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‘The doctor told me count to three – and he cut my leg’: The generation of Palestinian children with devastating amputations after a year of war
A generation of children and young adults in Gaza are coping with devastating amputations after a year of brutal war.
It’s left a terrible legacy, with thousands – many of them babies – coping with missing limbs.
Warning: This story contains images and descriptions readers may find distressing
Those in Gaza like Jihad have absolutely heart-breaking war wounds. The three-year-old’s left leg has been amputated right up to the hip, his right leg cut below the knee. The doctors couldn’t save three of the fingers on his left hand.
Jihad, who lost both his legs and three fingers
He cries constantly and he’s writhing around in pain when Sky’s Gaza crew sees him. His mother Mai tells our team that he’s completely changed since the bombing – going from an active, talkative toddler to a depressed little boy who can’t accept his crushing lack of mobility.
“He keeps asking me for slippers and he has no feet,” she says despairingly.
The whole family was injured when a bomb landed near their tent in Khan Younis where they’d fled to. But Jihad was by far the worst affected.
She’s desperate to get him the help he so urgently needs but there’s very little aid getting into Gaza, and there has been no evacuations from the war zone, even for the very sick or wounded, for weeks now.
We were given rare access on board a planeload of aid and personnel being flown into the area. But this aid was not going into Gaza. It was instead going to a floating hospital run by the United Arab Emirates and anchored off the coast of Egypt – the nearest secure position it has permission for near Gaza.
The entrance to the floating hospital
The hospital’s patients are all wounded or ill from Gaza. They include children – some who arrived like ten-year-old Yazan, alone without even a guardian, his left leg already cut below the knee. He’s already spent several weeks on board the floating hospital. The doctors and nurses all know him.
Yazan, 10, who arrived at the hospital without a guardian
The hospital’s director, Dr Ahmed Mubarak tells us: “We are his family right now and we try to give him all the support he needs.”
Dr Ahmed Mubarak, director of the floating hospital
Yazan tells the director he’s “good” and that he plays football and games like the other children on board – but his eyes are sunken and he has dark shadows around them. He’s just a little boy, all alone, thrown into and devastated by this man’s war which has changed his life forever.
The ship has been converted into a state-of-the-art medical facility with five decks of equipment including an emergency room, operating theatre and ICU.
Here, the rescued patients are given access to specialist surgeons, medics, nursing staff and equipment and medicines beyond the wildest dreams of those trapped in the Gaza war zone. And most of all, those here are given sanctuary from the bombing, mayhem, blood and chaos of the war a short distance away.
Read more:
How life changed in a year for a group of Gaza civilians
Israel-Hamas war: Timeline of events since 7 October
The UN has estimated about one thousand children like Yazan had amputations in just one month of the war last November. It’s a shuddering thought wondering how many more there must be now.
Children playing at the humanitarian centre
‘I just want to walk properly again’
At the Humanitarian City in Abu Dhabi – as it’s named by the Emiratis who set it up – we see a horrifying number of them. Amidst the children playing on the swings, or boys having a go at the arcade machines provided or those making their way along the corridors, you’ll catch glimpses of them.
There’s a young girl doing her best to get momentum on the swings with only one arm. At the arcade, there are boys in wheelchairs with legs missing or riding the arcade motorbike with only one leg.
In the physio room, a 13-year-old girl called Tuqa is being persuaded to try to walk on her artificial limbs. She has not one but two prosthesis to try to balance on and get the measure of. The double-amputee is struggling.
Tuqa and her prosthetic legs
“I’m scared,” she tells the physio who is trying to coax her into letting go of him. “Try, try, come on, let’s go,” he says.
Tuqa in Gaza
I ask her what her ambition is and she says with heart-rending simplicity: “I just want to walk properly again.” Then she adds: “And go back home.”
A childhood of surgeries
Rakan is one little baby who has made it out. He has his right leg missing but he’s too young to know that he’s seen as one of the “lucky” ones.
Baby Rakan’s parents were denied permission to leave Gaza
He’s not too young to be wary of the doctors who are measuring him up for his new prosthesis though. He’s learned this process can sometimes hurt.
He has a lot more pain to come. His childhood is going to be consumed with multiple surgeries as he’s fitted and re-fitted with artificial limbs as he grows.
Rakan’s grandmother is his guardian on the floating hospital
Rakan too came out of Gaza without his parents who were refused permission to leave. His guardian now is his grandmother. She tells us she doesn’t support Hamas. We’re not naming her for the safety of the family still in Gaza.
“Me, my family, all of us, don’t like Hamas,” she tells us. “If I have a neighbour who says they are [Hamas], I’ll distance myself from them.”
She adds: “I don’t like them and I won’t live in the same area but it’s impossible to know who’s who.”
‘The doctor told me to count to three’
When we hear Fuad’s tale of survival, I begin to think the loss of one of his legs might be the least of his wounds. He tells of a bomb hitting his parents’ bedroom in Gaza, killing them instantly as well as three siblings.
Fuad testing out his prosthetic leg
The sixteen-year-old was showered in rubble and pulled out by his cousin who took him to Al Shifa hospital which was already crowded. “I was laying in the hallway of the hospital,” he tells us, “I could see my leg was half gone.”
The doctor told him he was going to have to amputate it and he had no anaesthetic.
“I told him, wait for my father,” he said. “I didn’t know my father was killed then… and he told me: count to three – and he cut it. He put my leg in a bag next to me.”
Fuad in hospital in Gaza
He shows us pictures of himself in the crowded hospital, sometimes with dressings on his amputated leg, sometimes not. He spent 20 days there until the hospital was stormed for the first time by Israeli troops.
“We had no water, food or electricity,” he says. “And me and the guy next to me had a spoonful of food a day.”
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I ask him if he saw any armed men or Hamas in the hospital as the Israelis designated Al Shifa a command and control centre for the militant group. “The only armed men I saw were Israeli soldiers,” he said angrily. “And if you’re asking me if we were Hamas. We are not. My father was a doctor. We had nothing to do with Hamas.”
Everywhere we look there are tales of survival and horrifying death-defying battles. A year on, the trauma and war is still waging.
:: Alex Crawford reports with camera operator Jake Britton, specialist producer Chris Cunningham and our Sky News teams inside the Gaza Strip