Majd Alshaghnobi, 15 years old (left in the photo): Israeli shatters ripped his face. This is his story – but not only
“I was placed at Morgue”: a teenager taken from Gaza for medical treatment offers a glimpse of the horrors of war
by Christina Macfarlane, Sana Noor Haq e Muhammad DarwishCNN
Initially, health professionals thought Majd Alshaghnobi had died.
He was waiting to receive flour, like so many other children in northern Gaza, when Israeli splinters ripped his face to the Kuwait roundabout in February 2024, causing him an explosion injury in his jaw and bottom of his mouth.
“Someone dragged me and took me to a safe place,” the 15-year-old tells CNN. “I was placed in the morgue fridge because they thought I was dead. But then I moved my hand and warned them to the fact that I was alive.”
Palestinian doctors took him quickly before he wounds in a kitchen because there are not enough operations rooms at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in the city of Gaza-a tense scene of impossible screening and repeated medical improvisation throughout the track.
After that, Majd traveled destroyed neighborhoods and military control posts before meeting with his mother in the city of Khan Youis in the south.
“It was difficult,” recalls Majd. “I was very scared because the Israelites were there.”
In July, Majd Alshaghnobi became Gaza’s third child to enter the UK – had the help of the NGO Project Pure Hope, with the support of the non -profit organization Gaza Kinder Relief. Five months earlier, Majd had left the enclave by Egypt with his mother, Islam Felfel; with the younger brother, Nader, 10 years old; With her sister, Rahaf, 7, during a ceasefire. The British government did not fund the removal of Majd Alshaghnobi or treatment.
On Tuesday, Majd underwent facial reconstruction surgery at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, days after the British government announced a new program to facilitate the safe arrival of seriously sick children from Gaza-with the first group to enter the United Kingdom in mid-September.
Humanitarian and health professionals say it takes more to help – and warn that Majd’s trial offers a rare glimpse of the horrors of the Israeli campaign for children in Gaza. More than 50,000 children were killed or injured, according to the United Nations. Gaza has the largest number of amputated per capita children in the world, said Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees on Wednesday.
Almost two years of border bombing and border restrictions, after the attacks led by Hamas on October 7, 2023, destroyed the health system and strangled patients’ access to care. More than 700 people were waiting to be withdrawn from Gaza, including nearly 140 children, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on September 10.
Now, and as more Western powers advance to recognize the Palestinian State and the international condemnation of the Israeli offensive, human rights defenders require allies to act to remove military support from Israel and face the devastating humanitarian siege, including through withdrawals from Gaza.
Between October 2023 and July this year, 7,642 patients, including 5,303 children, were removed from the enclave, according to the NGO Médicos Without Borders (MSF). The United Kingdom received 0.03% of these patients, said the MSF.
“So many children have lost members, lost their ability to eat,” CNN Omar Din, co-founder of Project Pure Hope, told CNN. “With all the goodwill in the world, we should do more,” said Din. “There is a recognition that these are people who have an inalienable right to be treated like any other human being, of receiving health care.”
‘A drop in the ocean’
After more than 700 days of war in Gaza, UN parents, doctors and agencies say that Palestinian children face growing hunger, terror, bloodshed and heavy bombing. Some “wish to die to join their parents in heaven,” according to MSF.
Although Majd is receiving grafts and specialized reconstructive surgery that will give him best use of his mouth, the care he receives represent “an ocean drop” compared to the scale of need, according to Owase Jeelani, pediatric neurosurgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital. “We hope that if and when we can give you the result we expect, it makes way for more children to come,” Jeelani told CNN.
Israel aimed 38 hospitals in Gaza since October 7, 2023, according to Munir al-Bursh, director general of the Ministry of Health at Enclave. At least 1,723 health professionals were killed, said on Tuesday. Israel has been claiming for years that Hamas fighters have taken refuge in hospitals and other civilians to avoid Israelite attacks. Hamas repeatedly rejected these allegations.
An independent UN survey concluded last week that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza through a multifaceted campaign – including the target for children and the health system. Israel firmly denied the accusations of Genocide.
Hospitals in Gaza symbolize “life itself before the siege and war,” he told CNN Eyad Amawi on Monday, a Palestinian humanitarian worker dislocated in Deir Al-Balah, in downtown Gaza. “Destroying these headlights of hope is, first of all, to break the will of society, to push people into despair and steal their ability to resist.”
Brothers left behind in Gaza
Images recorded by a CNN team at Great Ormond Street Hospital before surgery show Majd lying in a small room to use a cream -colored pajama with the “Minecraft” video game logo. Brown eyes move from side to side of the room, a slight smile lurks behind a blue surgical mask.
“My wish is that Gaza will be what it was again, that everyone can gather,” he told CNN. “I would like to be like all other children.”
The tinnit of medical devices in London contrasts with the deafening noise of Israeli drones in northern Gaza – where their two younger brothers, Muhammad, 14, and Yusuf, 12, are displaced.
“If I knew the war would start over, it wouldn’t have left them behind,” Felfel, his mother, told CNN on Monday. “When I talk to them, you tell me ‘you left us here, you took the boy who you love and let us and we can die at any moment.’
The current Israeli military offensive in the city of Gaza-that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he aimed at what he calls Hamas’s “last bastions”-put three out of service hospitals, Al-Bursh wrote on Tuesday. CNN contacted Israel’s defense forces for a reaction. More than 320,000 people were forced to travel to south from the city, the largest of Gaza, since mid-August, according to the UN.
Felfel tells CNN that the two children, who are with their father, cannot afford the 2,500 euros needed to move from north to south. “Their house has disappeared. The safe places have disappeared. They are now on the street. Being away from them is shattering my heart.”
