They Went From a Family of 12 to Just 2 After Israeli Strikes

A Gaza doctor who lost nine of her 10 children to an Israeli airstrike last month has landed in Italy with her surviving child, an 11-year-old boy who was badly injured in the attack. The Guardian reports that pediatrician Alaa al-Najjar, her son Adam, and other critically ill patients were flown Wednesday to Milan on a plane chartered by the Italian government. Reuters notes that Najjar's husband, Hamdi, also a doctor, was also severely wounded in the May 23 strike and died a week later.

That leaves Najjar and Adam, who suffered severe burns all over his body and had to have a hand severed, on their own to start a new life together, from a family of 12 to a family of two. Adam is now "stable [and] has a head wound that is healing, but his left arm is bad, the bones are fractured and the nerves damaged," Najjar, 36, told Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

The doctor was working at Nasser Hospital when her home in Khan Younis was struck. The burned remains of seven of her children were brought to the hospital in a single body bag, per the AP; the bodies of two other children were later found in the debris. Najjar's deceased children ranged in age from 17 months to 12 years. "I gave birth to them, I loved them, and I raised them for as long as I could," Najjar says, per the Guardian. "If God allowed this tragedy, there must be a reason. There has to be. But I don't know what it is."

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Now, she and Adam will acclimate to a new life in Italy, where after he undergoes surgery for his injuries, he'll learn Italian and start attending school. "I hope to write a new chapter of our life in Italy, but in a different book," Najjar says. "I'll do everything I can." Adam, meanwhile, has told his mother he simply wants to live in a "beautiful place," where "there are no bombs. In a beautiful place the houses are not broken and I go to school. ... 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." (More Gaza stories.)