To find safety from Gaza, you need first to become the victim of a catastrophic injury and then be lucky enough to be identified, selected and extracted.
That’s one of the many brutal truths from this long war.
I have followed the stories of some of the few Palestinians who have left Gaza for medical care.
Less than 100 children have been granted permissions and temporary visas for the United States to receive treatment since the war began in October 2023.
In all, several hundred children have left Gaza for treatment in that time – most to other Middle Eastern countries. It has not been possible to confirm a precise number but we do know that the UK has not accepted any.
A few weeks ago, at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, the largest single group of children from Gaza arrived in America for treatment.
Eight Palestinian children were aboard Royal Jordanian flight 263 from Amman.
The number, tiny though it is, reflects an enormous achievement by the charity that has made this happen – the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF).
But it is also reflective of deep diplomatic and political failures; the fact that it was only possible to extract eight of many thousands who need urgent medical treatment.
The doors into the arrival hall at O’Hare opened to reveal a fleet of wheelchairs each carrying a child bearing the scars of the war they had left behind.
Among them, two brothers who survived the bombing that killed their sister.
Behind them, a boy who lost all his siblings and his arm. He is now his mother’s only child. She travelled with him. She too is now an amputee.
The last to emerge through the arrival door was a dot in her wheelchair.
Rahaf, just two, lost both her legs in an Israeli attack on her home in August, not long after she had learnt to walk.
All their stories reflect a collective horror. They are the civilian victims of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza which followed the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.
The children arrived in America after a massive collective effort involving the PCRF and Shriners – one of America’s largest non-profit children’s hospital networks.
Working with multiple governments they facilitated the extractions.
Israel controls all of Gaza’s borders and has only granted evacuations in rare circumstances, only in exceptional cases and only with one parent or guardian.
After their flight, the children travelled to Shriners Hospitals in different parts of the country – California, Oregon, Illinois, South Carolina, Kentucky and Missouri.
It was in Missouri this week that I spent a day with two-year-old Rahaf and her mother Israa Saed.
We met at the home of the American couple who have volunteered to be their hosts for their time in the US.
Six months since the bombing of Rahaf’s home and three weeks since she and her mother arrived in America, I’d come to see how a little life was now being rebuilt.
The first thing that hit me as we sat in the host family’s living room was how happy Rahaf now seems.
Her right leg is missing from below her knee and her left leg is almost completely gone – amputated just below her hip.
Yet she was darting around the floor in front of us chasing a blue balloon with shrieks of laughter. Her mum smiled as she watched.
The mood belied the enormity of their experience and the dilemma of their journey.
Until this month, Israa and Rahaf had never left Gaza. Now they are in America, without the language and without the rest of their family – Israa’s husband and her two young boys.
“My other two sons are still young and… do I need to stay with my other kids or do I need to come out?,” she said about her dilemma.
“Rahaf needs her mum. I could not let her go [to America] alone. And especially also with my fractures, my elbows, my arms. I was hoping for some treatment for myself.”
Israa was injured in the same attack on 1 August. Both her arms were badly damaged. New X-rays taken since she arrived in America show a section of bone still missing in her right forearm.
I asked about her family back in Gaza.
“Yes, we do talk but the internet is not the best. We still manage to have some conversations. The question that is always repeated is: ‘when can you come back? When will the little ones get you back? When can we meet again?'”
Israa sobbed. The pain was clear on her face.
“God willing, my wish is for my kids to live safely far from any conflicts and war. Safely. That is my wish.”
We looked at photographs on Israa’s phone of Rahaf in a pink dress before the attack and a video of her walking up the steps of their apartment block.
“She loved to be a princess,” Israa said.
Israa then showed me a photograph of Rahaf on a hospital bed in Gaza a few weeks after the attack looking down at her amputated legs.
I asked if she understands what has happened to her.
“She did ask ‘my legs are destroyed, what happened?'” Israa said they told her it was a rocket. Now, Rahaf avoids the subject. “If we start the conversation, she will change the subject.”
