GAZA: The boy keeps asking for his parents, and he wants to get up and walk, but his parents are dead and his legs have been amputated.

That is the plight of Ahmed Shabat, a four-year-old boy whose parents were killed when their home in the town of Beit Hanoun in the northeastern corner of the Gaza Strip was hit by an Israeli air strike.

“The child asks every day. ‘Where is my father? Where is my mother? Every single day. But we try very hard to make him forget, and adjust to the situation he is currently in,” said Ahmed’s uncle, Ibrahim Abu Amsha, who has become his guardian.

Abu Amsha said the force of the blast threw the boy into a neighbouring house and killed 17 family members in total. The only other survivor was Ahmed’s two-year-old brother.

Abu Amsha said he and other extended family members took in the two little boys at their home in Nuseirat refugee camp, in a different part of the strip, south of Gaza City, only for it to be hit by another Israeli strike.

Both of Ahmed’s legs were catastrophically injured. With the boy’s life in danger, he was taken to Shuhada al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, a town further south, where orthopaedic surgeon Dr Ahmed Zayyan took him into his care.

“We received this child with newly sustained injuries. He had severed lower limbs,” the doctor said at the hospital, speaking on Saturday as preparations were underway for him to operate on Ahmed.

Dr Zayyan said the hospital was overwhelmed with other gravely wounded patients, and Ahmed’s surgery would take place not in a proper operating theatre but in a room normally used for births. “We are going to carry out lower limb amputation due to severe lower limb lacerations, to the right leg. The amputation is above the knee. Same for the left leg,” he said.

During the surgery, Dr Zayyan spoke about the challenges of such a serious operation on a young child, and about how hard the ongoing situation has been on the hospital staff.

Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2023