Child survivor of Gaza family strike heads to Italy

Arab News

11-06-2025

Rome - ITARome, June 11, 2025 (AFP) - - An 11-year-old Palestinian boy who survived an Israeli air strike in Gaza last month, which killed his father and nine siblings, was due to arrive in Italy Wednesday for treatment.Adam and his mother, paediatrician Alaa al-Najjar, were due to fly to Milan in northern Italy on Wednesday evening alongside his aunt and four cousins, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said."Adam will arrive in Milan and will be admitted to the Niguarda (hospital), because he has multiple fractures and he will be treated there," Tajani told Rtl radio.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.Adam had a hand amputated and suffered severe burns across his body following the strike on the family house in the city of Khan Yunis on May 23.His mother was at work when the bomb hit the house, killing nine of her children and injuring Adam and his father, doctor 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.The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says at least 54,981 people, the majority civilians, have been killed in the territory since the start of the war. The UN considers these figures reliable.ide/djtRTL GROUP