‘It was her leg or her life’: Woman from viral video on how she escaped Gaza after brutal amputation
It was a moment of horror from Gaza which went viral – a video of an amputation on a dining table. No anaesthetic. No bandages. Just a bucket, some soap and a kitchen knife.
It was 19 December 2023, and the war in Gaza was in its third month. Israel’s bombardment of the northern part of the narrow strip of land was at its most intense.
Inside the Bseiso family home, an apartment on the ground floor of a six-storey block not far from Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, 17-year-old Ahed Bseiso was laid across the kitchen table.
The table, where Ahed’s mother had been making bread moments before, was now a scene of unimaginable horror, as Ahed’s uncle Hani, who is a doctor, carried out an emergency operation.
Ahed’s left leg was badly wounded, and her right lower leg was in shreds.
Desperate, she had pleaded with her uncle not to amputate it but Hani knew he had no choice.
It was her leg or her life.
Minutes earlier, Ahed had been on the top floor of their building, trying to call her father who lives in Belgium. The high floors were best for phone signal and every day, she and her older sister, Mona, would head up there to tell him they were still alive.
Ahed (left) had no anaesthetic as her uncle (right) amputated her leg
On this particular morning, as she struggled to get a connection, she noticed some large Israeli tanks outside on the street. Then a huge explosion split the air.
“I heard a bang and a wall came tumbling on top of me,” Ahed told Sky News. “There was dust all over the place and I couldn’t understand where I was.”
Trapped in the rubble, Ahed was disorientated. She called for Mona. Her mother and her cousins rushed to help. They managed to free her from the rubble, revealing the young Gazan – alive but with one leg broken and the other in pieces.
“I asked my cousin, ‘Is my leg gone?’ and he said, ‘No, don’t look’.”
Her cousins carried Ahed down the stairs to their apartment. There was gunfire outside.
“There was no surgical equipment,” Ahed recalled. “My uncle got soap and the scrubber from the kitchen and started to clean my leg… He started to cry. Then he cut my leg off.
“I remained conscious the entire time without anaesthesia. My only solace was my cousin, who stood next to me, reciting the Koran.”
The spot where Ahed was injured
Her uncle Hani saved her life. He had also felt compelled to film the procedure; to show the world what had come of life, and death, for the people of Gaza.
“What is this injustice that has befallen us?” he screamed straight at the camera as he cleaned Ahed’s wound.
“We have been surrounded for 15 days. I had to amputate my niece’s leg without anaesthesia. Where is the mercy? Where is humanity? What have we done to deserve this?”
The decision to upload the video to social media would in time precipitate a journey for Ahed out of Gaza, to Egypt and eventually to America.
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Six thousand miles away in the small American town of Aiken, South Carolina, a woman called Wafa Abed was online. Like so many exiled Palestinians around the world, she was deeply affected by the images emerging from her homeland.
As she scrolled, she came across the video of Hani Bseiso, his niece and the amputation. The Bseisos were strangers to her but the footage had an immediate impact.
“You have to get this girl out,” Wafa told her son Tareq. “You have to do this.”
Tareq Hailat, 27, a medical student, had recently taken on a new part-time role. As an Arab-American, he was consumed by the tragedy of the Israel-Gaza conflict, and had started working for a charity.
The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) is an American charity with a long history of helping the region’s vulnerable children. Since this latest conflict began it has tried, initially with little success, to evacuate injured children.
Tareq Hailat, Head of the Treatment Abroad Program, Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
Now, desperate to help Ahed and others who he had seen online, Tareq began to put together a global network of strangers. Despite the huge obstacles in his path, he pulled every lever and followed every lead.
PCRF’s long-established status in Gaza and the West Bank – combined with this young medical student’s drive and determination – began to work wonders.
“I kept working on ensuring that we can pull Ahed out,” Tareq said over a Palestinian breakfast at his parents’ South Carolina home.
