Mohammed Imad, 6, is a Gazan boy who is in Jacksonville to receive treatment for a skull fracture sustained when his home was bombed. Nearly 50 people welcomed Mohammed and his mother at Jacksonville International Airport on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024. | Will Brown, Jacksonville Today
Published on December 4, 2024 at 10:07 pm
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Dozens people awaited the arrival of a boy none of them ever met Tuesday afternoon at the Jacksonville International Airport
Mohammed Imad, 6, was greeted with smiles and snacks by nearly 50 people. The young boy arrived with his mother after their home in Gaza was bombed earlier this year, according to HEAL Palestine, an Ohio-based nonprofit that provides assistance for Palestinian children affected by the Israel–Hamas War.
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Mohammed suffered a skull fracture and partial paralysis on his left side. His brother and two uncles were killed in the bombing.
Mohammed’s care is funded by HEAL Palestine. Through the organization, more than a dozen Jacksonville residents have volunteered to take Mohammed and his mother to doctor’s appointments, provide food for them and host them during their stay. A small gaggle of children have stepped up to play video games with Mohammed.
Mohammed is in Northeast Florida to receive a cranioplasty. It’s a procedure that repairs skull fractures.
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According to Johns Hopkins University, most people who receive cranioplasty surgeries can go home after a few days.
Ranna Abduljawad is a Jacksonville resident and volunteer with HEAL Palestine. She was one of the people who helped organize the airport welcome to extend warmth on the nippy December afternoon to the child and his mother who were half a world away from home.
As Abduljawad wheeled Mohammed out of the airport, her own son walked alongside them.
“I am Palestinian. I do a lot of humanitarian work that has nothing to do with Palestine. There are other humanitarian aspects I have been involved in, but this one is more personal,” Abduljawad said. “These kids are coming from my country. They are my kid’s age. This genocide is so taboo to say. We have to call it what it is. It’s unfolding in front of us in live colors and live videos…This is one that we are literally seeing with our own eyes. It does impact us more. It hits us more.”
The war began after Hamas-led militants attacked Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas killed about 1,200 people in that attack and took scores of hostages. In response, Israel’s military has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, a majority of whom are women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
According to a November 2024 report from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 3,588 Palestinian children were killed in Gaza between November 2023 and April 2024 and that “the main victims of strikes on residential buildings were children.” Amnesty International declared yesterday that Israel is committing acts of genocide.
Israel has denied accusations of war crimes and genocide throughout the war in Gaza, saying the charges are politically motivated and undermine the country’s legitimate right to self-defense, as The Washington Post reports.
HEAL Palestine was founded by Steve Sosbee and Shireen Qaru this year in response to the thousands of children who have been killed or injured.
Sosbee has devoted decades to humanitarian relief in Palestine, including orchestrating free children’s medical care in the 1990s through the creation of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
Officials from the national organization did not respond to multiple requests from Jacksonville Today about their financing, nor their process for sending children to Jacksonville for treatment.
“The list of kids that need treatment right now in Gaza is just massive. What we’re doing is just a drop in the bucket, truthfully,” Shireen Yehya, a member of the said Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, told St. Louis Public Radio this week.
In addition to Tuesday’s arrival in Jacksonville, HEAL Palestine has brought Gazan children to Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Cleveland and Boston. Mohammed is the third to arrive in Northeast Florida for medical treatment, following a 9-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl who arrived in the spring. The boy had a skull fracture, while the girl needed rods in her leg after it was shattered in a bombing. Both returned home in August.
“HEAL does amazing work of giving innocent kids – they are innocent, they have nothing to do with the war – they try to give people with 0% survival a chance, a survival chance,” Abduljawad says.
