Zuri, nine years old, died alone in a hospital room in Cairo. Her mother was unable to assist her, let alone say goodbye: she was denied an urgent visa to Egypt. For months, we had been asking the Slovenian authorities to expedite the family reunification process: the six children were left alone, the oldest being seventeen, the youngest only three, while Linda had gone to Slovenia to get treatment for Waad, who became paraplegic after an Israeli attack in Gaza.
THERE WAS NOTHINGto be done. Months of letters, complaints, prayers to a bureaucratic monster that demands untraceable documents in conditions of armed conflict. It’s like throwing oneself naked against a gigantic rubber wall and each time bouncing back to the ground more violently than before.
In Gaza, offices have been reduced to piles of rubble, images that have been flashing before us for months and that our governments seem to want to continue to ignore. There are no fingerprint scanners, no printers, photocopiers, or municipal archives. In the repeated escapes, people have lost everything they had – including, of course, their children's birth certificates, marriage certificates, passports, identity cards, and medical records of the sick. With the houses, schools, municipalities, police stations, and hospitals, the documents have also gone up in smoke. Furthermore, Ramallah has not issued new passports for at least a year, to prevent identity theft or misuse.
Like Italy until the ruling of the Administrative Court of Rome on June 5, 2025, which required the Italian Consulate in Jerusalem to activate the issuance of visas entirely online for three Palestinian student recipients, Slovenia is also asking for the impossible.
Linda's family reunification with her children is blocked because she is unable to provide all the necessary documentation. A Slovenian official, at the end of a conversation with one of the people who have become dear to me in these months, casually explained to her while escorting her to the door that family reunification is an administrative procedure, not an emotional matter. No one in school, when studying law, must have explained to her that laws are formulated to accompany human facts. The cornerstone principle underlying family reunification is based on the right to protect family unity as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
FOUR CHILDRENwill bury their little sister alone, because the fifth, the oldest, torn apart by guilt for a responsibility she should not have had at her age, has been hospitalized in a mental health ward. Zuri was bitten by a dog a month and a half ago.
They did not understand, she and her siblings, without an adult reference nearby, how important it was to report that incident. They disinfected, covered the wound, and moved on, as they have for the past year, since their mother left to care for the most fragile of her seven children in Europe, hoping to bring the others as well, to ensure them a future that they will not have guaranteed in Egypt.
The Palestinians who find refuge in Arab countries remain stateless for life. Protected by the temporary agency created specifically for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, they are the only refugees in the world who do not have the right to a permanent solution: neither the return to their country of origin nor citizenship in the country where they live. Asking for political asylum in Europe was the only chance Linda had to secure a future for her children. She trusted the laws of our states, believing them to be the safest answer to protect her children.
TWENTY DAYSafter the incident, Zuri began to have a fever, and in a very short time, the encephalitis progressed, causing a stage of rapid and unstoppable delirium. By the time she reached the hospital, her condition was already critical. The girl was placed in isolation, behind a glass wall from which her brothers and sisters watched her destroy an entire hospital room with her bare hands, in the grip of the excruciating symptoms of rage.
Zuri, slender, with delicate features, her angelic face framed by large curls cascading down her shoulders, transformed before the eyes of her five siblings into a fury. Then, in the last days, she began to be shaken by spasms, paralysis became progressive, and culminated in a state of coma from which she never awakened.
In less than a year, Linda and her children have suffered unimaginable losses: from November of last year to today, three of Linda's brothers, eleven nephews, a sister have died in Gaza, while the daughter of one of her sisters lost her sight in the explosion that killed two of her children and her husband. Linda's anguish over being away from her children has often been violently overshadowed by the grief she feels for the tragedies suffered by her family in Gaza. Until this too arrived, the death of a daughter who was not in Gaza, but in Egypt.
The tragic death of Zuri is the painful reminder of the human cost of inaction. The day will come when international courts will hold accountable those who have not done enough to prevent avoidable human losses.