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Arish, Egypt
CNN
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Julia Abu Zeiter, who is only four years old, suffers from a rare neurological disease that can lead to death without medication.
The nine-month war in Gaza nearly cost Julia her life because she had no access to medical care due to the fighting and displacement.
After an arduous journey, she was finally evacuated from the war-torn enclave on June 27, accompanied only by her 21-year-old aunt, Dareen Zeiter.
“The displacement was really difficult, the events in Gaza are very difficult. What Julia saw was very hard,” Dareen told CNN.
Julia suffers from a rare neurological condition called alternating hemiplegia of childhood (AHC). It causes recurrent episodes of paralysis and life-threatening seizures. There is no cure for the condition, which is estimated to occur in about one in a million births. Patients are known as “human time bombs” and must be constantly monitored for signs of an impending seizure. Once one strikes, life-saving measures must be taken quickly.
CNN met Julia and Dareen aboard a United Arab Emirates floating hospital, where they had spent a week after leaving Gaza through Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing in the south.
The two Palestinians were among about a dozen patients who left the floating hospital to continue their treatment in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi. Most of these patients are children, including two who are suffering from leukemia.
The hospital is located off the coast of Arish on the northern coast of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, about 40 kilometers from Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, which now lies in ruins after Israel launched its ground offensive there in May.
The city was also home to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, a key land bridge through which two-thirds of aid was transported to Gaza. The crossing has been closed since it was captured by the Israeli military.
The UAE ship, equipped with 100 beds, has taken in 2,400 injured Palestinians since February, according to hospital director Dr. Ahmed Mubarak.
Yulia was an “invisible victim” of the war, Mubarak said, caught up in what Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, called “silent killings in Gaza, the result of deliberate deprivation.” The organization’s emergency programs director, Mari Carmen Viñoles, said in May that Israel’s “blockades, delays and restrictions on humanitarian aid and essential medical supplies” had made aid deliveries impossible.
Julia and Dareen are two of countless Palestinians displaced by the war in Gaza, which Israel launched in response to the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostage, according to Israeli authorities.
Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images
An injured Palestinian evacuated from the Gaza Strip is taken to an Emirates plane at Arish Airport in Egypt on July 5 for treatment in the United Arab Emirates.
According to the local health ministry, more than 38,000 people have died as a result of Israel’s war in Gaza. Large parts of the enclave lie in ruins, and almost the entire population of the two million Gaza Strip has become internally displaced.
Julia and Dareen had to leave their home in northern Gaza when the war began. The four-year-old witnessed “explosions and artillery fire” the whole time, her aunt said.
A heavy siege by Israel has suffocated the enclave, humanitarian aid is at a minimum and people in Gaza are no longer able to travel in and out. For Julia, this meant she ran out of medication, triggering a series of life-threatening seizures.
About a month after the war began, Julia ran out of three of the five medications she was taking, Dareen told CNN, causing a state of paralysis that lasted six months.
With the help of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization, Julia was eventually evacuated through Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing, Dareen said.
Further down the corridor of the makeshift medical wards lived Ibrahim, who had been injured in an airstrike in his family home in Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip on November 21, the day he turned seven years old.
Ibrahim was on board the ship with his aunt Alaa, 21. Alaa and Ibrahim were both injured in the airstrike but survived after being rescued from the wreckage, Alaa said. The aunt suffered severe burns, while Ibrahim broke his arm and leg, she said.
The boy’s injuries did not heal properly and required further treatment.
“Ibrahim and I were the only two survivors,” Alaa told CNN, adding that 30 members of her family were killed in the airstrike. They left Gaza through the Rafah crossing on April 28, just a week before Israeli forces took control of the Gaza Strip.
“Look, this is my father,” Ibrahim said, holding up a photo of his father, who was killed in the airstrike, on his aunt’s phone.
Before losing their home and family, Alaa and Ibrahim stayed in northern Gaza until April, when residents suffered severe hunger as Israeli military operations made it difficult for aid to reach them. In addition, humanitarian workers said there was increasing lawlessness and looting of trucks.
In mid-March, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessed that famine was “imminent” in northern Gaza and said it was likely to occur between then and May.
Ali Moustafa/Getty Images
Trucks loaded with humanitarian aid for Gaza line up in Arish, Egypt, on Tuesday after the Rafah border crossing was closed.
On Tuesday, the United Nations, citing a report by independent experts, said the recent deaths of more Palestinian children from hunger and malnutrition in Gaza indicated that famine had spread throughout the Gaza Strip. It condemned Israel’s “deliberate and targeted campaign of starvation against the Palestinian people” as a “form of genocidal violence.”
“There was incredible hunger,” Alaa told CNN, sitting on a hospital bed while Ibrahim stood nearby. “We experienced hunger, the main ingredients for our food were not there,” Alaa told CNN.
“Hunger has affected us more than the war itself,” she told CNN. “Those who died, died. But hunger is what is destroying us.”
Julia and Ibrahim managed to leave the border, but millions of others are still trapped in the war zone. And a ceasefire is hardly in sight.
Almost 26,000 children were killed or injured in Gaza within six months, the aid organization Save the Children said in April. That is just over two percent of the total child population in the Gaza Strip.
“Even in all the complexity of war, we cannot grasp a universal truth: a child is a child,” UNICEF spokesman James Elder said last month, calling for “a ceasefire that will bring the hostages home and end the killing of children.”
Dareen, Julia’s aunt, said the responsibility for her niece was too much for her.
“She needs her mother and her father. I can’t be her mother and her father at the same time,” she told CNN. “At the end of the day, I’m a child crossed with a child.”