“I started reaching out to my professors and they connected me with different physicians here in the US. Once that was established, then I started connecting with people inside Gaza and in Egypt.”
It took over a month, and 17 failed attempts, to get Ahed out of Gaza.
Israel repeatedly denied her permission to leave. Her ambulance convoy was attacked and the vehicle next to hers was destroyed.
In Egypt, in preparation, there were passports to apply for, and visas to be issued.
Ahed’s journey out of Gaza was fraught with danger
For Tareq and his new team, it felt like a logistical and bureaucratic impossibility. He was on the phone daily, sometimes hourly, for two weeks to the Red Crescent.
“They would ask the Israelis for permission to go up to the north of Gaza to get her. We would never get the green light. Finally, we did.”
Ahed Bseiso arrived in Greenville, South Carolina, on 17 February 2024, having just turned 18.
She had never left Gaza before and was now in a new world with her sister Mona beside her. The rest of the Bseiso family had to remain behind, trapped in Gaza.
Greenville was where they ended up because Tareq studies medicine there and he knew people willing to treat her injuries.
Ahed’s sister Mona travelled with her to America
Ahed was sitting in her wheelchair, with her sister, a faint smile on her face, when I first met her.
Like Tareq’s mother and many millions of others, I had seen the viral video months earlier. I never imagined I would meet the young woman at the heart of it.
“Marhaba,” I said – Arabic for hello. She replied in English. “Hello.”
I wasn’t quite sure where to begin. But she chose to start on that fateful day explaining it all with bravery and poise.
I asked her the question I’d wondered about ever since I’d first seen the video. Why wasn’t she screaming? How on earth did she cope?
”The strength came from within me,” she replied, “…because I never want to give my occupier the opportunity that they were able to kill us and silence us.”
Last week was the latest stage of Ahed’s journey, from South Carolina to Colorado. The strangers compelled to help her through every step were taking her to see a doctor in Denver.
Ahed was grateful for the kindness she received in America
Dr Omar Mubarak is a leading American vascular surgeon and another remarkable character who makes things happen. He’d been contacted by the PCRF and immediately wanted to help.
Beyond the welcome party he gathered at the arrivals hall at Denver airport, Dr Omar had arranged a new prosthetic leg. For free, for Ahed.
The morning of the fitting began with a smile. Ahed had left her right shoe in Greenville. There wouldn’t be anything to put on the new foot. She giggled and we all laughed.
The fitting itself was private – her moment.
But then, as the clinic door opened, one tentative step. Then lots. Ahed marched down the hospital corridor. “It feels great,” she said.
Dr Omar watched, smiling, but with a tear in his eye. “She took to it like a fish. She made four steps before we could stop her. Awesome day. Awesome. She’s extremely excited.”
Ahed seemed so grateful to those who have helped her, only a handful of whom could be mentioned in this story.
“It is something I will never forget,” she said.
But how did she feel about coming to America – a place where she’s found such kindness but the country which is the biggest supporter of the nation which caused her injuries? It was a tricky question but an important one.
Her answer spoke volumes.
“When you see people happy to see you or trying their best to support you… it is something I will never forget.
“But the first thing I thought was ‘how I could leave Gaza and seek treatment in a country that is possibly – even more than Israel – largely responsible for my condition?'”
Out of a war which has stirred so much and damaged so many, I found a young woman grateful but hugely conflicted too.
Ahed will now head back to South Carolina to continue her recovery. She wants to return home as soon as possible.
“I’m happy for this opportunity, but my heart is still with my family in northern Gaza, which is the most terrible place on earth right now.”
The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) has now extracted about 100 injured children from Gaza since this latest conflict began. Seven of them, including Ahed, have come to the United States.
Most have been sent for treatment in the region – 47 have been moved to Qatar and 15 to the United Arab Emirates. Many are in hospital in Egypt. Lebanon, South Africa and Jordan have all agreed to take patients. Others have gone to Europe. The UK has not accepted any Gazans.
