I have lost track of how many times Hazem and the children have been displaced since that first move to Jabaliya. It was hard enough moving from one part of Gaza City to another. There are eight babies in the orphanage, as well as children who are severely disabled and need help to move, eat and drink. Without electricity, Ayas, an eight-year-old boy with cerebral palsy who could not eat solid food, had to rely on an unsteady diet of grated cheese.
Hazem carried Ayas in his arms with his youngest son, Yaman, aged seven, walking beside him. ‘The soldiers enjoyed the humiliation,’ he wrote. The afghanistan phone data thousands desperate to flee were allowed to pass through a gate to the south twenty people at a time. They moved forward at three steps an hour. Hazem could barely breathe among the crowds. Ayas ‘suffered so much that the whites of his eyes became almost blue’.
They were fortunate to get through: Hazem saw others detained, forced to kneel or not permitted to cross at all. His wife and other children were also trying to cross that day, but he was not allowed to wait for them. He was told by soldiers to move immediately, ‘otherwise they would shoot us.’ Instead, he stood on a road a short distance away with others who were hoping to see their families pass through. After a while the soldiers opened fire on them. ‘I quickly moved away and then I waited a little, until I became desperate when darkness fell.’