ON THE morning of 24 August 2024, four-year-old Mira Al-Darini stood outside her family’s makeshift tent in a cramped displacement camp in Khan Younis, clutching a simple sandwich her mother had prepared.
It was her sister Rahaf’s birthday, and the children were trying to find a sliver of joy amid war. Minutes later, Israeli gunfire tore through the camp. A bullet struck Mira in the head.
‘They were excited. They said, “Get up Mama. Let’s make a cake for Rahaf’s birthday”,’ recalled Mira’s mother, Israa Haboush.
‘Suddenly, Mira’s whole face was covered in blood, and we knew she’d been shot in the head.’
Witnesses later confirmed that the bullet came from an Israeli military drone.
Her father, Mohammed Al-Darini, cradled Mira’s limp body and raced to find medical help, catching a ride on a stranger’s motorbike.
Their first stop was Kuwait Hospital in Rafah, and from there, they rushed to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis — one of Gaza’s largest, which itself would be bombed days later by Israeli forces.
By the time they arrived, Mira had lost almost all signs of life. Hospital staff gave her a black triage tag — meaning there was no hope for survival.
Inside the emergency room, American volunteer Dr Mimi Syed was working under near-impossible conditions. Israel’s blockade on medical supplies had left Gaza’s hospitals with dangerously low resources.
Despite her colleagues advising against it, Syed noted faint movement from Mira.
‘I started to examine her and one of my colleagues came and said, “No, don’t waste your time”,’ she said. ‘But I could see she was still moving. I felt I could save her.’
Using one of the few working intubation blades available, Dr Syed inserted a breathing tube and later managed to remove the bullet lodged in Mira’s skull. Mira defied the odds and survived.
This was not the first time Mira had escaped death. Her father recounted an earlier attack during the family’s forced displacement southward, when an Israeli missile killed one of her aunts and maimed another. ‘She was between life and death,’ Mohammed remembered.
Mira now attends physical therapy when facilities are available — although even this is not safe.
In January 2025, while she was receiving treatment, the building next door was bombed.
Mira survived again. Her mother, however, lost her leg in the explosion.
Her long-term care is uncertain. Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure has been obliterated by Israeli airstrikes targeting hospitals, clinics and ambulances.
Her future operations, therapy, and recovery needs are increasingly unlikely to be met.
Mira’s story, heart-breaking and extraordinary, is not isolated.
It forms part of a much broader pattern of systematic violence by Israeli forces against Palestinian children.
In its investigation into Gaza’s ongoing genocide, several doctors told of children who had been deliberately shot by Israeli drones, snipers, and soldiers.
Dr Tammy Abughnaim, an American emergency physician who worked in Gaza last year, described treating numerous gunshot wounds in children.
‘After five, six, seven, eight cases, I realised someone was shooting children,’ she said. ‘Nobody wants to believe that other humans are capable of annihilating children in that way.’
Mohammed Al-Darini still holds onto the bullet that shattered his daughter’s skull.
‘This is the bullet that ruined my daughter’s life,’ he said. ‘It represents that awful day when it all happened.’
According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, over 16,000 children have been killed since Israel began its large-scale assault in October 2023.
Children account for more than a third of all Palestinian deaths.
Many remain buried under rubble, their deaths unrecorded. Aid workers and rights organisations stress that this figure is almost certainly an undercount.
Doctors who have worked in Gaza’s overwhelmed hospitals say a growing number of child casualties are not the result of indiscriminate bombing but of precise, targeted shootings.
‘The target at the end of a scope is unmistakable,’ said Dr Mark Perlmutter, an orthopaedic surgeon serving at Nasser Hospital.
‘They are a young human being, and when that trigger gets pulled, it is not by accident. At all. Ever.’
Rights organisations such as Defence for Children International – Palestine describe the Israeli campaign as one of deliberate extermination.
Their staff, working inside Gaza, have been forced to cease documentation efforts after repeated bombings and displacements.
‘Israeli forces have killed so many children in Gaza that it is most likely we will never know all of their names,’ said Miranda Cleland, the organisation’s advocacy officer. ‘It will be a long time before we understand how many were shot with live ammunition, how many bled to death with no medical help.’
Between October 2023 and July 2024, 141 Palestinian children were killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Of those, 116 were shot with live ammunition — an average of one child killed every two days.
Figures for Gaza are no longer reliably available, because the healthcare and civil documentation systems have been targeted and largely destroyed.
Despite such grave breaches of international law, Israel continues to receive massive financial and military support from the United States.
Since its establishment, Israel has received an estimated $124 billion in military aid from the US — more than any other nation since the Second World War.
Tim Rieser, a senior advisor to former US Senator Patrick Leahy, explained that almost every Israeli military unit has received American training or equipment.
This support falls under the Leahy Law, which prohibits US funding to foreign military units credibly implicated in war crimes such as torture, extrajudicial killings, and rape.
In Israel’s case, however, enforcement has been virtually non-existent.
‘It’s been a huge frustration,’ Rieser admitted. ‘There’s so obviously a need for the law to be applied in Gaza and the West Bank. It might help deter future abuses.’
To oversee aid compliance, the US established the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum (ILVF) in 2020.
But former State Department official Charles Blaha, who ran the Office of Security and Human Rights until 2023, described the forum as deliberately designed to fail.
‘It’s a very elaborate, byzantine, complicated, delay-ridden process,’ he said. ‘I signed off on that. I believed the State Department would implement it in good faith. I believed in the Israeli military justice system. Both beliefs were wrong.’
Since its inception, the ILVF has never found a single Israeli unit ineligible for aid.
Blaha expressed devastation at the human cost of the forum’s failure. ‘I didn’t think it would come to these thousands and thousands of deaths.’
What is unfolding in Gaza is not only a humanitarian catastrophe, but a campaign of genocide that includes the systematic killing of children.
Mira’s survival is extraordinary — but it should never have been a matter of luck.