How the lives of the few child amputees allowed to leave Gaza are being rebuilt elsewhere
Warning: This story contains distressing images
To find safety from Gaza, you need first to become the victim of a catastrophic injury and then be lucky enough to be identified, selected and extracted.
That’s one of the many brutal truths from this long war.
I have followed the stories of some of the few Palestinians who have left Gaza for medical care.
Less than 100 children have been granted permissions and temporary visas for the United States to receive treatment since the war began in October 2023.
In all, several hundred children have left Gaza for treatment in that time – most to other Middle Eastern countries. It has not been possible to confirm a precise number but we do know that the UK has not accepted any.
Eight Palestinian children were aboard Royal Jordanian flight 263
A few weeks ago, at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, the largest single group of children from Gaza arrived in America for treatment.
Eight Palestinian children were aboard Royal Jordanian flight 263 from Amman.
The number, tiny though it is, reflects an enormous achievement by the charity that has made this happen – the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF).
But it is also reflective of deep diplomatic and political failures; the fact that it was only possible to extract eight of many thousands who need urgent medical treatment.
The doors into the arrival hall at O’Hare opened to reveal a fleet of wheelchairs each carrying a child bearing the scars of the war they had left behind.
Among them, two brothers who survived the bombing that killed their sister.
Behind them, a boy who lost all his siblings and his arm. He is now his mother’s only child. She travelled with him. She too is now an amputee.
The last to emerge through the arrival door was a dot in her wheelchair.
Rahaf, just two, lost both her legs in an Israeli attack on her home in August, not long after she had learnt to walk.
Both Rahaf’s legs had to be amputated
Rahaf at home in Gaza
All their stories reflect a collective horror. They are the civilian victims of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza which followed the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.
The children arrived in America after a massive collective effort involving the PCRF and Shriners – one of America’s largest non-profit children’s hospital networks.
Working with multiple governments they facilitated the extractions.
Israel controls all of Gaza’s borders and has only granted evacuations in rare circumstances, only in exceptional cases and only with one parent or guardian.
After their flight, the children travelled to Shriners Hospitals in different parts of the country – California, Oregon, Illinois, South Carolina, Kentucky and Missouri.
It was in Missouri this week that I spent a day with two-year-old Rahaf and her mother Israa Saed.
Rahaf Saed plays in the park near her new home in Missouri
Rahaf with her mother Israa Saed
We met at the home of the American couple who have volunteered to be their hosts for their time in the US.
Six months since the bombing of Rahaf’s home and three weeks since she and her mother arrived in America, I’d come to see how a little life was now being rebuilt.
The first thing that hit me as we sat in the host family’s living room was how happy Rahaf now seems.
Her right leg is missing from below her knee and her left leg is almost completely gone – amputated just below her hip.
Yet she was darting around the floor in front of us chasing a blue balloon with shrieks of laughter. Her mum smiled as she watched.
The mood belied the enormity of their experience and the dilemma of their journey.
The family’s apartment block before it was bombed
The apartment building engulfed in flames as it was bombed in August
The apartment block after the bombing
Until this month, Israa and Rahaf had never left Gaza. Now they are in America, without the language and without the rest of their family – Israa’s husband and her two young boys.
“My other two sons are still young and… do I need to stay with my other kids or do I need to come out?,” she said about her dilemma.
“Rahaf needs her mum. I could not let her go [to America] alone. And especially also with my fractures, my elbows, my arms. I was hoping for some treatment for myself.”
Israa was injured in the same attack on 1 August. Both her arms were badly damaged. New X-rays taken since she arrived in America show a section of bone still missing in her right forearm.
Israa still has a section of bone missing in her right forearm
I asked about her family back in Gaza.
“Yes, we do talk but the internet is not the best. We still manage to have some conversations. The question that is always repeated is: ‘when can you come back? When will the little ones get you back? When can we meet again?'”
Israa sobbed. The pain was clear on her face.
“God willing, my wish is for my kids to live safely far from any conflicts and war. Safely. That is my wish.”
We looked at photographs on Israa’s phone of Rahaf in a pink dress before the attack and a video of her walking up the steps of their apartment block.
“She loved to be a princess,” Israa said.
Rahaf back in Gaza
Israa then showed me a photograph of Rahaf on a hospital bed in Gaza a few weeks after the attack looking down at her amputated legs.
I asked if she understands what has happened to her.
“She did ask ‘my legs are destroyed, what happened?'” Israa said they told her it was a rocket. Now, Rahaf avoids the subject. “If we start the conversation, she will change the subject.”
The good news is that Rahaf’s amputations were done well given the situation.
Circumstance has ensured that Gazan medics have become among the best in the world at trauma surgery. But that’s where the care ends in Gaza. The shortage of doctors, equipment and functioning hospitals makes prolonged care impossible.
