‘He will call me Mama’: The Gaza ‘grandmother’ raising an orphaned baby

Maha is the paternal aunt of Hamza’s father, Omar al-Rubaie. She and her sister, Huriya, raised Omar beginning when he was 15 along with his two brothers after their father was killed in the 2008 Gaza war and their mother remarried.

“I raised the father when he was orphaned as a child, and now I am raising the son after he too became an orphan,” Maha explains, looking so...