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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
/
Mother of a sick baby in Gaza and daughter of an Israeli hostage call
for ceasefire deal
By Jomana Karadsheh, Muhammad Darwish and Abeer Salman, CNN
Updated:
6:59 AM EDT, Wed October 16, 2024
Source: CNN
In one of Gaza’s last standing hospitals, Tamara Al-Maarouf’s eyes
well up with tears as she stands helplessly by her baby boy’s
hospital bed. A tumor, now removed, has been compressing the
4-month-old’s tiny heart and he desperately needs treatment abroad.
Meanwhile, 84-year-old Oded Lifschitz, who was kidnapped from his home
in Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7 last year by Hamas militants, is still
being held hostage in the enclave. His family is still desperately
trying to bring him home.
The stories of two lives, those of a Palestinian infant and an elderly
Israeli man, tell the tragic tale of the countless innocent lives
trapped in a war they did not choose. Their fates are now tied up in
politics and negotiations that have all but failed.
The baby, Jihad, can barely breathe or feed. His mother, Tamara,
struggles to find ways to comfort him as he cries and wriggles around,
with tubes sticking out of his mouth and nose.
Like of other patients in Gaza, he is in urgent need of foreign medical
treatment, but these evacuations have all but ceased since May, when
Israel took control of the Rafah border crossing.
Israeli authorities have only allowed a fraction of the – many of
whom are children – to leave Gaza for treatment.
More than a year of devastating Israeli strikes and the accompanying
siege of the enclave have decimated the health sector, leaving medical
workers with very little with which to save lives. Hospitals are not
only overwhelmed with those injured in the conflict, but they’re now
dealing with preventable diseases that are spreading at an alarming
rate.
In August, an became the first person in Gaza in 25 years to be
diagnosed with polio after Israel’s military campaign destroyed water
and sanitation systems, leading to a resurgence of the deadly disease.
In September, the World Health Organization administered the first of
two doses of the polio vaccine to more than half a million children
aged below 10 in Gaza, with the second round of the emergency
vaccination drive now under way, according to the UN children’s
agency, UNICEF. The UN said it at one school being used as a
displacement shelter after it was damaged by an Israeli airstrike.
And there are many like Jihad who are suffering from serious
conditions, chronic illnesses and cancer who cannot be appropriately
treated in Gaza.
Doctors at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital told CNN there were neither the
specialists nor the necessary equipment there properly to diagnose and
treat Jihad, and so they found themselves with no choice but to operate
to remove the tumor and relieve the pressure on his heart, despite the
risks.
Speaking to CNN before her son’s operation, Al-Maarouf was unable to
hold back her tears as she begged the international community for help.
“These are children, they are not carrying weapons,” she told CNN.
“Why can’t he be evacuated?”
Against all odds, baby Jihad survived the surgery. But doctors were
unable to remove the tumor entirely, his mother told CNN last week. One
month on from the operation, he is still suffering from weight loss,
diarrhea, fever, and a loss of appetite, she said.
Thousands of miles away, in her London home, Sharone Lifschitz scrolled
through black and white photos saved on her phone as she met with CNN
last month. She beamed with pride as she pointed to one of her mother,
Yocheved Lifschitz, taken decades ago, with a sign in Hebrew that reads
“Shalom,” or peace.
Her parents were longtime advocates for peace. In recent years, the
elderly couple were part of a volunteer group of Israelis who would
drive Gazans from the border to hospitals in East Jerusalem and the
West Bank for treatment. Her father, Oded Lifschitz, kept his driving
license so he could continue these missions, she said.
“My father believed in thinking big and solving the difficult
issue… He was very much for the two-state solution,” Lifschitz told
CNN. “He believed we can reach agreements with the Palestinians.”
On the morning of October 7 last year, Oded and Yocheved were kidnapped
from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, the site of one of the worst
massacres of the Hamas attack on that day.
Yocheved, now 86, was abducted while still in her nightgown, thrown
onto the back of a motorbike and taken to Gaza. At the end of October,
she was on humanitarian grounds.
The last time Yocheved saw her husband of more than 60 years was last
October 7. He was lying on the ground injured, after he was shot in the
hand by the militants who stormed their home.
“He survived and his spirit survived,” their daughter told CNN.
