Deir el-Balah – In the intensive care unit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the little boy stares at his uncle’s face.
“Juice,” he said.
His maternal uncle, Ibrahim Abu Amsheh, complies, leaning forward to carefully insert the straw into the little boy’s mouth.
It was one of the few words uttered by three-year-old Ahmad Ibrahim Shabat since his legs were blown off in an Israeli airstrike on Monday.
His uncle Ibrahim said Ahmad was not fully aware of what happened to him.
“He doesn’t know he lost his legs,” the 28-year-old said. “He keeps asking to go out for a walk.
“He is in a lot of pain and the hospital only has Acamol (paracetamol), which you take if you have a headache, not if you have lost both legs.”
Ahmad was one of the first victims of the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip. His family’s home in the northern town of Beit Hanoon was directly targeted by an airstrike on the first day of the Israeli assault, killing his entire family except his two-year-old brother. years old, Mahmoud.
“I called my sister Diana and she told me they were getting ready to leave,” Abu Amsheh recalled. “As soon as I hung up, we learned that his house had been targeted, killing them all. Ahmad’s parents, his older brother Mohammed, his grandparents, his aunts and uncles. All gone.”
When Ibrahim went to Beit Hanoon to bury his family, he learned from neighbors that Ahmad had been taken to the Indonesian hospital alive.
“The force of the explosion threw him into the air and he landed in a neighbor’s yard,” Ibrahim said. “I took him back with me to Sheikh Radwan, where I had evacuated with my family.”
But a day later, they were forced to move again, after a house right next to them was bombed. Frightened, they went to a United Nations-run school in the al-Nasr neighborhood, but barely spent a night there before being displaced for the third time.
“That morning, the Israeli army dropped leaflets on us saying that the school was not safe and that we had to evacuate it,” Ibrahim said. “So we went to another UN school called Abu Oreiban, in the Nuseirat refugee camp. »
Israeli air attack
They spent a month at school and Ahmad became very close to his other uncle Saleh, Ibrahim’s younger brother.
“Ahmad was very attached to Saleh, and previous attacks caused him to cling even more to his uncle,” Ibrahim said. “He would wake up screaming and would only be comforted by Saleh, who would be his legal guardian.”
Then came November 13.
Ahmad wanted to go to the store with Saleh. As they were leaving the school, a series of explosions rocked the area. Ibrahim, still at school, was one of those who helped everyone run inside the classrooms to avoid being hit by shrapnel, until he realized that his brother and nephew were outside the school.
“I ran to see what happened to Ahmad and Saleh, and I saw Ahmad on the ground, without legs,” Ibrahim said. “I carried him in my arms and ran until an ambulance came to pick us up.”
At al-Awda Hospital, doctors provided basic care to the little boy before referring him to Al-Aqsa. Ibrahim looked for his brother among the wounded, but could not find him. Fear growing within him, he asked where the morgue was.
“I unwrapped the shroud from the body closest to me and saw his face,” he said, as he began to sob quietly. “Saleh was still young, only 26 years old. He had just gotten engaged. We buried him at sunset.
A long road to recovery
At Deir el-Balah hospital, Ahmad spent three hours on the operating table.
Dr. Ahmad Ismail al-Zayyan, the orthopedic surgeon who administered his case, said he arrived in a terrible condition, with both legs cut off above the knee.
“We have seen in other cases of child amputees, some of whom survived and some of whom did not, that the type of weapons Israel used melted bones and connective tissue,” al-Zayyan said.
In the long term, Ahmad’s problems are far from over, al-Zayyan said, and his biggest struggle may be getting proper fitting for prosthetics.
“His balance will also be affected since the amputation is above the knee,” he said. “And he will have muscle atrophy because his body still has a lot of growing to do.”
Al-Zayyan said he hoped Ahmad would receive the care he needs outside Gaza. “We do not have the resources to buy prosthetic parts in the Gaza Strip,” he said. “We also lack surgical instruments and anesthesia. »
“Live like other children”
In intensive care, Ahmad lies on his back, what remains of his legs heavily bandaged and spread apart. Ibrahim, who himself has a one and a half year old daughter, looks at him with tenderness.
“This boy has been through so much,” he said. “Ahmad survived, but he practically looks like the living dead. He barely had time to recover from the attack on his home which cost his family their lives.”
Ahmad was a cheeky boy and loved to play, but he is now consumed by pain and fear. He used to ask for his mother but doesn’t anymore.
“We tell her that her mother loves her very much and that she is in heaven now,” Ibrahim said, tears streaming down his face and onto his black beard.
“I wouldn’t wish what we went through on anyone.”
The uncle, who will raise Ahmad as his own son, hopes that the child will be able to have some semblance of a normal life.
“He had only just started daycare,” Ibrahim said.
“I know he won’t be the same boy he was before all this started, but I just want him to have as normal a life as possible.
I implore everyone who can to help us get him prosthetics so that he can live like other children.