Wounded Child, No Surviving Family, 2024, digital.
Wounded Child, No Surviving Family is a phrase that has come to be used by healthcare workers in Gaza to identify thousands of hospitalized children in the months since the airstrikes began. The burden on healthcare providers in Gaza has been exceedingly dire and deadly, but I wrote this for Layan, Anas, Maryam, Suhaib, Dania, Saeed, Bisan, Fatima, Salim, Joud, Tasneem, and the thousands of their friends and cousins and brothers and sisters who I could not list here.
As a Palestinian-American medical student with an interest in pediatric medicine, this piece stands at the intersection of my heritage and my present studies. It is the image that I see each time I look at the ED trackboard at the children’s hospital here in Philadelphia. When I read the names of the children of Gaza who have been made casualties, I wish with shame that they were born here and not there. If only they were born here, they would receive revolutionary surgeries instead of amputations. They would be brought warm blankets when they were cold instead of wrapped in old blankets when they bleed. They would be children instead of numbers.
But children are resilient, pediatricians here often say. In Palestine, the word is Sumud. The drawing of Handala, a Palestinian child refugee, has symbolized the Sumud of Palestinians for decades. It is this resilience that I hoped to capture in this work. I am inspired by the pioneering Palestinian artists Sliman Mansour and Ismail Shammout, among many others. My writing is inspired by poets Mohammed el-Kurd and the late Refaat Alareer, as well as the poignant words of Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sitta. I encourage you to interact with their works, and to think of the children of Gaza as they wait for us.
Nassim Abu-Halaweh is an MS1 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