Faces marked by terror and torment fill North Darfur’s displacement camps.
Their eyes fill with despair as they describe what they have survived during a 16-month siege on one of Sudan‘s oldest cities.
It has entrapped their loved ones and spread armed violence, leaving village after village burnt to the ground.
Extreme cases of torture, rape and forced starvation are shared again and again in horrifying detail.
This elderly man told us he was blinded by the RSF when he tried to flee
Women collapse into sobs as they contemplate the future and the elderly raise their hands to the sky, trembling and empty, to pray for overdue relief.
In shelters which have seen little to no humanitarian aid, camp directors hand us lists showing requests for clean water, medical supplies and food. Even the trademark white United Nations tarp is scarce.
Some frayed tent material is used to close the gaps in the stick-lined walls that surround the traditional huts displaced families have built for themselves.
They use them as a temporary refuge from the battles that rage for control of the regional capital, Al Fashir.
Instead of fleeing into nearby Chad, they wait here for news that the siege has been lifted and they may finally be able to return.
But that news may never come.
The battle for Al Fashir – and Sudan
Al Fashir is being suffocated to death by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as they push to claim full control of the Darfur region as a base for their parallel government, after the military recaptured the capital Khartoum and other key sites in central Sudan.
Close to a million people are facing famine in Al Fashir and surrounding camps as the RSF enforces a full blockade, launching armed attacks on volunteers and aid workers risking their lives to bring in food.
Inside the city, thousands are bombarded by almost daily shelling from surrounding RSF troops.
The RSF have physically reinforced their siege with a berm – a raised earth mound. First spotted by Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, the berm is visible from space.
The Sudan war started in April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between the Sudanese army and the RSF broke out in Khartoum.
UN agencies said in July that some 40,000 people have been killed and almost 13 million displaced.
Several mediation attempts have failed to secure a humanitarian access mechanism or any lulls in fighting.
‘We could hear some of them being killed’
As the bombs drop on Al Fashir, war-wounded civilians travel by road to the last functioning hospital in the state. But the beds in Tina Hospital are largely empty.
The facility cannot afford to provide free or subsidised treatment to the people that need it.
“It is so difficult. This hospital cannot care for a patient without money,” says Dr Usman Adam, standing over an emaciated teenager with a gunshot wound in his stomach.
“We need support.
“Either medication or money to the victims – by anyhow, we need support.”
Maaz, 18, a victim of a gunshot wound, is treated in the last functioning hospital in North Darfur
In nearby camps, women are grieving brothers, fathers, and husbands killed, missing or still trapped inside Al Fashir. Many of them were forced to face Rapid Support Forces (RSF) torture as they tried to escape.
“If you don’t have money to pay ransom, they take you inside a room that looks like an office and say ‘if you don’t have anything we will kill you or worse’,” says 20-year-old mother Zahra, speaking to us at a girls’ school in Tine that is now a makeshift shelter.
“They beat the men, robbed them and whipped them. We could hear some of them being killed while we women were rounded up on a mat and threatened. We gave them money, but they took the other girls into a room, and we couldn’t tell if they were beaten or raped.”
Zahra was threatened by the RSF and heard people being killed
The women around her on the mat echo Zahra’s anguish.
“They beat us, tortured us, humiliated us – everything you can imagine!” one yells out in tears.
A mother named Leila sits next to her four children and stares down at the ground. I ask her if she has hope of returning to Al Fashir, and she starts to say no as the women nearby shout: “Yes! We will return by the grace of God.”
Leila complies with weak affirmation, but her eyes have the haunting resignation of permanent loss. Her city, as she knows it, is gone.
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Babies and young children silently stare out from their laps. Many of them wear the signs of physical shock. An older woman on the mat tells us her infant grandson was blinded by the extreme conditions of their escape and takes us to see him and his mother in their hut.
