Sondos is no longer afraid of pain as much as she is afraid to look at her face in the mirror, to her left a crutch to lean on, and to her right the shoulder of a mother trying to support the rest of her daughter’s soul, after the shrapnel of the missile tore the body of the twenty-year-old girl, leaving Traces were not limited to burns and wounds, but extended to their features, hearing, sight and whole life. In a displacement tent in Gaza City, Sundus sat reading the question of the Al-Jazeera correspondent with her eyes, after she lost the ability to hear. She didn’t say much, she just whispered one wish, “I wish I could go back to my normal life before the war.” But her mother knew that the way to that life had become beyond merely treating a wound or a burning bandage. The mother says that her daughter had severe burns on her hands and face, and she lost hearing, and one of her eyes was damaged, while the traces of deformities remained clear on her body and features. The mother tells her heavy daughters, when she wakes up in panic from the severity of the itching and the pain caused by the burns, she removes the bandages from her body until he bleeds again, and she cries, unable to bear the pain. But what hurts Sundus the most, according to her mother, is not the only wound, but the words she hears around her. “Sometimes I throw her crying alone in the tent, and when I ask her, she says, “Speak to me today, you distorted,” says the mother, in a voice in which helplessness is mixed with oppression. With the increase in the number of people with burns and deformities in the Gaza Strip, doctors warn that hundreds of cases need long-term restoration and treatment, at a time when hospitals suffer from a severe shortage of medical tools and consumables for these operations.
Doctors in the sector confirm that many of the wounded have been waiting for months to provide medical capabilities to perform the necessary operations, while their physical and psychological suffering worsens day after day. In Gaza, the pain does not end with the bleeding or wound healing. The war, as the scenes coming from the tents and hospitals say, leave behind faces burdened with deformities, and souls trying to escape from traces that are not easily erased by years.
