He lost his arm in Gaza. His mother was determined to get him out.

Mint

a day ago

Boom. The explosion was still ringing in Ibrahim Abuowda's ears when he saw the schoolyard crowd scatter and looked up to see a limb flying above him. 'I was wondering, whose arm is that?" the then-13-year-old recalled thinking, before fainting.
A man he didn't know tried to carry him to safety but another explosion went off, sending shrapnel into Ibrahim's chest and injuring the man. The boy awoke when the man dropped him to the ground. Ibrahim's oldest brother then rushed to help. They ducked behind tires and a third explosion went off, this time piercing Ibrahim's back with shrapnel.
Their mother, Amani Abuowda, was in the school sheltering with her husband and their other children. She raced toward the schoolyard, toward the bombs, toward Ibrahim. Other women in the shelter blocked her path, and locked her in a classroom to keep her from going outside.
When the explosions stopped, she said, she couldn't find Ibrahim in the destruction. She walked in a daze to the nearest hospital. Scanning the throngs of injured people, she spotted her son, covered in blood and wearing an oxygen mask. Half of his right arm was gone. His blood pressure had plummeted. The medical staff told her he would not survive.
The war in Gaza has taken an especially large toll on children. Gaza's health ministry estimates that as of early August, roughly 18,430 children have been killed in the conflict since October 2023—about 30% of the now more than 62,000 total deaths.
The ministry says 156,230 people in Gaza have been injured, including thousands of amputees, but it hasn't been able to estimate current numbers for children due to challenges on the ground. Unicef says that just two months into the war, about 1,000 children already had one or more of their limbs amputated.
With most of Gaza's hospitals destroyed or in disarray, some injured or ill children have left on highly publicized evacuation flights to Arab nations. A few of the most severely injured children have been quietly whisked away to America for treatment.
Their evacuations are arranged by a loosely connected group of nonprofits and activists pulling strings, calling in favors and navigating the protocols and whims of four governments amid war. But first they have to figure out which children they can help. That process is often by chance: the right person at the right time scrolling through social media and stopping on one story.
This week, the possibility of those transfers became more difficult. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday said the U.S. would pause issuing visitor visas for people from Gaza as officials re-evaluate how they are vetted and to ensure people or organizations have no connections to Hamas. The move came after criticism from some conservative lawmakers and commenters.
The Israeli military, in response to a request by The Wall Street Journal, said it had struck 'terrorist infrastructure" near the site where Ibrahim was injured, and that such strikes involve assessing that 'the expected incidental harm to civilians and civilian property is not excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage of the strike."
Ibrahim's mother knew nothing about the intricacies involved in even one evacuation on the day he lost his arm, in November 2023. She only knew that her son had to live, and his best chance of that was to get out of Gaza.
At Kamal Adwan Hospital, the medical staff were surprised that Ibrahim was still alive 24 hours later, his mother said. His arm had been tied up with a rope to stanch his bleeding. Doctors decided to operate on it even though they had run out of anesthesia and blood for transfusions. The boy said he was half-conscious when he felt the surgeon's saw cutting through his bone.
Ibrahim was far from out of the woods. His arm stump, which ended below the elbow, needed daily dressings, to be kept sterile, and the hospital said the shrapnel lodged throughout his body could be life-threatening. But it could do no more. Abuowda, his mother, made a decision. She left her husband and other children, and helped Ibrahim onto a crowded bus for a 17-mile ride south to another hospital.
There, doctors again said Ibrahim would die. He had lost so much blood that he continued to slip in and out of consciousness. Abuowda begged them for attention, but they were flooded with other patients who had better odds of surviving.
Abuowda was 37, and before the war, ran a beauty salon while her husband ran a convenience store. They had four sons and three daughters, the youngest then 7. Ibrahim was their spirited and playful fourth child.
The mother started stealing gauze and disinfectant to clean her son's wounds herself. She turned to Palestinian journalists outside the hospital, asking them to videotape her picking shrapnel out of Ibrahim's body. She thought making a commotion would get the attention of the medical staff. It worked. A hospital manager promised to help and on their 10th day at the hospital, Ibrahim received two units of blood, then another surgery on his arm. Once infected tissue was removed, the stump ended above the elbow.
