Putting his head on a worn pillow, and lying on a dilapidated bed in the Nasser Medical Complex in the city of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, looking towards the ceiling of a room in a section crowded with wounded and sick, the twenty-year-old Ayman Atef Daoud Rabbo prays so that he does not wait long for his turn to travel abroad for treatment.
Four months ago, Daoud, 22, was killed as a result of an Israeli airstrike on a neighboring house, where he was hit in his spine by shrapnel from a rocket, which caused him paralysis and other complications, and required several surgeries.
“Day by day my situation is getting worse. I only wish to travel and get treatment,” says the wounded young man, who received a large share of pain and suffering from the Israeli war, so his father was martyred, and the occupation destroyed his house in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
Daoud is one of about 35,000 wounded and sick people waiting on travel lists for treatment abroad, as they are not available for treatment in hospitals in the Gaza Strip, which have been systematically targeted since the outbreak of the war following the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation on October 7, 2023.
