In their home in war-devastated Gaza City, Iman Farhat and her husband cherish the “paradise” brought by their newly adopted baby, one of many orphans in the Palestinian territory after more than 15 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Wrapping five-month-old Jannah in a brightly colored blanket, Farhat gently sang as she rocked her to sleep.
“I chose Jannah just as she was,” the new mother said smiling, adding that the couple wanted to adopt a young child without preference for gender or physical appearance.
Photo: AFP
“Her name was Massa, and I officially changed her name from Massa to Jannah,” which means “paradise” in Arabic, she said.
Farhat, 45, and her husband, Rami al-Arouqi, 47, adopted the well-behaved and chubby baby in January.
“At first, we had mixed feelings of both joy and fear, because it is a huge responsibility and we had never had a child,” said al-Arouqi, a Palestinian Authority employee.
Photo: AFP
“The idea of adopting a child had crossed our minds, but it was cemented during the war,” which “wiped out entire families and left only orphans,” he said.
In September last year, the UN Children’s Fund estimated that 19,000 children were unaccompanied or separated from their parents in Gaza, fund spokesman for the Palestinian territories Jonathan Crickx said.
Data for the number of adoptions in Gaza was not immediately available.
The war sparked by Palestinian militant group Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel left more than 69 percent of Gaza’s buildings damaged or destroyed, displaced almost the entire population and triggered widespread hunger, the UN said.
Hamas’ attack resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, official figures showed.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 48,446 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN considers that data reliable.
Farhat and her husband said that before Jannah’s adoption, she was taken care of by the SOS Children’s Villages — an international non-governmental organization that looks after children in need.
After the organization’s premises in the southern Gaza city of Rafah were destroyed in the war, it moved to nearby Khan Yunis, where “they could not house all the children in buildings, so they set up tents for them,” Farhat said.
Al-Arouqi said that another motive for adopting a child came from the idea that “Palestinians should stand by each other’s side.”
“The whole world has abandoned and let us down, so we shouldn’t let each other down,” he added.
Once the pair took Jannah home, “our life was turned upside down in a beautiful and pleasant way,” he said. “Her name is Jannah and our world has truly become a paradise.”
A fragile truce took effect on Jan. 19, largely halting the devastating fighting between Israel and Hamas Palestinian militants. The ceasefire’s first phase ended last week.
While Israel has said it wants to extend the first phase until the middle of next month, Hamas has insisted on a transition to the deal’s second phase, which should lead to a permanent end to the war.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
RSS