BEIRUT -- 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 .
