More than 3,350 people in Gaza have experienced major burns. Nine-year-old Elham Abu Hajjaj is among them.The last thing Elham Abu Hajjaj remembers from the Israeli bombing of her Gaza City home is that her mother held her and prayed.When Hajjaj woke up, she found herself in a hospital with a machine on her stomach and her “whole body trembling,” Abu Hajjaj told Al Jazeera.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list“I touched my body and it was all burned,” she said. “A doctor was speaking to me, and I asked him where my father and mother were. He didn’t answer me.”The Israeli attack in Gaza City’s al-Saffaweh area had killed both her parents and left Abu Hajjaj – who is nine years old – with third-degree burns. Elham Abu Hajjaj, nine, awoke in a hospital to find her body ‘all burned’ [Screen grab/Al Jazeera]She is not alone in the horrific fallout from Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Nearly 42,000 people – about 2 percent of Gaza’s population – have received “life-changing” injuries, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated in September. As many as a quarter of them are children.More than 3,350 people have experienced major burns, making them among the most common injuries the WHO has recorded. Children are “clearly disproportionately affected”, the organisation added. About 70 percent of people receiving burn surgery in Gaza were children, mostly aged under five, and many were burned during bomb blasts.“When I look in the mirror, I say to myself: ‘Oh God, look at these wounds, they are very bad wounds,’” Abu Hajjaj said, scrolling through photos of heavy scarring on her neck, her arm and her leg. “I have wounds here and here, and on my hand as well.” Advertisement Still, she …
