Malik Issa ... Al-Issawiya's child, whom the occupation prohibited

Aseel soldier - occupied Jerusalem

Al-Maqdisi Malik Issa joined the list of victims who lost one of their eyes by the occupation forces bullets in the town of Al-Issawiya, east of Jerusalem, which the occupation targets on a daily basis by storming, searching, arresting, and firing live and rubber bullets and gas and sound bombs indiscriminately.

When Malik returned from his school in the Wadi Al-Joz neighborhood to his town of Al-Issawiya with his three sisters a week ago, he decided to enter the grocery store to buy sweets while the occupation forces were deploying in the town to arrest a young man in the place, and as soon as Malik left, the Israeli soldiers shot him with a rubber-coated metal bullet, hitting him His left eye.

After a medical trip that included four surgeries, the last of which was the removal of his left eye, one of which - as his father Wael Issa says - lasted for hours during which the medical staff tried to control the bleeding and repair the lacerations in the forehead area.

After two hours of the first operation, the child Malik (nine years) underwent another operation during which the doctors tried to stitch an internal wound in the eye, but they were not able to do so, and after days they tried again and were able to stitch a part of the wound only because of its depth and size.

As for the fourth operation, it was eradicating his left eye after making sure he lost sight of it, and informing his family of the danger of its survival, for fear of damaging the healthy eye.

"I asked the medical staff to keep his eye in place so that his face would not be deformed, but they assured us that this would expose his right eye to great harm," Wael Issa said, adding that family members "did not understand the shock yet who shot the owner who wounded us all."

The father affirms the necessity of gathering his strength to accompany his son on his therapeutic journey that will extend for years, and at the start of his visit to Haifa, he will soon be able to install a glass eye that will be his lifelong companion.

Assaults
On this and similar cases, a member of the Follow-up Committee in the town of Al-Issawiya, Muhammad Abu Al-Homs, told Al-Jazeera Net, "The occupation has targeted Al-Issawiya on a daily basis for ten months, and intentionally inflicts injuries on their faces directly while storming the town."

He adds that the occupation police and soldiers claim that what they are doing "in self-defense because the townspeople pose a threat to their lives and that the soldiers are training to shoot rubber bullets from their guns in the town of Al-Issawiya, and this is the explanation for the repeated injuries in Al-Ain that have reached 15 injuries so far."

As for the aspirations of the mother of the child Noureddine Mustafa, who was subjected to a similar attack and lost his left eye two and a half years ago, she says that her son does not yet accept the issue of his injury but is forced to coexist with her, and he was forced to stop learning and practicing boxing due to the danger to her healthy eye.

She adds that her son meets on a weekly basis with a psychologist, and his reviews with ophthalmologists, ears, and throat doctors did not stop due to the severe damage to his nose and loss of smell.

Crime and Punishment
The Chairman of the Scientific Committee of the Society of Ophthalmologists in Palestine, Alaa Al-Talbishi, warns that the injuries that lead to laceration in the bones of the skull or the impact of the eye socket, its effect extends to the nerves of hearing or smelling and the nerve responsible for moving and feeling the facial muscles.

Al-Tilbishi added that the doctors ’warnings increase and their instructions are more stringent when the patient loses one of his eyes.“ We do not recommend practicing any sport with any kind of violence or the possibility of injury, whether it is football, basket, boxing, and others. ”

As for the Director General of the International Child Defense Movement (Palestine Branch) Khaled Qazmar, he said that they documented all cases of targeting children in the town of Al-Issawiya, noting that the highest rate of lead injury in children’s eyes is concentrated in this town.

On the movement's available mechanisms to pursue these practices and seek to hold perpetrators accountable, he said, "We do not trust the Israeli judiciary, we document these violations and then pass them on to the ICC prosecutor's office, because these practices fundamentally affect the child's right to life."