The good news is that Rahaf’s amputations were done well given the situation.
Circumstance has ensured that Gazan medics have become among the best in the world at trauma surgery. But that’s where the care ends in Gaza. The shortage of doctors, equipment and functioning hospitals makes prolonged care impossible.
Amputations require ongoing work from doctors with various skills including orthopaedic surgeons, plastic surgeons, and prosthetists.
Children with lost limbs demand a whole extra layer of care because they are still growing. Rahaf will need new prosthetic limbs frequently as she gets bigger.
Prosthetists estimate that for every death in a war, there are likely to be three times as many surviving amputees. According to the Gaza health ministry the number of dead in the war has now topped 45,000.
According to analysis by the charity Oxfam more children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military than in the equivalent period in any other conflict of the past 18 years.
Those numbers give a sense of the number of amputees, adults and children, still inside Gaza.
Through pressure from charities and commitments of treatment from hospitals, the United States has admitted a small number of Gazan children, but the key blocker is the Israeli government, which controls access to the strip through all the borders.
Josh Paul is a former US State Department official who resigned last year over the Gaza war.
Speaking to Sky News he said the situation with injured children represents a deep failure of American diplomacy.
“Even on something as humanitarian as saving the lives of children, getting them to critical care, it’s not that America isn’t willing to ask. It’s that America isn’t willing to press,” Mr Paul said.
“And it could be done in a second if they wanted to. If President Biden picked up the phone [to Israel] and said, ‘we are stopping our arms shipments until you let out children, until you let out critically injured children or critically sick children for care, we are not standing by you’.”
On why more hasn’t been done, Mr Paul said: “It’s the political costs… he believed he would pay. I think that is a severe miscalculation.
“I think American public opinion has shifted radically and is going to continue to shift.
“I also think that the geopolitical incentives here have also shifted and there is a cost, a clear cost, that we are paying for our unconditional support to Israel.”
The sense of hollowness of the Church of the Nativity is deeper than absent tourists.
The chants and prayers are pain-stricken and desperate.
Down in the manger by the enshrined spot where baby Jesus was said to be born, a priest solemnly swings incense into the corners.
There is no beautifully-lit tree in the square outside for the second year in a row. Even in their homes, the Palestinian Christian community in Bethlehem is struggling to celebrate.
The empty spaces and lack of tourism are the shadow of 14 months of war in Gaza and a daily reminder of the ongoing devastation.
And around their family homes, Israeli settlements in the West Bank – illegal under international law – are inching closer.
‘Our country is shrinking’
“Normally we spend Christmas in Bethlehem and Jerusalem but this year there are no celebrations because of what is happening with the war. It is not nice to celebrate while people are dying,” says Alice Kisiya.
Alice is from Beit Jala, Bethlehem. For five years, her family have waged legal battles with settlers over their generational home.
“Each Christmas we had demolition because each time they come and demolish. Last year, we were celebrating Christmas there and they came and demolished our small tent,” says Alice.
She and her family are waiting for a Supreme Court ruling in January on whether they can return.
“Our country is shrinking. As Palestinian Christians, we cannot really have our freedom to move freely and it’s getting worse.”
Her words resonate as we drive along the West Bank wall on the edges of Bethlehem.
A stark reminder of the political divide that is tearing through the Holy Land.
‘It seems destiny of Holy Land is to stay divided’
On the other side of the wall from the sacred site where Jesus was born is where he was crucified in Jerusalem.
We hear that the procession of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem is soon arriving through a checkpoint inside the wall into Bethlehem to the Church of Nativity.
A crowd of eager Catholics are waiting for him by Rachel’s Tomb, a sacred site for Orthodox Jews.
School children visiting the tomb are ushered off the street by elders aware of the arriving procession.
They start to sing defiantly as older students are forcefully removed from the road by Israeli police.
