A Palestinian boy looks at the wreckage of a car that was destroyed in an Israeli missile strike in the Gaza Strip. (Hatem Omar, Maan Images)

Mariya Aman is looking forward to her sixth birthday party next week. Her face lights up when her father, Hamdi, promises her a clown and lots of balloons at the party, and she whizzes up and down the hospital corridor in her electric wheelchair. As he smiles and waves to her, Hamdi Aman's sad eyes never leave his only daughter. Apart from the birthday party, he says quietly, he has no idea what the future holds for Mariya.

Confined to a wheelchair and paralyzed from the neck down, the Palestinian girl is at the center of a legal fight over whether Israel should continue to take care of her treatment.

Back in May 2006, an Israeli missile attack on an Islamic Jihad activist's car in war-torn Gaza left the Aman family, traveling close behind, in ruins. Mariya's mother, brother, grandmother and uncle were killed, and Mariya, thrown out of the car into a ditch, sustained serious injuries. Today Mariya is kept alive by an artificial respirator at the Alyn Children's Rehabilitation Hospital in Jerusalem.

Although it has never formally accepted responsibility, the Israeli government has largely sponsored her complicated medical rehabilitation for the past 15 months. But now her father has been told by the Israeli Ministry of Defense that his daughter must leave Israel and return to the territory of the Palestinian Authority. "Sending her away from this hospital, out of Israel, is like sending her to hell," says Aman, 30.

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A court decision in favor of Mariya Aman could set a precedent and trigger other court appeals from Palestinians injured by similar acts of the Israeli military. Sarit Michaeli of the human-rights organization B'Tselem says there are hundreds of other families who may seek compensation from Israel in the future, something that clearly Israel is not interested in confronting.

It's not difficult to understand why Mariya’s father is so worried. She will need around-the-clock specialized medical attention for the rest of her life. She is catheterized every four hours to avoid the buildup of urine in thekidneys, and her respiratory tract is regularly cleaned of secretions. She will never be able to dress herself in the morning or comb her hair.

But since arriving at the hospital, she has learned to use a computer and to deftly steer her wheelchair using her chin. She has also learned to chatter away in fluent Hebrew to her dedicated Israeli therapists. "I have always avoided telling Mariya who aimed that missile at us," says Aman. "How can I explain that the people who hurt us are the same people who are helping us now?"

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