Curled up in his father ’s lap, clinging to his chest, Hussein Mikdad cried his heart out. The 4-year-old kicked his doctor with his intact foot and pushed him away with the arm that was not in a cast. “My Dad! My Dad!" Hussein said. "Make him leave me alone!” With eyes tearing up in relief and pain, the father reassured his son and pulled him closer.
Hussein and his father, Hassan, are the only survivors of their family after an Israeli airstrike last month on their Beirut neighborhood. The strike killed 18 people, including his mother, three siblings and six relatives.
“Can he now shower?” the father asked the doctor.
Ten days after surgery, doctors examining Hussein's wounds said the boy is healing properly. He has rods in his fractured right thigh and stitches that assembled his torn tendons back in place on the right arm. The pain has subsided, and Hussein should be able to walk again in two months — albeit with a lingering limp.
A prognosis for Hussein's invisible wounds is much harder to give. He is back in diapers and has begun wetting his bed. He hardly speaks and has not said a word about his mother, two sisters and brother.
“The trauma is not just on the muscular skeletal aspect. But he is also mentally hurt,” Imad Nahle, one of Hussein’s orthopedic surgeons, said.
Israel said, without elaborating, that the strike on the Mikdad neighborhood struck a Hezbollah target. In the war that has escalated since
September, Israeli airstrikes have increasingly hit residential areas around Lebanon. Israel accuses the Lebanese militant group of hiding its capabilities and fighters among civilians. It vows to cripple Hezbollah, which began firing into northern Israel after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack triggered the war in Gaza.
With more strikes on homes and in residential areas, doctors are seeing more children affected by the violence. More than 100 children have been killed in Lebanon in the past six weeks and hundreds injured. And of the 14,000 wounded since last year, around 10% are children. Many have been left with severed limbs, burned bodies, and broken families — scars that could last for a lifetime.
Ghassan Abu Sittah, a renowned British-Palestinian surgeon who is also treating Hussein, sees that long road ahead. This is his worry: “It leaves us with a generation of physically wounded children, children who are psychologically and emotionally wounded."
At the American University of Beirut Medical Center, which is receiving limited cases of war casualties, Nahle said he operated on five children in the past five weeks — up from no cases before. Most were referred from south and eastern Lebanon.
A few miles away, at the Lebanese Hospital Geitaoui, one of the country’s largest burns centers increased its capacity by nearly 180% since September so it could accommodate more war wounded, its medical director Naji Abirached said. About a fifth of the newly admitted patients are children.
In one of the burn center’s ICU units lies Ivana Skakye. She turned 2 in the hospital ward last week. Ivana has been healing from burns she sustained following an Israeli airstrike outside their home in southern Lebanon on Sept. 23. Israel launched hundreds of airstrikes that day in different parts of Lebanon, making it the deadliest day of the war so far. More than 500 people were killed.
Six weeks later, the tiny Ivana remains wrapped in white gauze from head to toe except her torso. She sustained third-degree burns over 40 percent of her body. Her hair and head, her left side all the way to her legs, both her arms and her chest were burned. Her family home was damaged, its ceiling set afire. The family’s valuables, packed in their car as they prepared to leave, were also torched. Ivana’s older sister, Rahaf, 7, has recovered faster from burns to her face and hands.
Fatima Zayoun, their mother, was in the kitchen when the explosion hit. Zayoun jumped up to grab the girls, who were playing on the terrace.
It was, Zayoun said, "as if something lifted me up so that I can grab my kids. I have no idea how I managed to pull them in and throw them out of the window. She spoke from the ICU burns unit. “They were not on fire, but they were burned. Black ash covered them. ... (Ivana) was without any hair. I told myself, `That is not her.'”
Now, Ivana's wound dressings are changed every two days. Her doctor, Ziad Sleiman, said she could be discharged in a few days. She’s back again to saying “Mama” and “Bye — shorthand for wanting to go out.
Like Hussein, though, Ivana has no home to return to. Her parents fear collective shelters could cause an infection to return.
After seeing her kids “sizzling on the floor,” Zayoun, 35, said that even if their home is repaired, she wouldn’t want to return. “I saw death with my own eyes,” she said.
Zayoun was 17 last time Israel and Hezbollah were at war, in 2006. Displaced with her family then, she said she almost enjoyed the experience, riding out of their village in a truck full of their belongings, mixing with new people, learning new things. They returned home when the war was over.
“But this war is hard. They are hitting everywhere,” she said. “What do they want from us? Do they want to hurt our children? We are not what they are looking for."
Abu Sittah, the reconstructive surgeon, said most of the children's injuries are from blasts or collapsing rubble. That attack on a space they expect to be inviolable can have lingering effects.
“Children feel safe at home," he said. "The injury makes them for the first time lose that sense of security — that their parents are keeping them safe, that their homes are invincible, and suddenly their homes become not so.”
