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.
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