“We fled Al Fashir to Tawila camp while I was heavily pregnant,” says Nadeefa, as her son Mustafa cries on her lap, unable to focus his eyes.
Mustafa was blinded as a newborn after his mother fled the RSF
“After I had given birth, we made the journey here. Mustafa was only 16 days old and could not handle the harsh conditions. As time went on, we realised he couldn’t see. We think he was blinded as a newborn on the road.”
Her mother and mother-in-law sit on the mat next to her and take turns trying to calm Mustafa down. Her mother-in-law Husna tells us that her own son, Mustafa’s father, is missing.
“We don’t know where my son is,” she says. “He disappeared as we fled.”
Mustafa’s father went missing as the family fled the RSF
‘They killed my children’
An elderly woman, Hawa, approaches us in the same yard with her own story to tell.
“These people [the RSF] killed my children. They killed my in-laws. They orphaned my grandchildren. They killed two of my sons.
“One of my daughters gave birth on the road and I brought her with me to this camp. I don’t have anything,” she says, trembling as she stands.
“They raped my two younger daughters in front of me. There is nothing more than that. They fled from shame and humiliation. I haven’t seen them since.”
The RSF raped Hawa’s daughters in front of her
Dr Afaf Ishaq, the camp director and emergency response room (EER) volunteer, is sobbing nearby.
“I have dealt with thousands and thousands of cases, I am on the verge of a mental breakdown,” she says.
“Sometimes in the morning, I have my tea and forget that I need to eat or how to function. I just sit listening to testimony after testimony in my head and feel like I am hallucinating.”
Everyone we speak to points to her as a source of relief and help, but Dr Ishaq is largely carrying the burden alone. When haphazard financial support for the ERR community kitchens ends, she says people flock to her complaining of hunger.
Dr Ishaq lives in the camp by herself after fleeing her home in Khartoum at the start of the war in April 2023. She says she quickly escaped after her husband joined the RSF.
Dr Afaf Ishaq has seen thousands of cases of violence and sexual violence
Since then, she has been constantly reminded of the atrocities committed by her husband’s ranks in Khartoum, her hometown Al Fashir and the ethnic violence they are carrying out across the region.
“The RSF focuses on ethnicity,” she says. “If you are from the Zaghawa, Massalit, Fur – from Darfuri tribes – you should be killed, you should be raped.
“If they find that your mother or father are from another tribe like Rizeigat or Mahamid – they won’t rape you, they won’t touch you.”
The RSF has besieged Al Fashir for 16 months. File pic: Reuters
A message for the West
In January, the Biden administration determined that the RSF are carrying out genocide in Darfur, 20 years after former US secretary of state Colin Powell made the declaration in 2004.
But the designation has done little to quell the violence.
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Sudan’s government has accused the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of supplying arms and logistical support to the RSF. The UAE denies these claims but many on the ground in Darfur say its role in this war is accepted as fact.
The silence from the UAE’s allies in the West, including the UK and US, is felt loudly here – punctuated by gunfire and daily bombs.
Dr Ishaq fled her home in Khartoum at the start of the war after her husband joined the RSF
Dr Ishaq’s distress ratches up when I ask her about neglect from the international community.
“I direct my blame to the international community. How can they speak of human rights and ignore what is happening here?
“Where is the humanity?”
The prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has refused to be interviewed by the Metropolitan Police.
German drifter Christian B, as he is known under privacy laws, became a leading person of interest following the three-year-old British girl’s disappearance from a holiday resort in Portugal in 2007.
He is expected to be released from a jail in Germany as soon as Wednesday, at the end of a sentence for raping an elderly woman in Praia da Luz in 2005.
The Met said it sent an “international letter of request” to the 49-year-old for him to speak with them – but he rejected it.
Madeleine vanished shortly after she was left sleeping by her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, who went for dinner in a nearby restaurant in Praia da Luz.
The search for the British toddler has gone on for 18 years
The Met said Christian B remains a suspect in its own investigation – with Portuguese and German authorities also probing Madeleine’s disappearance.
