Dozens of people across the world were in non-stop communication for several months to arrange the arrival of Tasneem Sharif Abbas to the US. Abbas’s entire life changed when a bomb dropped on her family’s home in Gaza on 31 October 2023. A piece of metal severed her arm and she blacked out as rubble fell on her. Soon after, her arm was amputated at a local Gaza hospital. “This is not a movie or a fictional story. This is the reality I have lived,” Abbas said in a statement. “This is just a glimpse of the dark days that have turned my life into a nightmare.”
Last year, the 16-year-old and an accompanying guardian, her adult sister Ashjan who is not injured, evacuated to Egypt, where they spent several months aboard a medical ship. The journey to fit Abbas with a prosthetic arm began with a 24-hour-flight from Cairo to New York, where volunteers met them in the airport during a several-hour layover. “The only time there was uncertainty was in the visa process,” said Raghed Ahmed, vice-president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), a non-profit that has provided medical care to Middle Eastern kids since the 1990s. The group also facilitated the sisters’ travel. “We weren’t sure if it would take two weeks or six months, but her visa was approved in a couple of weeks,” Ahmed said.
So when Abbas entered the arrivals section at the Philadelphia international airport last December, the mood was ebullient. Some 100 community members cheered and waved Palestinian flags, while others held handmade signs that read “Welcome to Philadelphia” in English and Arabic. “Free Palestine!” they shouted in unison. Farha Ghannam, an anthropology professor at Swarthmore College and Abbas’s host mother, embraced the 16-year-old and handed her a bouquet of flowers as they met for the first time.
“When they saw that there was a really big presence from the community at the airport, they really appreciated that. And [Abbas] said it made them forget the tiredness of travel,” said Johara Shamaa, a volunteer coordinator for PCRF’s Philadelphia chapter. Abbas, who declined to be interviewed due to stress, is the only Palestinian child being hosted and medically treated in Philadelphia at the sponsorship of PCRF. Aside from Philadelphia, PCRF has brought more than 20 children to Chicago, Illinois; Washington DC; Portland, Oregon; Houston, Texas; Greenville, South Carolina; St Louis, Missouri; Lexington, Kentucky; Boston, Massachusetts; and Sacramento and Los Angeles, California, to seek medical treatment since October 2023.
Everywhere the children are sent, a community of people rally behind them to improve their lives. All the while, they perform a delicate dance of navigating an ever-changing evacuation system in the absence of a permanent ceasefire. In Philadelphia, 50 volunteers pitch in by driving Abbas to doctors’ appointments, tutoring her in English, and hosting dinners at their homes during the sisters’ six-month stay. The cost of Abbas’s prosthetic limb and the medical treatment to repair her residual appendage, which was improperly amputated due to the lack of medical resources in Gaza, are being covered by the hospital Shriners Children’s Philadelphia.
Though Abbas’s is a story of triumph, thousands of children from Gaza have inadequate or no access to medical treatment. And with Abbas and her sister’s visa renewal coming up in May, their futures are uncertain.
“You have to constantly be amendable, because every single day something is always changing,” said Tareq Hailat, head of PCRF’s treatment abroad program, which works with government entities and hospitals to facilitate free medical care. “There’s always some kind of difficulty occurring: abandonment of ceasefires, the targeting of humanitarian workers, a new border or corridor coming up, which puts a hold on operations.”
While the volunteers are helping shape Abbas’s life, her host family said that the girls’ presence has also helped them feel empowered as they watch from afar Israel’s war on Gaza, where more than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October 2023.
When PCRF approached them in the late fall of 2024, Ghannam, a Palestinian American, and her husband, Hans Lofgren, a Swedish American who is fluent in Arabic, were eager to host Abbas and her sister at their home in Swarthmore, a quiet suburb 20 miles (32km) south-west of Philadelphia. Being host parents gave them a concrete way to help Palestinians after seeing “unimaginable suffering” while watching the news, Lofgren said: “When you get that kind of a request, you cannot in good conscience say no. It’s absolutely a necessity to say yes. You do not know exactly what this would involve, and what would happen, it’s a bit of an unknown. But to jump into this was absolutely necessary.”
‘These communities are not just Arabs’
The complicated process of sending a child to the US from Gaza involves clearances from several governments and the financial backing of non-governmental organizations and hospital systems. It begins when a hospital in the Middle East contacts PCRF because they are unable to address a child’s medical needs. PCRF then lines up a hospital abroad that will treat the child for free, and seeks approval to pull the child out of Gaza from the Israeli ministry of defense’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, and the Egyptian government. They coordinate with the United Nation’s World Health Organization to transport the child through Gaza’s Rafah border crossing to a buffer zone in al-Arish, Egypt, and then their visas are secured at embassies in Egypt.
