More than a year and a half into Israel's war on Gaza, the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian enclave shows no sign of easing. Thousands of survivors carry devastating physical and psychological wounds, the healthcare system has been largely gutted, and beneath tens of millions of tonnes of rubble, over a thousand bodies remain unrecovered. Three separate developments this week illustrate the breadth of suffering endured by Gaza's population.

Najwa Abu Atiwi, a 42-year-old woman from Nuseirat — a densely populated refugee camp in central Gaza — woke from a weeks-long coma in October 2024 to learn she had lost one eye, and later discovered that her six-year-old daughter Hajar had been killed in the same Israeli air strike that hospitalised her. Metal plates and meshes were surgically placed in her fractured face, and she still cannot eat solid food, subsisting on soups and liquids. Her treating specialist, Dr Ayman Saidam, an oculoplastic surgeon, describes her case as among the most complex he has encountered, requiring multiple stages of maxillofacial reconstruction before cosmetic procedures can even begin. The core obstacle, he says, is not medical knowledge but chronic shortages of equipment and supplies — the result of years of Israeli restrictions on imports into Gaza. Najwa has a referral for treatment abroad but remains in Gaza, waiting for permission to leave. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 50,000 people in Gaza require long-term rehabilitation, with roughly a quarter of recorded injuries classified as life-changing.

The psychological toll of such injuries compounds the physical. Dr Hassan Abu Shawish, a psychologist at the Deir el-Balah Mental Health Clinic who treated Najwa, says survivors of facial disfigurement frequently develop post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and acute body image disturbance, sometimes withdrawing entirely from social life. For Najwa, the grief of losing Hajar — a daughter she never had the chance to say goodbye to — remains the deepest wound.