Child survivor of Gaza family strike heads to Italy

Rome: A group of about 80 Palestinians, including an 11-year-old boy who lost nine siblings in an Israeli strike in Gaza last month, will arrive in Italy later on Wednesday for hospital treatment, Italy’s foreign minister said.

Accompanied by his mother, Adam Al-Najjar will be transferred to Niguarda Hospital in the northern city of Milan, while others will be moved to nearby Bergamo and Rome.

“Adam will arrive in Milan and be treated at Niguarda hospital because he has multiple fractures,” Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said in an interview with RTL 102.5 radio.

Tajani said the group would number about 80, including wounded people and those, such as family members, accompanying them. Tajani’s spokesman later said the group was made up of 17 injured people, accompanied by 52 others.

The 23 May attack left Adam in a serious condition at Nasser Hospital, one of the few operational medical facilities in southern Gaza.

His mother was at work when the bomb hit the house, killing nine of her children and injuring Adam and his father, Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar, who died last week.

Al-Najjar, who ran to the house to find her children charred beyond recognition, told Italy’s La Repubblica daily: “I remember everything. Every detail, every minute, every scream.”

“But when I remember, it’s too painful, so I try to keep my mind focused entirely on Adam,” she said in an interview published Wednesday ahead of their arrival.

Asked by his mother during the interview to describe his hopes, Adam said he wanted to “live in a beautiful place”.

“A beautiful place is a place where there are no bombs. In a beautiful place, the houses are not broken and I go to school,” he said, according to La Repubblica.

“Schools have desks, the kids study their lessons, but then they go play in the courtyard and nobody dies.

“A beautiful place is where they operate on my arm and my arm works again. In a beautiful place, my mother is not sad. They told me that Italy is a beautiful place,” he said.

Al-Najjar said she has packed the Koran, their documents and Adam’s clothes.

“I am heartbroken. I am leaving behind everything that was important to me. My husband, my children, the hospital where I worked, my job, my patients,” she said.

“People are dying of hunger. If not of hunger, of bombs. We would just like to live in peace,” she told the Daily.

Adam is one of 17 children being brought to Italy on Wednesday from Gaza along with relatives, Tajani said.

Adam “is stable, has a head wound that is healing but his left arm is bad, the bones are fractured and the nerves damaged,” his 36-year-old mother, Alaa al-Najjar, a paediatrician, told Italian newspaper la Repubblica.

“The damage is in my left hand, there is a problem with the nerves, I can’t feel my fingers. There’s still a lot of pain,” Adam told Turkish news agency Anadolu.

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) website, more than 15,000 children have reportedly been killed and over 34,000 injured in almost two years of war in Gaza.

A plane carrying Palestinians in need of medical care is scheduled to land at 7:30 pm (1730 GMT) at Milan’s Linate airport, according to the foreign ministry.