clipped from: news.bbc.co.uk   
Four-year-old Samar Abed Rabbu is a little girl with a captivating smile to melt the heart of the most hardened correspondent.

Samer Abedrabou

Samer's two sisters did not survive the attack

When we first came across her in the hospital in the Egyptian town of El-Arish, just over the border from Gaza, she was playing with an inflated surgical glove beneath the covers.


The doctors had puffed air into the glove, trying to distract her from the further pain they had to inflict inserting a drip.


Samar had been shot in the back at close range. The bullet damaged her spine, and she is unlikely to walk again.