No one in the Abou Amro family knows sign language. To communicate with 12-year-old Dana, who has become deaf, her desperate parents have resorted to shouting. Only Alina, her 4-year-old little sister, has managed to connect with her by speaking directly into her ear. "Alina has become our interpreter. Otherwise, we have no way of understanding Dana's needs. It is a tremendous suffering," said their father, Ziad, age 52, reached by phone. Israel still bans journalists from entering the Gaza Strip.
Dana was not born deaf. In early September, she was resting in her room in Gaza City when the building just across from hers was hit by Israeli missiles. "The explosion was extremely violent, the door to her room was torn off and the windows were blown out," her father recounted.
The young girl survived, but in the days that followed, her family noticed a change in her behavior: Dana no longer reacted as before, no longer understood when she was spoken to. Her parents took her to consult specialists from the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children, a pioneering organization that has operated in Gaza since 1992 and whose 132 employees have not stopped working, despite the destruction of the group's main center in the enclave. "Because of the power of the explosion, the auditory nerve was severely damaged, perhaps even completely destroyed. Dana is suffering from a very severe hearing loss," they explained.
According to a survey conducted by Atfaluna over the past two years, 35,000 children and adults have become partially or completely deaf as a result of Israeli bombings. "Hearing loss can result from injuries to the head or neck, brain trauma causing ruptured eardrums and damage to the auditory system. But it can also be caused by exposure to sound waves, even if a person was not physically injured. These hearing disorders are, most often, irreversible," explained Dr. Ramadan Hussein, an audiologist working with the organization.