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.
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