Out of Gaza

Amputations. Disfiguration. Brain damage. Their injuries are life-changing.

Ruba Abu Jibba lost an eye during shelling as her family was fleeing Israeli tanks in Gaza, she says.

She and some other badly wounded Gazans survived a war that has killed tens of thousands. They made it out for medical treatment in Qatar, where we photographed and interviewed them.

They are alive — even if some are not sure they still want to be.

Mahmoud Ajjour’s family fled their home after Israeli shells began falling, his mother, Noor Ajjour, says. The going was slow, and the boy went back to urge everyone on.

When an explosion ripped off one hand and mangled the other, his pleas changed. He asked to be left behind, saying: “I am going to die.”

In Qatar, Mahmoud, 9, is using his feet for everything.

“My biggest wish now is to get prosthetics,” he says.

Abdullah al-Haj, a photographer, lost both legs in an airstrike as he was taking pictures of two fishermen emerging from the sea with their catch.

At first, when the war began between Israel and Hamas, he refused to pick up his camera.

“I don’t like pictures of destruction,” he says. “I usually take pictures of the beauty and love in Gaza.”

Fatima Abu Shaar’s 14-year-old son had just cooked his first meal, a moment of celebration at a time when celebration was scarce. “It tastes great,” she recalls telling him.

Then the kitchen shook with explosions.

“My arm was severed in front of my eyes in the sink,” she says.

Her daughter Tala, 8, lost a foot, and is waiting for a prosthetic.

“The thing that scares me the most now is my daughter’s future,” Ms. Abu Shaar says.

The war in the Gaza Strip began after Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 people. The Israeli military says it has taken measures to limit civilian harm as it tries to defeat the militants, but its campaign has taken a staggering toll on Palestinians. Of the tens of thousands killed in the Israeli bombardment and invasion, Gazan health officials estimate about 15,000 were children. 

Many Gazans have suffered horrific wounds, but few have been able to leave for treatment. When some met with us in Qatar, they lamented those they left behind, the living and the dead alike.

At some point over the past 13 months of war, most of Gaza’s two million residents have been forced by the fighting to flee their homes — often more than once. Many left bearing only a few belongings and the hope that somewhere else, anywhere else, might be safer than where they were.

Often, that was not the case.

Islam al-Ghoulah, a psychologist, moved with her family from their home in Gaza City to a tent in Khan Younis. Then, unable to stand the harsh winter conditions, they rented an apartment in Deir al-Balah.

“As soon as we arrived, Israeli warplanes bombed a mosque next to us,” Ms. al-Ghoulah says.

Ibrahim al-Dahouk, 15, was also driven from his family home in Gaza City, in his case by an explosion next door that severed an arm. Desperate to try to save the limb, his father put him in a wheelchair and pushed him to a hospital in a city to the south.

The Gazans we interviewed spoke of a world in which explosions can render landscapes and bodies alike unrecognizable in a split second.

 “I saw my leg like sand — it was there but the bone was shattered,” says Nusaiba Kleib, 9. She was fleeing with her family, she says, when a missile hit. Her leg was amputated.

Sadeen Nofal, 4, was pulled from the rubble of her home after a blast that killed her mother and father. “Her leg had become infected, and she needed surgery due to the infection reaching the bone,” her grandmother says.

Even those who may be too young to remember a war whose death toll has horrified the world will live their days in its shadow after it eventually ends.

Aid groups say the fighting has taken a brutal toll on the children of Gaza. Some 19,000 there are believed to be orphaned, the U.N. says.

At the age of just 2, Melisya Joudeh lost not just her mother and her father in an airstrike but also her brother, uncles, five cousins, her grandmother and two aunts.

“She is now the only surviving member of our family, and I am her only guardian,” says her aunt, Yasmin Joudeh. Shrapnel hit Melisya’s spine and she can no longer walk.

Haya al-Barai, 15, also lost both parents. She, too, is paraplegic, and was initially thought dead. “I asked why I was in a shroud,” she says.

Before the war, medical care was hard to come by in Gaza, which has faced a blockade by its neighbors Israel and Egypt since Hamas seized control in 2007. Those patients who could left for treatment outside the territory.

After the war started, when the need for care became more urgent than ever, crossing the border became nearly impossible. Thousands of desperate Gazans, many wounded, others suffering from cancer and other serious diseases, could only hope for a chance to make it to places like Qatar and Jordan, which have taken in patients.

Wafa Abu Semaan, 27, had been trying to negotiate Gaza's medical system even before she was wounded in a strike that killed her husband. She had thyroid cancer. And she was pregnant.

“When I woke up, they told me that the baby was still in my womb,” she says. “I couldn’t believe them.” Doctors transferred her to Egypt, where she gave birth to a son and was given a leg prosthesis.

Nesma Abu Jiyab, 18, lost a leg but struggled to find care in Gaza. “The hardest thing,” she says, “was when my father was cleaning the wound with vinegar.”

Last month, Israel reported that more than 4,000 people had left Gaza for medical treatment. But in June, the U.N. said that more than than 10,000 Gazans urgently needed care available only elsewhere. Health officials in Gaza have put the total number of wounded at more than 100,000.

With so much of their homeland in ruins, the relatively few who have made it out, like those in Qatar, do not know when, or if, they will be able to return. For some, even after treatment, their medical hurdles remain daunting.

Sanad al-Arabi lost one arm and has only a thumb on the other hand. “My biggest fear is Sanad’s future: whether he will be able to take care of himself,” says his grandmother.

Amina Ghanam remembers the ground shaking as her father sat sewing with his children. Then a tank crushed their trailer. Pressed against him in the rubble, Amina felt her father's breath on her face. “Now it was gone,” she says. 

Amina, 13, left Gaza in January. “I always feel guilty for leaving him and my sister Asia behind,” she says. “I fear that maybe she was still alive, and I left her.”