Those days were some of the most difficult for Ibrahim. He would be lost in thought, rocking his body back and forth while sticking his thumb in his mouth, Abuowda said. At one point he begged her to bring him a knife so he could end his life. Such was his guilt over keeping his mother away from the rest of the family.
Around the hospital, the bombardments closed in. An explosion hit the room next door to Ibrahim, killing a girl who was supposed to leave Gaza just a few days later. Some of the medical staff began to flee.
Emergency medicine doctor Dr. Haytham Ahmed stayed, and so did Ibrahim and his mother. In January 2024, Ahmed borrowed a journalist's microphone and recorded a video of Ibrahim speaking from a hospital bed. 'I can't eat, write or play," he says in Arabic. 'I wish I could get back to what I was like before."
Ahmed felt the boy needed to leave Gaza and hoped that a video might get him the attention of a humanitarian group that could help. 'It's a chance, not a promise," he told Ibrahim's mother.
The doctor went up to the fourth floor where there was just enough phone signal to post the video on Instagram.
In Amman, Jordan, Maya Haddad, an employee at the American nonprofit Kinder Relief, had been transfixed by the footage out of Gaza. After the war broke out, Haddad had given up her job as a special needs teacher to focus on helping families in Gaza. She quickly became plugged into a network of Palestinian journalists inside Gaza who were in touch with aid workers. She sometimes fielded over 100 messages a day from people in Gaza seeking help.
One morning, Haddad received a text from a friend in Paris. It was the video of Ibrahim. Haddad tracked down Abuowda's phone number through a journalist contact, although by the time she got in touch, the mother and Ibrahim had fled the hospital and were sleeping on the street.
The first order of business was to find them shelter. They eventually ended up at an American field hospital that had just opened.
Haddad and Abuowda soon began speaking about the complicated process of leaving Gaza. Patients with severe enough conditions could request permission from Gaza's Ministry of Health to leave; health officials would pass on names to Egypt, which at the time was allowing foreigners and some wounded Palestinians in at the border. Egypt would then pass names onto Israel for consideration.
Abuowda and Ibrahim were already trying that process, but Haddad said that she didn't see their names on the lists of approved evacuees.
Haddad confirmed with an official contact at Gaza's health ministry that it had been submitting both names. The official told Haddad that her database showed Abuowda was rejected at least 15 times by Israel between November 2023 and Feb. 18, 2024. Cogat, the Israeli military unit that coordinates humanitarian aid in the Palestinian territories, didn't respond to requests for comment.
U.S. officials say that Israel often bars Palestinians it deems to have some connection to Hamas from leaving. Abuowda said neither she nor her relatives were involved with Hamas.
Their escape from Gaza had hit a roadblock, when a message appeared on Abuowda's phone that February: 'Hello, do I have the mother of Ibrahim? With you is Tareq Hilat from the United States and I work with PCRF."
Ibrahim, now 15 years old, rests his head after eating lunch.A page in Ibrahim's notebook shows his name, written with his remaining hand, his left.
Hilat, a medical student at the University of South Carolina, had also found Ahmed's video. Between his studies, he had joined Palestine Children's Relief Fund, an American nonprofit helping evacuate children from Gaza. Before the war, PCRF had facilitated medical evacuations for patients with complicated cases on a regular basis. It was difficult work then but had gotten exponentially harder. Like Kinder, the staff there reviewed dozens of posts of children every day, trying to make contact with their families.
Abuowda was encouraged by Hilat's energy and optimism. She gave him consent for Ibrahim's evacuation and treatment in the U.S. Hilat had already been reaching out to hospitals to see which could take on injured Palestinian children pro bono.
In March 2024, he sent Ibrahim's medical files to Shriners Hospitals for Children, headquartered in Florida. The group had facilities across the U.S. and specialized in amputation and burns cases. It had a history of accepting kids injured by war, including from Ukraine.
In Gaza, Ibrahim was doing a bit better, yet there was so little food that he and his mother sometimes went for days without eating.
Every day, Hilat checked the official list of approved evacuees to see if PCRF's children appeared. On March 21, 2024, the list showed Ibrahim—but not his mother.
Hilat knew that Egyptian security guards sometimes let mothers of young children through the border crossing even if their names weren't on the exit list. He suggested that Abuowda try with Ibrahim the very next day.
