In Washington DC and Gaza two very different families are united by one very rare disease
It is a paradox that humanity at its very worst so often also brings out its very best too.
This is a story about the kindness of strangers. It’s a story about hope over hopelessness. It’s about the war in Gaza but also about the rarest of diseases.
It is about two families in worlds far apart. It is a story about two little girls, Julia and Annabel.
I don’t yet know how it will end. But this is how it started.
It was two weeks ago when my phone pinged: a message on Instagram from a friend-of-a-friend. Her name is Nina Frost.
Nina and I first met a few years ago at a party in Washington DC where she had told me about her daughter Annabel, a little girl with an ultra-rare genetic disorder called AHC.
I remember Nina explaining how it was a disease like no other.
‘The human time bomb disease’ she had called it, based on the all-consuming parental nightmare that their little girl could have a fatal seizure at any moment.
The Frost family
I’ve followed Nina’s Instagram, @HopeForAnnabel since we first met.
The good news is that Annabel is doing well, albeit with that eternal danger hanging over her. She requires constant care, attention and love.
Nina’s message to me wasn’t about her own daughter. It was about another little girl, in Gaza.
Rare diseases like AHC, which stands for Alternating Hemiplegia of Childhood, generate tight networks; the families living with the condition. Only about 1,000 people worldwide have been diagnosed with AHC. It really is rare.
“There is a little girl stuck in Gaza with the disease,” Nina wrote to me.
“Julia is three – after the last few months she has become paralyzed and unable to eat as her symptoms have worsened dramatically. We are desperate to help as she is massively vulnerable – literally on the brink of death.”
Julia’s mother administers medication
Nina told me how she and her husband, Simon, are trying to organise the impossible: to get specialist drugs into Gaza and, ultimately, to try to get Julia and her family out.
Nina was modest about an endeavour that I now know has been all-consuming and expensive.
To tell this remarkable story of kindness and hope, I asked Nina to share with me Julia’s father’s number. Our local colleagues in Gaza then tracked the family down to a tent in the southern city of Rafah.
Julia Abu Zaiter is from northern Gaza originally. But with her father Amjad, her mother Maha and her older sister Sham, she was forced south by the Israeli military.
“My girl is three and a half years old. I want her to go out and play with the other children. Now, she cannot move at all,” Julia’s mother told our team, cradling her severely disabled little girl.
Annabel Frost
Rafah is on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Safety is so close and yet beyond reach unless the right strings are pulled with different authorities and governments in a labyrinth of wartime bureaucracy.
The images filmed by our team confirm what Nina had feared in her message to me.
Julia and her family are in the toughest of conditions. The house next to the tent was bombed a few days before our team visited.
The Abu Zaiters are now stuck in the city that could be the next battlefield and with a daughter whose condition is compounded by just the slightest stress, a little girl with, as Nina had told me, the ‘time bomb disease’.
“I told myself ‘it’s over, my girl is gone’,” Julia’s mother told our Gaza team, showing them Julia’s semi-paralysed state.
“Then a man named Simon contacted us and told us he will see if he can help, because his daughter’s situation is similar to mine.”
Five thousand miles away, and a world apart, in a leafy northwest suburb of Washington DC, I am now sitting with Simon, Nina and Annabel.
Julia Abu Zaiter
It is humbling to listen to their words – about their own daughter, but about their fight for a stranger too.
“Annabel lives with the most challenging condition that we can imagine – a neurological degeneration – and she lives with it with a smile on her face,” Simon says. “And we’re imagining the same for Julia in the most dire of circumstances.”
We look at videos of Julia which Amjad has sent to Simon.
“Our kids are all so similar… we feel a sense of connection to so many families and our world of rare disease,” Nina tells me.
“This is like that but on steroids. I mean, we feel so distressed for the situation that they’re facing.”
“Julia’s circumstances are exponentially worse, but I think we’ve always embraced the idea that we can do something to help, we must do something to help and that we should. I mean, I think it’s always been if not us, then who?” Nina adds.
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Amjad’s message highlights concerns he has about his daughter. He is looking for reassurance from Simon.