“We know he looked for my mom on the first day,” she said, citing
testimony from hostages who were released. “We know that he was
helping the other hostages he shared a room with. My father was a very
helpful, kind and generous man.”
It is that kindness and generosity, as well as his ability to speak
Arabic, that the family hopes will have helped a frail, elderly man
with medical conditions survive in captivity.
They have now been waiting for his return for over a year. In May, Oded
turned 84 in Hamas captivity.
Lifschitz wears a dog tag around her neck with a photo of her father
and “84” engraved on it, along with the message, “Waiting for you
at home.”
“Hamas took elderly, elderly people; they did not need them, and they
could have returned them without a deal,” Lifschitz said. “There is
no deal needed to return an 84-year-old man. There is no deal needed to
return a 1-year-old baby. The fact that Hamas is using them to reach a
deal is horrific.”
But Lifshitz, , still believes the only way out of this nightmare is a
deal between Israel and Hamas that would stop the war and secure the
release of the hostages.
She fears they are losing what feels like a race against time to bring
them home alive.
“We are so exhausted and so heartbroken again and again,” Sharone
said. “We are not giving up. We do not have the luxury of giving
up.”
Hopes for a ceasefire deal and hostage release deal have been shattered
repeatedly by failing negotiations. Both Israel and Hamas have blamed
each other for derailing the efforts, leaving mediators from the United
States, Qatar and Egypt scrambling to save talks that have stalled for
months.
In July, a deal appeared imminent, but sources have told CNN that
last-minute demands by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
undermined and created obstacles to an agreement. US officials have
since blamed both Israel and Hamas for adding conditions that have left
talks deadlocked. Hostage families have repeatedly accused Netanyahu of
purposefully prolonging the war and torpedoing deals for his own
political benefit.
Hanging in the balance are the lives of more than 100 Israeli hostages
and Gaza’s population of 2.2 million, all trapped in a besieged
enclave that has become a “hell on Earth,” according to aid
agencies which have been pleading for a ceasefire to save lives.
Those who survive Israel’s bombardment, which has killed more than
42,000 people, according to Palestinian authorities, face what Gaza
residents like al-Maarouf describe as a slow death under siege, with
conditions growing more catastrophic by the day.
“He is a child who has nothing to do with what is happening,” the
distraught mother told CNN last month. “What did a 4-month-old do?”
Lifschitz said she thinks the mediators could do more to get a deal
done. She wants Egypt and Qatar to put more pressure on Hamas but, for
her, it is US President Joe Biden who could make this deal happen.
“I believe it is President Biden at this very moment that must do
what it takes to bring them back home… I believe he is our best
hope,” she said.
Lifschitz refuses to compare her own government’s position to that of
a militant group like Hamas, but said: “Anybody who is interested in
history sees people that are caught in the tide of time and political
and military fanatical regimes that are putting their own agenda above
human lives… Both nations are incredibly unlucky in the leaders that
are guiding them at the moment.
For Israelis like Lifschitz, the race to save the lives of their loved
ones took a more urgent turn in early September after the Israeli
military executed by Hamas.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had been “brutally”
murdered “a short while” before Israeli troops were able to reach
them. Hamas, meanwhile, issued a chilling threat that more hostages
would return in coffins if Israeli forces tried to rescue them.
Three of the six had been as part of an eventual ceasefire agreement,
Israeli officials told CNN.
These were young people who had every chance of survival, and they
survived for almost a year,” said an emotional Lifschitz. “It is a
failure; we have failed them.”
The families of hostages fear for the safety of their loved ones, not
only in relation to their captors, but also Israeli military
operations, not least the relentless bombardment that has .
Last month, the IDF confirmed that three hostages whose bodies were
recovered in December were “most likely” killed in an Israeli
strike. The military had previously admitted mistakenly three other
hostages last year and said it was investigating the circumstances of
the whose bodies were recovered in June.
While prospects of an agreement appear bleak, Lifschitz said she would
not stop fighting for the release of her father and the other hostages.
Asked what she would tell her father if he could hear her, Lifschitz
said, choking back tears: “Forgive us. Forgive us. We have tried so
hard. And know that we hear your voice in our heads… You know, we
tried the way he tried all his life. He tried for many years to avert
this disaster.
“I hear him now saying, ‘work for peace, work for the possibility
of humans in this region to live together,’” she added.
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