PCRF then creates a shortlist of families from a large database of volunteers whose culture and language typically align with those of the child, said Hailat from PCRF. Then a member of Hailat’s team and the local chapter interview the families and visit their homes before making the final selection. PCRF pays for the children’s travel and any clothes or supplies they will need during their six-month stay abroad.
Outside the US, they’ve sent more than 250 children to Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Norway, Lebanon and Jordan, and they hope to expand their efforts to the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. But Hailat said that the amount of children they’ve helped is only a drop in the bucket.
When Gaza’s Rafah border crossing to Egypt closed in May 2024 and children were instead transported through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing, the number of evacuated children dropped from more than 280 children a month to 20. Since the Rafah border crossing was reopened in February, Hailat said, at least 600 people a month have been evacuated from Gaza. But he fears that the amount of evacuees may severely dwindle again following Israel’s new security corridor that blocks Rafah from the rest of Gaza.
“The biggest problem is that we as an organization are caught in the middle,” Hailat said. “We don’t want to be a part of the proposed displacement of these children, but we don’t want them to die. The only solution is a complete ceasefire that allows us to bring medical treatment inside Gaza.”
Despite the frustration in the international process that hinders more children from evacuating, he said his faith resides in the compassionate communities throughout the US that have opened their arms to the children in need of medical treatment. “One of the most beautiful things about these communities is that they are not just Arabs, they are not just Muslims, they are not just Palestinians. They are Americans. They are of all races, of all religions, of all sexes,” Hailat said. “No matter where you stand on the political aisle, once they see these children in real life, people realize that this is a humanitarian issue.”
As a Palestinian American, Ghannam said, she was initially concerned that she might be overwhelmed by the sisters’ trauma. But over the past few months, she and Lofgren say, the sisters have brought a brightness to their home. “I think I’m able to support them, but I think they are also able to support me,” Ghannam said. “Just seeing sometimes their spirits and their resilience has actually been very, very important to me. They also have been helping me deal with what’s happening.”
The couple only had about a week to prepare for the sisters’ arrival after completing a vetting process with PCRF. As a semi-retired economist, Lofgren was in charge of moving the furniture into the 60-somethings’ spare storage room and securing two mattresses for the sisters to sleep on. Neighbors and friends gifted the sisters gloves and gift cards to a beauty supply chain. Philadelphia’s PCRF chapter created a group chat on WhatsApp to collect winter clothes, hygiene items, books and phone chargers, and community members stepped up to host dinners for the sisters at their homes.
Volunteers also drive Abbas to her appointments at Shriners hospital, where she’s undergoing occupational therapy and being fitted for her prosthesis. Her medical team is determining whether they need to make adjustments to the arm replacement. “It’s a lot more complicated because of the dire need of medical supplies in Gaza, especially with the ongoing genocide and the lack of aid and completely destroyed healthcare systems. The amputation wasn’t done as it should have been,” said Shamaa, of PCRF. As part of her sessions, Abbas is training her left arm to write and do other tasks since she is right-handed. When the prosthetic arm is attached, further occupational therapy sessions will teach Abbas how to use it.
PCRF will likely try to renew Abbas’s visa in May for another six months since she is still undergoing medical care, said Hailat. She and her sister will return to Egypt and live independently through help from PCRF and donations from the community when her treatment ends.
Earlier this year, volunteer tutors who are bilingual in Arab and English began teaching Abbas English as a second language. They are also tutoring her in math and science using a Palestinian curriculum for the 10th grade, the last grade she completed prior to evacuating Gaza.
Supporting Abbas requires a delicate balance of helping her feel welcome while giving her the space to process the trauma of evacuating from a war zone and leaving behind most of her family in Gaza, said Ghannam. The couple’s home has seen a complicated range of emotions with the backdrop of Israel’s war on Gaza. When the ceasefire was announced in mid-January, the sisters were thrilled and exclaimed how enthusiastic they were to eventually return home and for Gaza to be rebuilt. “I am very cautious and pessimistic, and they managed to engulf me with their optimism,” Ghannam said. A few hours later, Abbas became solemn when she learned that more than 80 people had been killed in airstrikes directly following the ceasefire announcement.
Still, Ghannam said, she is impressed by Abbas’s strength and wonder as she adjusts to life in the US. During the evenings, the family often watch Arabic shows on Netflix together, or take turns choosing their favorite Arabic songs on YouTube. When Abbas saw snow falling outside the window for the first time during the winter, a big smile stretched across her face as she remarked on its beauty. She went outside to touch it and posed for photos with her sister.
“When I see them laugh,” Ghannam said, “and when I see them excited about life, that really gives me a good feeling.”