Amputations require ongoing work from doctors with various skills including orthopaedic surgeons, plastic surgeons, and prosthetists.
Children with lost limbs demand a whole extra layer of care because they are still growing. Rahaf will need new prosthetic limbs frequently as she gets bigger.
Prosthetists estimate that for every death in a war, there are likely to be three times as many surviving amputees. According to the Gaza health ministry the number of dead in the war has now topped 45,000.
According to analysis by the charity Oxfam more children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military than in the equivalent period in any other conflict of the past 18 years.
Those numbers give a sense of the number of amputees, adults and children, still inside Gaza.
Through pressure from charities and commitments of treatment from hospitals, the United States has admitted a small number of Gazan children, but the key blocker is the Israeli government, which controls access to the strip through all the borders.
Josh Paul is a former US State Department official who resigned last year over the Gaza war.
Speaking to Sky News he said the situation with injured children represents a deep failure of American diplomacy.
“Even on something as humanitarian as saving the lives of children, getting them to critical care, it’s not that America isn’t willing to ask. It’s that America isn’t willing to press,” Mr Paul said.
“And it could be done in a second if they wanted to. If President Biden picked up the phone [to Israel] and said, ‘we are stopping our arms shipments until you let out children, until you let out critically injured children or critically sick children for care, we are not standing by you’.”
On why more hasn’t been done, Mr Paul said: “It’s the political costs… he believed he would pay. I think that is a severe miscalculation.
“I think American public opinion has shifted radically and is going to continue to shift.
“I also think that the geopolitical incentives here have also shifted and there is a cost, a clear cost, that we are paying for our unconditional support to Israel.”
Watch and read our other stories on Gaza’s children:
Stuck in Gaza with the rarest of diseases
Girl with rare disease leaves Gaza
Sky meets teenager whose uncle amputated her leg
Israa, Rahaf and Sky correspondent Mark Stone
The next step for Rahaf is prosthetics. It is the kindness of strangers and their donations that will make all this happen.
Then it will be time for her to walk again. But a reunion with family is, for now, far less certain.
International teams searching for the bodies of hostages have been allowed to cross Israel’s military boundary in Gaza, according to an Israeli government spokesperson.
Hamas says it has expanded its search for the bodies of hostages in Gaza, a day after a team of Egyptian experts arrived to help retrieve them.
The team is working with the Red Cross during the search.
“Israel is aware that Hamas knows where our deceased hostages are, in fact, located. If Hamas made more of an effort,
they would be able to retrieve the remains of our hostages,” the government spokesperson said on Sunday.
Teams using excavators in Khan Younis. Pic: AP
Pic: AP
The military boundary, often referred to as the “yellow line”, is a boundary for Israel Defence Forces (IDF) troops in Gaza, established by the ceasefire agreement.
The fragile ceasefire, brokered by the US, relies on Hamas returning all the remains of Israeli hostages as soon as possible, but in the past five days, no bodies have been released.
Read more: Revealed: The plan for a ‘New Gaza’
On Saturday, the Egyptian team arrived with an excavator and bulldozers to help search for bodies, as part of efforts by international mediators to make sure the ceasefire holds.
The bodies of 13 hostages remain in Gaza, with Hamas chief Khalil al Hayya saying the group has started searching in new areas on Sunday morning.
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Israel backing armed groups despite Gaza ceasefire
As part of the ceasefire deal, Israel agreed to give back 15 bodies of Palestinians for every body of a hostage.
Israel has now sent back the bodies of 195 Palestinians, while Hamas has returned 15 bodies of hostages.
US President Donald Trump warned he is “watching very closely” to ensure Hamas returns more bodies.
“Some of the bodies are hard to reach, but others they can return now and, for some reason, they are not,” he wrote on Truth Social.
“Let’s see what they do over the next 48 hours. I am watching this very closely,” he said in his post on Saturday.
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Vance: ‘Optimistic a ceasefire will hold’
Last week, Hayya told an Egyptian media outlet that efforts to retrieve the bodies faced challenges because of the massive destruction, burying them deep underground.
On Saturday night, Israeli forces struck the central Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza for the second time in a week, according to Awda Hospital.
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Sky News reports from inside a Gaza City suburb
The IDF claimed it was targeting militants associated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group who were planning to attack Israeli troops.
Islamic Jihad, the second largest militant group in Gaza, denied it was preparing for an attack.
Hamas called the strike a “clear violation” of the ceasefire and accused Benjamin Netanyahu of attempting to sabotage President Trump’s efforts to end the war.
The strike on Saturday came hours after US secretary of state Marco Rubio left Israel.
