A Tiny Collateral Damage

The location of Alyn Hospital on the outskirts of Jerusalem is so idyllic it could be straight out of the famous tale, Heidi.

Nestled on a hilltop enclosed in pine-groves and wild yellow daffodils, the sound of birdsong and children’s giggles allow one to momentarily forget the reality inside the hospital’s walls- the damaged and deformed children who are its patients.

On an office wall hangs a watercolour of a small child, head bowed over the dove in his hand - as though in supplication. Like the guardian angels of the Victorian sculptors, which knelt at the headstones of children’s graves.

Looking out through the sunny bay windows on the first floor look out onto the Jerusalem hills.

The hilltops around the plush suburb of Ein Kerem are a reminder of the history of a land forged in blood and tears.

To the right, just beyond the forest clearing is the Yad Vashem; the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Further along the same road is Mount Herzl, the cemetery wherein lie interred the fallen in Israel’s successive wars.

Inside Alyn Hospital’s Intensive Respiratory Unit lies the latest casualty of Israel’s more recent past. Three year-old Mariya Aman, paralysed in her cot.

Her neck and body in a protective corset, the girl stares blankly out at the ward nurse changing her drip. Underneath the brace, pressure sores covering the child’s neck and back are now slowly starting to heal.

Pastel pink track-pants cover her motionless legs. Fingers whose nails shine with bright red varnish neither twitch, curl or grasp. Doctors say she is in what they term ‘spinal shock.’ Caused by a physical trauma so severe it literally shuts down the body’s normal functions.

Mariya Aman is what is known in war-speak as ‘collateral damage.’ A bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time - in her case, the line of fire of a missile from an Israeli army jet.

But doctors treating the girl are optimistic. When she was first brought to the hospital she was completely qadruplegic, and fully ventilated. Now, her doctors say, Mariya has begun swallowing on her own, and they have removed her feeding tube. She is able to sit up for short periods in her wheelchair. Soon, they say, they will attach a voice valve to her respirator, so she will be able to attempt speaking.

‘You can see she wants to talk so badly, but she just can’t,’ says hospital director Dr. Shirley Meyer.

But Mariya Aman is a lucky Palestinian child. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, 20 Palestinian children have died from army bullets this year alone.

This week, another three children died from army fire in the Gaza Strip, their short life stories, and circumstances of their deaths resembling that of Mariya Aman.

On 20 May 2006 the family car in which Mariya Aman, her father, mother, grandmother, brother and uncle were driving got caught in the rush-hour traffic in Sanayeh street, one of Gaza City’s biggest streets.

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) was carrying out another one of what it calls ‘targeted assassinations’ of wanted men in Gaza. This time it was the turn of Islamic Jihad operative Muhammad a-Dahduh.

No-one save the Israeli Air Force (IAF) knows precisely when the missile hit. Army sources say it was at precisely 19.00 - a time when the streets are congested with commuters coming home from work; in one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

The pilot pushed the fire button just as the car carrying Mariya Aman and her family drew up alongside the militant’s car.

When the dust cleared, the bloody and mangled bodies of Mariya Aman’s mother Na’ima Aman, 28, her grandmother Hanan Muhammad Hussein Aman, 47 and her brother Muhand, 7 lay scattered amidst the wreck of their new car.

Mariya, her father Hamid, 28 and her uncle, Nahed Aman, 35 were the only survivors. Although Mariya’s father received only light shrapnel wounds, the girl and her uncle were badly wounded.

The two were rushed to the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City: itself running on empty with virtually no medical supplies, including pain-killers.

That the three year-old girl is now being treated in one of Israel’s foremost paediatric rehabilitation centers is due to the intervention of the Israel branch of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

The organization whose aim is to promote access to and deliver healthcare across the Israeli/Palestinian divide, pressured members of the Israeli Knesset to lobby the Ministry of Defence.

The PHR also mounted a media campaign calling for the army to take responsibility for the girl’s treatment.

It was the Alyn Hospital, and in particular its director, Dr Shirley Meyer - herself a member of PHR, who agreed to allow Mariya Aman to be admitted. Though open to all races, the hospital is privately funded and only admits referral cases from general hospitals. Though it isn’t the first time a Palestinian child from Gaza has been treated at the hospital, it is the first time, says Meyer, that the Ministry of Defence is footing the bill.

According to Meyer, prospects for Mariya Aman’s recovery, not full but partial - are good. Mariya’s spinal cord remains intact, despite the numerous fractures. In such children, says Meyer, it can take up to six months before an accurate picture may be formed of the extent of her recovery.

“At no stage do we raise expectations beyond what is reasonable,” says Meyer.

As the doctors in Gaza City tried to save Mariya Aman’s life the IDF told Haaretz newspaper it “still hand to check” what exactly caused the deaths of the Aman family.

It was a week later that the army issued a press-release noting that it was “continuing to investigate” the incident. End of story. Close on a month later, the defence establishment has yet to publicly accept responsibility for putting Mariya Aman in Alyn Hospital.

In the meantime, someone in the corridors of power is signing off the payments to cover her treatment.

‘They have a moral duty to do it,’ says Ibrahim Habib, a fieldwork co-ordinator for PHR who has been by Mariya Aman’s side since she first arrived in Israel three weeks ago. According to Habib, that the Ministry of Defence agreed to pay for the girl’s treatment came as a surprise. ‘We tried the same thing for another case last year, and got no response. We felt we should try again this time, despite the law.’

The law Habib refers to is the amendment to the Civil Wrongs Law, passed by the Israeli Knesset last year.

The law effectively bars Palestinians from claiming compensation from the Israeli state as a result of army wrong-doing because they are “residents of a conflict area” - such as the Gaza Strip.

Two weeks after the attack that killed Mariya Aman’s family, and paralysed her, the army issued a press-release.

Saying it regretted “any harm done on innocent civilians”, the army’s press-release went on to add: “if Palestinians were killed by IDF fire, operational lessons will be learned in order to continue to minimize the risk of hurting the uninvolved in similar operations in the future.”

According to Alyn Hospital, Mariya Aman is likely to remain hospitalized there for another six months. From there, it is likely she will be sent back to Gaza, and probably to the under-resourced and supply-starved Shifa Hospital, where paediatric rehabilitation facilities are non-existent.

“All I hope for, says Meyer, “is to see that someone will take her and maintain her in the state she will be in, and not let her slip back.”