Healing and Resilience

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What happens after the bombs stopped dropping on Gaza is just as important as what happened before, because the violence in occupied Palestinian territory has become so cyclical.

I had the opportunity to go back to the scenes of violence, to dig deeper and identify the individual suffering.

My intent was to document how civilians manage to move on with their lives, searching for the visual references of human resilience that emerges from the pain and tons of rubble, by living with families and tracking their gradual, emotional and physical recovery, or the obstacles that make it impossible.

In Jabalya, I met 14-year-old Manar Shabari, who, with the help of women in her family, was trying on two prosthetic legs adorned with white-spangled shoes so she could celebrate her brother's wedding later that day.

Manar lost both her legs last summer on July 24 after an Israeli artillery attack on a United Nations school in Beit Hanoun. When I met her again just a few weeks ago, she showed me how she could attach her prosthetic legs by herself and walked up and down the hallway.

During the war, I captured an image of Rawya Joma's face, as she lay critically wounded in her bed in Shifa Hospital.

Today her beautiful face does not show any signs of the horrific shrapnel wounds but she spoke about the flash backs to the Israeli airstrike on her family's home that killed her 4-year-old sister and two aunts. Yet she is hopeful to find medical treatment to repair the crushed nerves and bones in her hands so that she can write again and enrol in university.

With more than 2,000 people killed, 11,000 wounded and thousands still displaced, these cases and others highlight what still shocks and amazes me after so many years, and what my continuing project tries to capture.

They epitomise human resilience, they depict the process of emotional and physical healing that makes itself felt here in Gaza, even as the threat of another military conflict looms.

foreign.desk@thenational.ae