He was the latest in a series of White House officials to visit Israel and visit a new centre for civilian and military coordination that is attempting to oversee the ceasefire.
US vice president JD Vance was in Israel earlier this week, as were American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.
Two men have been arrested following a robbery at the Louvre museum in Paris which saw thieves escape with priceless jewellery, including part of the French crown jewels.
Confirming arrests had been made on Saturday night, French public prosecutor Laure Beccuau appeared furious with the way the arrests were announced.
She said: “I deeply deplore the hasty disclosure of this information by informed individuals, without consideration for the investigation.
“This revelation can only harm the investigative efforts of the hundred or so investigators involved in the search for both the stolen jewellery and all the perpetrators.”
Police officers near a basket lift used by the thieves. Pic: AP
While Ms Beccuau did not confirm the number of arrests, she said one man had been arrested as he was preparing to leave the country from Charles de Gaulle Airport.
A second man was arrested on the same evening, also in the Paris region, according to French media.
Ms Beccuau did not say whether jewels had been recovered.
Both men are originally from Seine-Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, according to French daily paper Le Parisien.
The operation is understood to have been swiftly launched after investigators, who had been monitoring the two individuals for days, realised that one of them was about to flee abroad. French media reported he was set to board a flight to Algeria.
Ms Beccuau said it was too early to provide any further details, but would say more at the end of the period of police custody.
The Louvre is one of the most famous museums in the world. Pic: AP
Commenting on the arrests on social media, France’s interior minister Laurent Nunez praised the investigators for “working tirelessly” and said “the investigations must continue while respecting the confidentiality of the inquiry”.
The suspects are now in pre-trial detention as part of investigations into the “organised theft” and “criminal conspiracy to commit a crime”. They can be held for up to 96 hours.
The men are suspected of being part of the group of criminals who used a cherry picker to reach a window in the Apollo Gallery of the Louvre, smashing display cases and making off with jewels worth £76m. They fled on motorbikes.
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‘Matter of time’ before gang hit Louvre
One of the world’s most famous museums, attracting up to 30,000 visitors a day, the Louvre was forced to close last Sunday morning after thieves accessed a gallery containing the French crown jewels at around 9.30am local time (8.30am UK time).
It took them less than eight minutes to steal eight “priceless” objects, including sapphire and emerald necklaces, and a diamond brooch containing 2,438 diamonds.
A ninth item – the emerald crown of Napoleon III’s wife, Empress Eugenie – was stolen but recovered, damaged at the scene.
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The Louvre reopened to visitors earlier this week.
Sky News has contacted French police for comment.
US President Donald Trump has overseen the signing of an expanded ceasefire deal between Thailand and Cambodia, which he helped negotiate this summer to resolve their border dispute.
The ceremony took place shortly after Mr Trump arrived in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur for the ASEAN summit on Sunday, in what he described as a “momentous day”.
“There was a lot of killing. And then we got it stopped, very quickly,” he said before Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul signed the agreement.
“We did something that a lot of people said couldn’t be done,” said Mr Trump. Mr Manet called it a “historic day” and Mr Charnvirakul said the agreement creates “the building blocks for a lasting peace”.
The ceasefire agreement calls for Thailand to release 18 Cambodian soldiers in captivity and for both countries to start withdrawing heavy weapons from the border.
The US president said he had signed economic deals with both nations and was scheduled to finalise a trade agreement with Malaysia later in the day.
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim welcomes Mr Trump on the first stop of his trip to Asia. Pic: Reuters
During the ASEAN Summit, regional leaders are expected to work on stabilising ties with the US.
Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and a troupe of ceremonial dancers greeted Mr Trump at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. He paused on the red carpet to dance with the performers before getting into his limousine.
Kuala Lumpur is the first stop of Mr Trump’s week-long trip to the region, which also includes visits to Japan and South Korea.
This includes a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea.
Asked by a reporter whether rare earths were discussed in the US-China talks that began on Saturday, US trade negotiator Jamieson Greer said a wide range of topics were covered, including extending the trade truce.
“I believe we are reaching a point where the leaders will have a very productive meeting,” Mr Greer said.
Mr Trump is also expected to discuss tariffs with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is among the leaders attending the APEC summit.
Mr Trump joins performers in a dance during a welcome ceremony at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Pic: Reuters
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East Timor, Asia’s youngest nation, officially became ASEAN’s 11th member on Sunday, fulfilling a vision its current president had nearly 50 years ago, when the country was still a Portuguese colony.
Also known as Timor-Leste, the nation of 1.4 million is among Asia’s poorest and hopes joining the bloc will strengthen its fledgling economy. At roughly $2bn, it represents only a small fraction of ASEAN’s combined $3.8trn GDP.
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