Gaza’s Miracle Baby

The cruelty of last year’s Israeli campaign against Gaza has many facets.  The sheer magnitude of the destruction, the hideous carnage, the callous indifference towards targeting women and children, the utter contempt for International law, the indiscriminant use of internationally banned chemical weapons against the civilian population, and the continued strangulation of the strip via the continued siege during, before and after the military operations are but a few of those facets.  One year later, touching stories are still pouring out of the embattled strip.  While those stories highlight human suffering inflicted by the Israeli brutality, they also underscore an astonishing abundance of steadfastness and courage.  What’s also new about those stories is that they are being splashed across the pages of highly reputed mainstream newspapers such as The Guardian sobering along the way a world public opinion that has doped on Israeli fiction for too long.  One such story is that of Gaza’s miracle baby Eyad Radea.  Truly a Gazan, he had to surmount challenges that most of us will not face throughout our entire lives just so that his imminent moment of birth did not morph into his abrupt moment of death. 

Read this fascinating story in a fantastic Guardian report by clicking here.   The report depicts the tumultuous dramatic journey of a pregnant mother trying to give birth under fire, from the safety of her home to the perilous streets in the crosshair Israel’s hi tech killing machines, to delivering her child while on the brink of death, to hopping between hospitals in Gaza and Egypt, to losing a limb and falling into a coma in the process, to finally rejoining her family six months later to meet its newest member for the very first time, experiencing rejection at first then acceptance with reservation!!

You can also check out the associated 5 minute video interview with the mother, Wafa, as she recounts the details of her terrible ordeal. 

Eyad, by the will of the almighty creator, was meant to live in spite of the steep unremitting Israeli propensity for wreaking death.  And in spite of the deeply seeded burning desire of American, Zionist and some Arab governments to see Gaza disappear in a black hole of time and space, it will, God willing,  rise from the ashes.  It may take some time, a few months, years, or may be decades.  But if it takes that long may be … just may be little Eyad along with his 3500 colleagues, born under the dreadful specter of undifferentiating predator drones during the 3 week savage Israeli assault, will have something to do with that rising.