LAYAN al-Baz cries in agony when the effect fades of the painkillers she receives after her legs were amputated — the result of a strike on Gaza as Israel fights Hamas.
“I don’t want a false leg,” the 13-year-old Palestinian tells AFP in Khan Yunis’s Nasser hospital, in the southern Gaza Strip, where getting artificial limbs was nearly impossible anyway.
The impoverished Palestinian territory, under a crippling Israeli-led blockade for years and besieged since war erupted on October 7, suffers severe shortages of food, water and fuel, and medical supplies are scarce.
“I want them to put my legs back, they can do it,” Baz says in desperation from her bed at Nasser’s paediatric ward.
Every time she opens her eyes as the painkillers wear off, she sees her bandaged stumps.
Her mother, Lamia al-Baz, 47, says Layan was wounded last week in a strike on the Al-Qarara district of Khan Yunis, part of Israel’s unrelenting military campaign in response to bloody Hamas attacks on October 7 that Israeli officials say killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians.
According to the Hamas-run health ministry, nearly 9,500 people have been killed in Gaza since the war erupted, including at least 3,900 children.
Four of them were Baz’s relatives, killed in the strike that cost the 13-year-old’s legs, her mother says.
Lamia says two of her daughters, Ikhlas and Khitam, and two grandchildren, including a newborn baby, were killed when the Israeli strike hit Ikhlas’s home. The family were there to support Ikhlas, who had just given birth.
“Their bodies were in shreds,” says Lamia, who had to identify her daughters’ bodies at a morgue. “I identified Khitam by her earrings and Ikhlas by her toes.”
Layan, her face and arms dotted with injuries, asks: “How will I return to school when my friends walk and I can’t?”
Lamia tries to reassure her: “I will be by your side. It will all be fine. You still have a future ahead of you.”