There is a hushed sense of anticipation and awe from those waiting for Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa to arrive from the Church of Holy Sepulchre – where Jesus was crucified – to the Church of the Nativity, where he was born in refuge.
“This is an important more than a thousand-year-old tradition,” says Tony Marcos, Dean of the Catholic Action Foundation.
As a Palestinian resident of the West Bank, Tony is not permitted to make the procession between the two holy sites.
“It seems the destiny of this Holy Land is to stay divided and these are difficult times we are living in,” he adds.
“Christmas is the season of love and the season of hope. There is big pain and there is instability – a lot of sacrifices and a lot of blood,” he says.
‘We want next year to be full of light’
The anxiety seems to dissipate as Cardinal Pizzaballa arrives.
He shakes hands with a queue of people eager to get close to the leader of the Church they cannot visit.
“This Christmas, we want people not to lose hope. It is possible to break down the hatred, the division, the contempt and the lack of justice and dignity we are experiencing here,” says Cardinal Pizzaballa.
“The prayer is to raise our gaze and to look forward, not backwards. We want the next year to be full of light – lighted in the darkness.”
Syria’s de facto leader has reached an agreement with the heads of rebel factions to dissolve their groups and work under the country’s defence ministry, his new administration says.
Ahmed al Sharaa, the head of the Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) group which toppled Bashar al Assad‘s regime earlier this month, met with the leaders of several of the rival factions that have been vying for influence in the country for years in the Syrian capital Damascus.
Those in attendance said their groups would dissolve, according to a statement from the new government.
The statement did not make clear which groups attended, but Syria has factions made up of Muslim Kurds and Shi’ites, as well as Syriac, Greek and Armenian Orthodox Christians, and the Druze community.
However, one major group, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), did not join the meeting in Damascus and has not agreed to dissolve.
It comes as Al Sharaa attempts to end years of civil strife and armed conflict – with the leader telling Western officials that his new government will not seek revenge against the former regime nor repress any religious minority.
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What can Syrians expect from HTS?
SDF launches fresh counter-offensive as fighting continues
Despite many groups agreeing to dissolve, fighting continues in the north of Syria.
The SDF, which in 2021 was estimated to have some 100,000 members, is not one of the groups set to dissolve and fall under the Syrian defence ministry.
On Tuesday it announced it had instead launched a fresh counter-offensive against the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) to take back areas it previously controlled near Syria’s northern border.
Clashes between the SDF and the SNA have intensified since the fall of the Assad regime at the start of the month, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says dozens from both sides have been killed.
The SDF is one of the US’s key allies in the country, and is frequently used by Washington to counter a resurgence of the so-called Islamic State in Syria.
The SNA, which helped topple the Assad regime, capitalised on the fall of the previous government by quickly launching an offensive and capturing the key city of Manbij and the areas surrounding it.
Since Monday and following overnight fighting, the SDF has recaptured some villages and is just seven miles from the centre of Manbij, according to reports from commanders and rights groups.
Hundreds of people have protested in Christian areas of the Syrian capital of Damascus after a video emerged showing hooded fighters setting a Christmas tree on fire elsewhere in the country.
“We demand the rights of Christians,” demonstrators chanted as they marched through the city on Christmas Eve.
The overthrow of Bashar al Assad by rebels led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – a group once aligned with Al Qaeda – has sparked concerns for religious minorities in Syria, but the group’s leader has insisted that all faiths will be respected.
The protests erupted after a video spread on social media showing fighters torching a Christmas tree in the Christian-majority town of Suqaylabiyah, near the city of Hama.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the men were foreigners from the Islamist group Ansar al Tawhid.
A demonstrator who gave his name as Georges said he was protesting “injustice against Christians”.
“If we’re not allowed to live our Christian faith in our country, as we used to, then we don’t belong here anymore,” he said.
A religious leader from HTS, the leading rebel group in the coalition that toppled Assad, claimed that those who set the tree on fire were “not Syrian” and promised they would be punished.
“The tree will be restored and lit up by tomorrow morning”, he said.