Young survivor caught in nightmare

A boy with an amputated leg — Wasim Muhammad.
Photo courtesy of the author

In a war-torn place where hope flickers like a dim candle in a storm, Wasim Muhammad’s journey is a heart-wrenching testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

Wasim, 12, has been caught in a nightmare that no child should ever have to endure.

Forced to flee his home in Jabaliya refugee camp with his father, Wasim sought refuge in a United Nations shelter for the displaced.

On 12 December the center was struck by Israeli missiles. Terrified, Wasim, who had been out riding his bicycle, ran to the room where his father had been staying.

The boy found his father lying dead on the floor.

Moments later, another explosion occurred. Wasim was struck in one leg.

As survivors scoured the rubble, Wasim and the wounded were placed on a makeshift donkey drawn cart to take them to hospital.

Wasim’s leg was amputated immediately. He was then transferred by ambulance to another hospital for further treatment and surgery.

But he was still unconscious, and medical staff and other patients at the new hospital first mistook him for a deceased person. They wrapped him in a shroud and performed a funeral prayer.

“I heard them praying over me, and I thought I was just sleeping,” Wasim recalled. “Then another explosion happened, and I was terrified. I woke up, still wrapped in the shroud.”

As people screamed in panic, Wasim said he began to scream, too.

A mother’s worst fear

Noha Madi, 33, Wasim’s mother, is in Khan Younis in the south. She told The Electronic Intifada that she communicated with Wasim and his father daily until that day in December.

So when contact was cut off, and she heard that the occupation army had committed a massacre in the Abu Hussein school in Jabalia camp, she feared the worst.

She reached out to everyone she could think of in the north for news of her son. She was eventually told that Wasim and his father had been killed.

Three months later, Noha then received a call from a woman who told her that she was caring for her son in a hospital and that his leg had been amputated.

She cried.

“I was so happy that he was alive,” she said. “And I felt so sad that his leg had been amputated and that he had been an orphan and wounded for three months suffering alone,” she said.

She still cries, she said, when she gets a moment to herself.

“I can’t imagine how much suffering my son experienced.”

Noha is hoping to bring her son from north to south to care for him. But so far, it has not been possible, and the situation remains extremely dangerous.

Until he is reunited with his mother, Wasim lives in fear.

“I am scared and don’t like hearing the sound of airplanes,” he told The Electronic Intifada.

But he is still looking forward and is hoping that he can get a prosthetic leg.

“I want to walk on my own again. I want to play. I want to live a normal life.”

Fedaa al-Qedra is a journalist in Gaza.