Julia is experiencing some severe paralysis and via a translated SMS and a few photos, Amjad wants some encouragement which Simon can’t give.
“They don’t have the medicines they need and the doctors that they need to really treat and properly prevent episodes and to address them when she has them,” Simon says.
“So we’ve been trying to gather a group that can support her. It’s been constant communication and really difficult with the translation issues,” Simon tells me.
Over in Gaza, Julia’s mum is desperate. “Our conditions due to the war are below zero.
“Our situation is horrible. I cannot provide my daughter with any food or drinks. I can get medications through lots of difficulty, and I tell myself that getting these medications is more important than getting food for us.”
The Frosts speak to Sky’s Mark Stone
Against the odds, Simon has managed to coordinate with the right people to get the right medication into Gaza for Julia.
Through the tight AHC network, one doctor has prompted another who knows another and another. That’s how this works. Threads of kindness stitched together.
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Now the challenge is getting Julia out to Egypt and then on a medical flight to Abu Dhabi. It will be hard, maybe impossible.
“And it seems like she’s really declined,” Nina says looking at the latest videos of Julia.
“I mean, it seems like exactly what we would have predicted has happened. She has gone from being a happy three-year-old with a profoundly difficult disease to being this shell of herself.”
“I feel like I am losing her,” Maha says with Julia in her arms. “She is dying right next to me and I cannot even do anything. The thing I fear the most is losing my daughter.”
There is some chance of an extraction to safety soon. It is not guaranteed but it is some hope for one little girl in a place where uncertainty is all around.
This is a story about two families worlds apart but bound by a disease.
I don’t yet know how it will end. This may feel sometimes like a world of hopelessness, but I have some hope.
Donald Trump has responded after Elon Musk said some of his recent social media posts about the US president “went too far”.
The Tesla and SpaceX boss shared a series of posts on his X social media platform last week, including one which described Mr Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill as a “disgusting abomination”.
He also claimed, in a since-deleted post, that the president appeared in files relating to the disgraced paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Posting on X this morning, Mr Musk said: “I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.”
In response, the president is quoted as telling the New York Post: “I thought it was very nice that he did that.”
The publication said it spoke to Mr Trump in a brief phone conversation.
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Musk and Trump’s bust-up
The White House dismissed Mr Musk’s Epstein claims at the time, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying: “This is an unfortunate episode from Elon, who is unhappy with the One Big Beautiful Bill [a Republican tax and spending bill] because it does not include the policies he wanted.
“The president is focused on passing this historic piece of legislation and making our country great again.”
Mr Musk did not specify which posts he regretted.
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Could the Musk-Trump fallout stall US space goals?
In another post last Thursday, Mr Musk attacked Mr Trump’s tariffs, saying they “will cause a recession in the second half of this year”.
In response, Mr Trump, in an interview with ABC News, said Mr Musk had “lost his mind”. He also threatened to cancel government contracts with the businessman’s companies and said he had asked the billionaire to leave the White House.
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Trump and Musk’s feud explained
But yesterday, Mr Musk’s father Errol Musk told Sky News’ Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett: “It’s like any argument. Everybody at some point says I’ll never make up, but then they do later.”
He said the argument likely happened because of “emotions welling out of hand”.
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Elon’s dad on the Musk-Trump bust-up
“They’ve had five months of intense day and night, hardly any sleep, and anybody who went through that would know your nerves are pretty much shredded after that time.”
He also said his son had texted him to say: “Don’t worry, we’re sorting it out.”
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The spat hit Tesla shares, which closed down 14.3% last Thursday, losing about $150bn (£111bn) in value.
They’ve since regained much of their value compared to the beginning of the month.
US
Los Angeles protests: Curfew comes into force – as California’s governor steps up his attack on Donald Trump
A curfew has come into force in Los Angeles as officials attempt to “stop the vandalism and stop the looting”.
Mayor Karen Bass said the restrictions will be in force in downtown areas of the city from 8pm to 6am local time (4am to 2pm UK time) – and will likely be repeated in the coming days.
She confirmed that a local emergency had been declared as “we reached a tipping point”, with 23 businesses looted on Monday night.
