Surround, Gaza: How to Survive with Varzon
BbcZakaria is 11 years old and lives in Gaza. He believes he has seen thousands of bodies since the beginning of the war.
But at the age when children usually meet in the classroom, Zakaria voluntarily deals with one of the few functioning hospitals of Gaza – Al -Axa.
As a series of ambulances who ferry victims of the war between Israel and Hamas, they escape in front of the facility in the central city of Deir al -Balah, Zakaria clears the way through the crowds to extract newly arrived patients and hurry them inside for treatment.
Moments later, he passes through the corridors of the hospital with a stretcher and later carries a small child inside the emergency room.
Several of his school friends have been killed since the start of the conflict and hanging around the hospital means that Zakaria witnesses shocking scenes. He says that once, after an Israeli blow, he saw a boy in front of him burn to death in a fire.
“I must have seen at least 5,000 bodies. I saw them with my own eyes,” he says to our operator.
Zakaria is one of the children and young people we spent nine months following our BBC Gaza documentary: how to survive in Warzone.
This is a movie that my colleague Youssef Hamash and I have collected from London, as international journalists are not allowed by Israel to enter the Gaza Strip and report independently of the beginning of the war 16 months ago.
To collect the staff and interviews, we hired two operators who live in Gaza – Amjad Al Fayumi and Ibrahim Abu Isaiba – communicating with them regularly using messages, internet calls and mobile phone nets.
Yousef and I wanted to make this documentary to show what everyday life is for Gazan people who are trying to survive the horrors of this conflict as it unfolds. We finished the photos a few weeks ago, the day when the present ceasefire began.
We focused on three children and a young woman with a newborn because they are the innocent in this war who came to a shaky pause on January 19 when a a The hostage release deal between Hamas and Israel came into force.
More than 48,200 people were killed in Gaza during Israel's offensive, according to Hamas Health Ministry. The hostilities followed the attacks on South Israel from Hamas on October 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 hostages taken.
In general, we filmed in an area of southern and central gas, intended by the Israeli army as the “humanitarian zone”, where the Palestinians were told to go for their own safety. Despite its designation, the area itself was hit almost 100 times between May 2024 and January this year, According to the BBC Cerify analysis. Israeli defense forces said they were targeting Hamas fighters working there.
We wanted to know how the children find food, we decided where to sleep and how they did while trying to survive.
Abdullah, 13, says the movie. He spoke excellent English after attending the British school in Gaza before the war and doing everything possible to continue his education.
10 -year -old Renad makes a Tittok cooking show with the help of his bigger sister. They make many types of dishes, although war means that they cannot get the right ingredients and have more than one million followers.
We also followed the 24 -year -old wound that gave birth to a girl prematurely. She has been displaced three times and lives near the hospital with her two sons and her parents.
Some of the movie also views how medicines struggled to keep people alive in Al-Aksa Hospital, which was Described in January 2024 by British doctors as the only functioning hospital in central gas.
That's where we found Zakaria.
Everyone working in the hospital knows the boy. He, of course, is still a child, not a qualified doctor, but always hangs around, waiting for an opportunity to help someone, hoping that he can get food or money in return.
Sometimes it helps to carry equipment for local journalists, other times stretchers with people injured or dying.
When there is a quiet moment, it helps to clean the blood and dirt from the ambulances.
There is no school to go for and he is the only person in his family to make money. He doesn't stay with them as they have some food or water, he says and instead lives alone in the hospital and sleeps where he can. One evening is in the scan room, another in the tent of journalists or the back of an ambulance.
There were many nights that he fell asleep hungry.
As much as they try, hospital officials cannot keep him away from the chaos of victim care.
Zakaria idolizes the paramedics and wants to be considered part of the team. One of them, he said, takes him under his wing. Every time he treats Zakaria as a child, he says, the boy is upset.
Other employees see the care and attention that Zakaria turns them with the patients in the hospital and teach him to give someone IV drop.
In recognition of his efforts, they even make him a miniature set of blue scrub – in which he is proud.
Said tries to ensure that the boy is still getting a similarity to childhood and in the movie we follow them on a trip to the beach.
Sitting under the frosses of a tree branch, Zakaria is inserted into lunch, said, bought. According to him, Shaurma is perfect. They said jokes that this was the only time the boy was once “closed”.
But he said he was worried that Zakaria had seen so much death and destruction that he could never fit into children his age again.
Zakaria himself looks beyond childhood.
“I want to be a paramedic,” he says. “But first I have to get out of here.”
As they said to George Sandeman