Abandoned by
his parents and the Palestinian government, 3-year-old Mohammed has been at Tel
Hashomer Hospital all his life
RAMAT GAN, Israel (AP) — In his short
life, Palestinian toddler Mohammed al-Farra has known just one home: the
yellow-painted children’s ward in Israel’s Tel Hashomer Hospital.
Born in Gaza with a rare genetic
disease, Mohammed’s hands and feet were amputated because of complications from
his condition, and the 3½-year-old carts about in a tiny red wheelchair. His
parents abandoned him, and the Palestinian government won’t pay for his care,
so he lives at the hospital with his grandfather.
There’s no care for this child in Gaza,
there’s no home in Gaza where he can live,” said the grandfather, Hamouda
al-Farra.
“He can’t open anything by himself, he
can’t eat or take down his pants. His life is zero without help,” he said at
the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital, part of the Tel Hashomer complex
in the Israeli city of Ramat Gan.
Mohammed’s plight is an extreme example
of the harsh treatment some families mete out to the disabled, particularly in
the more tribal-dominated corners of the Gaza Strip, even as Palestinians make
strides in combating such attitudes.
It also demonstrates a costly legacy of
Gaza’s strongly patriarchal culture that prods women into first-cousin
marriages and allows polygamy, while rendering mothers powerless over their
children’s fate.
Mohammed was rushed to Israel as a
newborn for emergency treatment. His genetic disorder left him with a weakened
immune system and crippled his bowels, doctors say, and an infection destroyed
his hands and feet, requiring them to be amputated.
In the midst of his treatment, his
mother abandoned Mohammed because her husband, ashamed of their son, threatened
to take a second wife if she didn’t leave the baby and return to their home in
the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis, Farra said. In Gaza, polygamy is
permitted but isn’t common. But it’s a powerful threat to women fearful of
competing against newer wives.
Now Mohammed spends his days undergoing
treatment and learning how to use prosthetic limbs.
His 55-year-old grandfather cares for
him. Mohammed’s Israeli doctors, who’ve grown attached to the boy, fund-raise
to cover his bills, allowing him and his grandfather to live in the sunny
pediatric ward.
But it’s not clear how long he’ll stay
in the hospital, or where he’ll go when his treatment is complete. As a
Palestinian, Mohammed is not eligible for permanent Israeli residency. Yet his
family will not take the child back, the grandfather said. His parents,
contacted by The Associated Press, refused to comment.
As his grandfather spoke, Mohammed used
his knees and elbows to scamper up and down a nearby stairwell, his knees and
elbows blackened and scarred from constant pressure. He used his arms to hold a
green bottle he found in a stroller. His prosthetic legs with painted-on shoes
were strewn nearby.
He crawled toward his grandfather’s lap.
“Baba!” he shouted, Arabic for “daddy.” ”Ana ayef,” he said — a mix of Arabic and Hebrew
for “I’m tired.”
Dr. Raz Somech, the senior physician in
the Tel Hashomer pediatric immunology department, attributes Mohammed’s genetic
disorder to the several generations of cousin marriages in his family —
including his parents.
In deeply patriarchal parts of Gaza — not
in all the territory — men believe they have “first rights” to wed their female
cousins, even above the women’s own wishes. Parents approve the partnerships
because it strengthens family bonds and ensures inheritances don’t leave the
tribe.
Repeated generations of cousin marriages
complicate blood ties. It’s not clear what affect that has had on disability
rates in Gaza; but Somech said a third of patients in his department are
Palestinians and most have genetic diseases that were the result of close-relation
marriages.
Further worsening the situation,
disabled children are often stigmatized.
Some families hide the children, fearing
they won’t be able to marry off their able-bodied children if the community
knows of their less-abled siblings. And they are seen as burdens in the
impoverished territory.
Some 183,600 Gaza residents — or 10.8
percent of the 1.7 million Gazans — suffer some kind of disability that affects
their mental health, eyesight, hearing or mobility. Some 40,800 people suffer severe
disability, the Palestinian bureau of statistics reported in 2011.
According to the bureau, two-thirds of
young disabled Gazans are illiterate and some 40 percent were never sent to
school, suggesting either their parents kept them home or did not have the
means to educate them — a likely scenario in the territory, where about
two-thirds of the population live under the poverty line. Over 90 percent of
the disabled are unemployed, the bureau said.
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