The two went on foot. An official on the Gaza side waved them through. On the Egyptian side however, the security official refused to let Abuowda pass. In her excitement, she had let slip that they were headed to America. The man then insisted that an official from the U.S. Embassy meet them at the border.
They tried the same crossing and failed twice more over the next few weeks. Each time, Ibrahim walked back to the hospital in silence and climbed into his cot, burying his head into the covers. His mother, who didn't have a bed, retreated to her sleeping spot on the ground underneath Ibrahim's cot. She heard her son's faint weeping. She wept too.
In September, a State Department official reached out to Hilat at PCRF to ask for a list of children it wanted to evacuate. The border crossing with Egypt was now closed, but the U.S. government had worked out an alternative exit route through Israel into Jordan.
Hilat chose 10 children with some of the most dire situations among hundreds of names. There was 2-year-old Rahaf Saed, who had lost both of her legs in an explosion that also injured her mother. There was Nasser Abu Draby, 8, who was missing a hand and lost his father and two siblings. There were two brothers—Ahmed Ayyash, 8, who sustained a major injury to his left leg and Kenan Ayyash, 9, who still had open wounds on his arm.
The rest were teenagers. Ibrahim, who had turned 14, made the list.
Shriners agreed to take all the children.
On Nov. 7, the U.S. told Hilat that only two of the children and their companions had the green light from Israel to leave. The companions of Ibrahim and of seven other children hadn't been approved.
Then, on Nov. 21, to Hilat's surprise, the U.S. told PCRF that Israel had approved the remaining cases—children and companions—with no explanation.
Amani Abuowda, right, talks with Vivian Khalaf of the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.Ibrahim prays after dinner.
Days later, all the families gathered at the European Hospital in southern Gaza to get into a World Health Organization vehicle that would drive them out. Many of them had never been beyond Gaza's fences until that day.
At a hotel in Amman, PCRF staff led the families to a buffet-style dining room where they were told to help themselves. Abuowda said she and the other mothers began to cry, thinking of their hungry relatives in Gaza.
On the flight from Jordan to the U.S., Abuowda prayed again and again for God to protect them. It was their first time flying.
They landed in Chicago in December. The freezing weather was a shock to them, as was the snow that covered the ground a few weeks later.
Abuowda and Ibrahim's first stop was the house of a young American couple who were Egyptian and Syrian, but didn't speak much Arabic. The families used a combination of broken Arabic and English to understand each other.
A few days later, a PCRF volunteer took Abuowda and Ibrahim to Shriners Children's Chicago for the first time. The doctors began running tests on Ibrahim, including a CT scan of his abdomen and pelvic area. They thought the shrapnel was small enough that his body would absorb it over time, so chose not to remove it.
In January, the hospital presented Ibrahim with options for a prosthetic arm. One had a metal hook, while another was shaped like a hand. Neither option seemed particularly versatile to the boy, who said he had imagined something more like a bionic arm. He went with the plastic hand and months of physical therapy followed.
The weight of the limb and the straps around his back have been hard for Ibrahim to get used to. He has to use his shoulder muscles to pick up a cup.
Ibrahim has at times returned to his boisterous self. He was able to enroll in the second half of eighth grade, and is learning English and discovering the joys of using a calculator for math. The highlight of his summer so far was going on the roller coasters at Six Flags.
Abuowda is building an online teaching platform for Arabic and religion. But her thoughts frequently turn back to Gaza, where the rest of the family is living in a tent and have to move constantly due to the fighting.
The flow of agonizing news is relentless. Her father died in an explosion in Gaza. More recently, her son Mohammed was caught in an explosion when he was out looking for food; shrapnel flew into his head, killing him quickly. Another son, Muath, has made it to Egypt, where he is trying to get medical treatment for his injury. Abuowda says her eldest son was detained late last year and is on a list of Palestinians at Ofer prison, an Israeli facility in the occupied West Bank.
Her girls depend on their father now. 'We miss you so much. You can yell at us, just come back soon," they keep saying. The youngest is now 8.
Abuowda and Ibrahim's visitor visas allow them to stay in the U.S. up to five years, but they are heading to Egypt soon, so they can at least reunite with Abuowda's son there. What they really want is to go back home, to Gaza. But it feels out of reach for now, perhaps more improbable than their journey out.
Write to Chao Deng at [e-mail]