In the third part of our series on Gaza, Rory McCarthy talks to Ahmad Abu Me'tiq, who lost his wife and four of his children in an Israeli air strike
Her bed is on the third floor of Gaza's Shifa hospital, where shafts of warm afternoon sunshine reach in from the window. The ward is crowded, and the bed on which Asma'a Abu Me'tiq lay is curtained off from the rest and surrounded by the blankets her sister-in-law uses when she sleeps on the floor next to her at night.
It may be the best hospital in Gaza but even the poorest families, like the Abu Me'tiqs, must provide extra food themselves. Asma'a's father, Ahmad, returns from downstairs with a cheap electric hot-plate, which he bought on credit from a shopkeeper he knows. He plugs it into the wall to heat a pot of thin homemade soup for his 13-year-old daughter, but there is either no electricity or the hot-plate didn't work. "What bad luck," he says quietly to himself.
Then he reaches over to his daughter, who is coughing and struggling to breathe from the deep wound in her chest. She hasn't touched her food since she was rushed to hospital 10 days earlier: the day an explosion in the street outside demolished the metal front door of their house as the family were eating breakfast, impaling her and her younger sister, Shaima, seven, with shrapnel and killing outright four other brothers and sisters and her mother too.
"I'm waiting to see you eat," says her father. "Later," says Asma'a. Several minutes passed. "Let me see you eat," he says again. "Tomorrow," she replies
read on, if you can..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/14/gaza