Even the injections for treatment and pain relief remind her of what happened. With every prick of a needle, she screams as though the rocket is falling on her all over again
AT a mere two years old, Maryam Ghanem witnessed her mother being burned alive after an Israeli bomb ripped through their apartment in Gaza City last week (October 14). Maryam survived the bombing with third-degree burns and psychological trauma, the extent and consequences of which cannot yet be known.
Maryam was born amid the ongoing genocide on February 18, 2024, and has known nothing but genocide. The pain of loss accompanied her even before birth, as the Israelis killed her father, Ahmad Ghanem, a month into the genocide. She arrived three months after her father was martyred in an Israeli airstrike that also killed Ahmad’s brother and several members of their family.
By the time of Maryam’s birth, the effects of the Israeli-engineered starvation had begun to emerge in the Gaza Strip. During the first months of her life, Maryam experienced repeated displacement as her mother, Reem Awad, moved with her between tents, schools, and hospitals in search of safe shelter.
Her mother’s travails have now come to a fiery end.
Maryam’s parents endured five years of waiting, longing, and medical interventions for their first daughter’s birth. Yet Ahmad never knew Maryam, and she had the misfortune of witnessing her mother being burned to death.
Ibrahim Ghanem, Maryam’s uncle, told Ultra Palestine that she “is still living in a state of panic since the air strike. From time to time, she suddenly jolts, and if she cannot find anyone around her, she starts screaming. Whenever she hears the sound of nursing trolleys or movement outside her room at Al-Shifa Hospital, she screams, believing it is a rocket.”
Ibrahim adds: “Even the injections for treatment and pain relief remind her of what happened. With every prick of a needle, she screams as though the rocket is falling on her all over again.”
Maryam remembers the flames and her mother being burned. She described what happened in simple language to her grandfather and grandmother, yet despite this, she does not know that her mother is gone and will not return.
“Maryam, the clever, beautiful two-and-a-half-year-old, astonished us when she recited the prayer before eating after I had persuaded her to eat,” her uncle says.
“But she kept asking for her mother to come and feed her with her own hand. We stood before her, helpless, with nothing to do but cry.”
“We do not know how we will remove from Maryam’s mind the tragedy she witnessed,” he adds. “Her birth was difficult, then she lived through famine and displacement, and today she loses her mother at the beginning of her life, after being deprived of seeing her father. We do not know how we will compensate her for what she saw and experienced.” — Palestine Will Be Free
