Twelve-year-old Hala from Gaza was just playing on a swing beside her family’s tent, one of the few joys left to her, when an Israeli airstrike tore her childhood apart. In an instant, the blast’s force yanked her hair into the swing’s chains, violently ripping off her entire scalp. Since that moment, Hala has been trapped in a world of pain, rejection, and isolation.

“I flipped and fell,” she recalled softly. “My whole scalp was gone… and since then, I haven’t left the tent.” Her voice, captured in an interview with Shehab News, carries the weight of a girl forced to grow old far too soon.

Beyond the unbearable physical agony, Hala lives with the cruelty of stares and screams from other children who now fear her. “They ask why I don’t have hair… why my head looks like this.” The simple act of playing, of belonging, has been stripped from her, as completely as her hair.

Displaced six times with her family, Hala now shelters in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, where medical care is virtually non-existent. Gaza’s decimated hospitals couldn’t treat her wounds; infections worsened her condition. Doctors finally admitted there was nothing more they could do unless she could be evacuated. But the siege traps her inside Gaza, just as surely as her injuries trap her inside her tent.

Her father, injured by shrapnel to the head early in the war, can no longer move. Her family survives on lentils. “We can’t afford bread or medicine,” Hala says. “I have four younger sisters and one brother… I’m the oldest, but I can’t take care of anyone… not even myself.”

What Hala needs is simple: urgent medical evacuation and the chance to reclaim her childhood. But instead, she is left waiting, between pain, poverty, and forgotten promises, while the world looks away. “I just want to play again,” she says. “To be like I used to be… to leave the tent again.”