Ms Bass said “graffiti is everywhere”, with “significant damage” to properties as a result of the protests.
Workers try to remove graffiti after a protest over immigration raids. ICE Pic: AP/Damian Dovarganes
Workers remove graffiti from the Ronald Reagan Federal Building in Santa Ana. Pic: Mindy Schauer/The Orange County Register via AP
A protester marches past businesses being boarded up. Pic: Reuters/Leah Millis
Jim McDonnell, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, described the curfew as a “necessary measure to protect lives” as “unlawful and dangerous behaviour” had been escalating in the last few days.
On Tuesday alone, 197 arrests were made by the force, and he warned anyone violating the curfew without a valid reason would be detained.
Residents, people who are homeless, those travelling to and from work, credited media as well as public safety and emergency personnel, will be exempt from the curfew.
The curfew covers a one square mile section of downtown LA that includes the area where protests have happened since Friday. The city of Los Angeles encompasses about 500 square miles.
Workers board up a store in Santa Ana. Pic: AP/Jae C. Hong
California National Guard soldiers stand at a federal agency building. Pic: AP
Protesters are detained by law enforcement near the federal building in downtown LA. Pic: AP/Eric Thayer
The protests are in response to raids carried out by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).
US President Donald Trump has activated 4,000 National Guard troops – the federal reserve force – to protect ICE officers carrying out raids as well as federal buildings in LA, despite objections by California Governor Gavin Newsom, who called the deployments unnecessary, illegal and politically motivated.
Mr Trump also sent 700 marines, who are expected to start operating in the LA area on Wednesday, according to the US Northern Command.
Read more from Sky News:
Eyewitness: Furious immigrants vow to ‘defend’ LA
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Explainer: Who is Gavin Newsom?
The Ronald Reagan Federal Building and Courthouse in Santa are boarded up. Pic: Mindy Schauer/The Orange County Register via AP
National Guard troops are lined up to protect a federal building in downtown LA. Pic: AP/Eric Thayer
State officials said Mr Trump’s response was an extreme overreaction to mostly peaceful demonstrations, with California senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla saying the domestic mobilisation of active-duty military personnel should only happen “during the most extreme circumstances, and these are not them”.
Mr Trump defended his decision in a speech to soldiers at the Army base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, saying his administration would “liberate Los Angeles”.
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Trump: ‘We will liberate Los Angeles’
“Generations of Army heroes did not shed their blood on distant shores only to watch our country be destroyed by invasion and third-world lawlessness,” Mr Trump said.
“What you’re witnessing in California is a full-blown assault on peace, on public order and on national sovereignty, carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags.”
A protester is arrested by law enforcement officers in downtown LA. Pic: AP/Eric Thayer
California Highway Patrol officers clash with protesters in LA. Pic: AP/Eric Thayer
Gavin Newsom launched a blistering response in an address on Tuesday evening, saying the deployment of the National Guard without consulting Californian officials was a “brazen abuse of power by a sitting president”.
He said it “enflamed a combustible situation, putting our people, our officers and even our National Guard at risk”.
“That’s when the downward spiral began. He doubled down on his dangerous National Guard deployment by fanning the flames even harder – and the president, he did it on purpose,” Mr Newsom said.
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The governor accused Mr Trump of choosing escalation and “theatrics over public safety”, as the situation was “winding down” before the president deployed the troops.
Mr Newsom added: “When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard, he made that order apply to every state in this nation.
“This is about all of us, this is about you. California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here; other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes.”
A man holds a Mexican flag, which has become synonymous with solidarity for migrants targeted in the raids. Pic: AP/Damian Dovarganes
A protester holds up a placard while marching through downtown LA. Pic: Reuters/Leah Millis
People protest against the ongoing immigration raids in Washington, D.C. Pic: AP/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
Homeland Security said on Monday that ICE had arrested 2,000 immigration offenders per day recently, which significantly exceeds the 311 daily average in the fiscal year 2024 under former president Joe Biden.
The protests over the immigration raids have started to spread across the US, with demonstrations in cities like Seattle, Austin, Chicago and Washington, DC.
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