He has previously denied any involvement.
Detective Chief Inspector Mark Cranwell, a senior investigating officer, said the force will “continue to pursue any viable lines of inquiry” in the absence of an interview with Christian B.
He said: “For a number of years we have worked closely with our policing colleagues in Germany and Portugal to investigate the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and support Madeleine’s family to understand what happened…
“We have requested an interview with this German suspect but, for legal reasons, this can only be done via an International Letter of Request which has been submitted.
“It was subsequently refused by the suspect. In the absence of an interview, we will nevertheless continue to pursue any viable lines of inquiry.”
Madeleine was taken from her family’s apartment while her parents dined in a nearby restaurant
In June, a hit-and-run theory emerged in connection with Madeleine’s death.
But her mother, Kate, has long dismissed the suggestion her daughter managed to get out of the apartment alone.
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Sky’s Martin Brunt investigates the hit-and-run theory in the case of Madeleine McCann
A number of searches have been carried out by German, Portuguese and British authorities since her disappearance – with the latest taking place near the Portuguese municipality of Lagos in June.
In 2023, investigators carried out searches near the Barragem do Arade reservoir, about 30 miles from Praia da Luz.
Christian B spent time in the area between 2000 and 2017 and had photographs and videos of himself near the reservoir.
In October last year, the suspect was cleared by a German court of unrelated sexual offences, alleged to have taken place in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
The total funding given to the Met’s investigation, titled Operation Grange, has been more than £13.2m since 2011 after a further £108,000 was secured from the government in April.
On NATO’s doorstep, Russia is rehearsing for war.
It has deployed tanks, battleships and supersonic bombers for military drills with Belarus that are happening on land, at sea and in the air.
‘Zapad-2025′ are the allies’ first joint exercises since the invasion of Ukraine, and on Sunday involved the launch of a hypersonic missile in the Barents Sea.
“There are several strategic goals here that [Russia and Belarus] want to achieve,” Hanna Liubakova, an independent Belarusian journalist, told Sky News.
“Scare, show that they are capable, show that they can threaten… and of course, they’re also checking what the reaction and response could be.”
The reaction so far has been frosty, to say the least.
A Russian nuclear submarine sets out to sea during the practice run. Pic: AP.
Russia launches a Zircon hypersonic missile at a target during the Zapad joint strategic exercise. Pic: Reuters
Ahead of the drills, Poland closed its border with Belarus and deployed more than 30,000 troops as part of its own military exercises.
Lithuania is also holding drills and said it would bolster defences along its frontiers with Russia and Belarus.
The authorities in Minsk, and in Moscow, insist the drills are defensive and not aimed at any other country.
A Russian nuclear submarine sets out to sea during the practice run. Pic: AP.
On Friday, the Kremlin even described Europe’s concerns as “emotional overload”.
But the last time these drills happened four years ago, it led to a massive build-up of Russian troops in Belarus, which Moscow then used for part of its invasion of Ukraine a few months later.
And the drills aren’t the only thing Europe is worried about.
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The show of strength comes at a time of heightened tension after recent Russian drone incursions into NATO airspace – first in Poland and then Romania.
There’s a feeling in the West that the drones and drills are a test of NATO’s defences and Western resolve.
But you’re unlikely to find that opinion on the streets of the Belarusian capital, Minsk.
“There is no aggression,” Mikhail told Sky News. “Exercises are normal, especially planned ones. So I think it’s fine.”
Pic: AP
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According to Kristina, Russia and Belarus are “not the aggressors”.
“I think our head of state [Alexander Lukashenko] will solve this issue and we will support him. He’s not aggravating the situation.”
A provocation or not, the drills offer NATO a fresh chance to scrutinise Russia’s military, after three-and-a-half years of costly combat in Ukraine.
It would feel a lot more comfortable, though, if they weren’t happening so close to home.
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