, moved into a single room at the hospital with him after they felt their home became unsafe due to Israeli airstrikes.
At his new job in the UAE, he has had to start from ground zero. He needs to establish a name and build a referral system for patients to come.
Their new life holds promise, because the main language is Arabic, there are nice places to go with his kids, and some restaurants that serve Middle Eastern food. He doesn’t have an appetite for it.
Source: Whatever happened to … the Gaza neurosurgeon who faced a wrenching decision
Eliminating the Effects of Burn Scars for a Technicolor Veteran: Farah Yousry, MD, Managing Editor of Side Effects Public Media
Even though he held a medical license to practice in the U.S. it took him four months to get approval to practice in a private medical center in Al-Ain.
He was one of the most well-adjusted men in the family. He was a third year computer science student in college. He was full of passion and had a passion for his work. “All of that is gone. He can’t use his hands to work on computers. And it pains me that I can’t do anything about it.”
He lost his right ear, can’t properly use his legs because he needs physiotherapy and can’t move his hands due to contractures, a complication where burn scars mature, tighten and thicken, preventing movement of the affected area, Abukhedeir says. The situation weighs heavily on him.
Farah Yousry is the managing editor of Side Effects Public Media, a health reporting collaboration of NPR member stations across the Midwest, based at WFYI in Indianapolis. She used to work for the British Broadcasting Corp.’s Arabic radio and television reporting on a wide variety of stories from the US. She covered the Arab Spring as a journalist in Egypt.
The Palestinian Girl Who Shoots in Her Pink Roller Skates Go Viral: She Walks Outside a Building, Enters a Neighborhood, and Arrives
A war that has killed tens of thousands of people in the Gaza Strip has left hundreds of pictures of dead and wounded children in the area.
There was one photo this week that stood out, it showed a girl covered in a white shroud wearing pink roller skates. It has become a defining image of the war in Gaza, which the UN has called a graveyard for children.
332 days after the war began, a 10-year-old boy is still alive. In the past 11 months, she and her family walked from place to place, sometimes in the middle of the night.
She wanted to live like the other kids, her father told NPR over the phone from Gaza City.
On Tuesday, the young girl went downstairs to catch up with her brother as he played outside. Just as Tala reached the ground floor, an explosion rocked the building.
Shrapnel sliced through the air, piercing her neck. An Israeli airstrike had struck an apartment in the building belonging to the Kiheel family, her father says.
She died at the entrance of the building. He says that he heard the airstrike and went down to look for her. There was a lot of carnage. She passed away in a few minutes.
Source: Killed in her pink roller skates, a Palestinian girl’s photo in Gaza goes viral
A Palestinian Girl’s Photo Go Viral in Gaza Goes Viral: The Weeping Woman in the White Shroud of the Oct. 7 Attack
The Israeli military says it takes precautions to limit civilian deaths in its hunt for Hamas, the group that launched the Oct. 7 attack that Israel says killed around 1,200 people.
In photos at the hospital, it’s obvious that Tala is covering her body with a white shroud. A man gently takes the skates off, handing them to her father. He was shown in a video weeping. Her mother is seen crumpled over Tala’s body.
“We’re all shocked. We never imagined it,” her father says. “My other kids are in shock. It feels like a nightmare,” he says. God, may your will give her strength. Her mother is confused. She is unable to believe what has happened.
The air strike killed eight people, among them a neighbor’s toddler son and a family with three young children and two grandparents.
Before the war, Abu Ajai was a high school chemistry teacher. His job meant he could afford the basics and some extras to lavish onto his eldest daughter, Tala.
Source: Killed in her pink roller skates, a Palestinian girl’s photo in Gaza goes viral
The roller skates that she wore before she died: What happened to Abu Ajwa, the only girl in the Gazan family?
“Those roller skates she was wearing, she’d really wanted me to buy them,” he says. I got them for her and that’s why I praise God, she died because of them. There are stairs to play with.
Tala was the middle child and, for most of her life, the only girl in the family, wedged between two brothers, until her youngest sibling, a sister, was born about a year ago.
The family had a good life before the war. In one, Tala’s got her arms wrapped around her dad’s neck in a pool. She wears a Daisy Duck sweater and dresses, in others she wears headbands. She is laughing and caked in foam.
She wanted to know why we live this way with death and martyrs. And I’d tell her ‘when the war’s over, we’ll travel outside and God will reward you,’ ” he says.
Abu Ajwa said that his daughter dreamt of becoming a dentist the day before she died. The U.N. says most of Gaza’s schools have been destroyed or damaged in the war. Children haven’t been in school in nearly a year, with classrooms turned into crowded shelters for displaced families with nowhere else to go.
One wish for September was made by Tala. She wanted to celebrate her younger brother’s 5th birthday with presents and friends to distract from the war. He promised to try.
A Palestinian girl who was killed in an Israeli air strike was covered in pink roller skates, her father said. Tala Abu Ajwa’s photo went viral on social media after it showed her covered in a white shroud. “She’d really wanted me to buy them. I’d tell her ‘when the war is over, we’ll travel outside and God will reward you’,” he added.