Gaza’s child amputees are growing faster than their prosthetics allow
Mohanad El-Hemrawi reports in Mondoweiss on 15 October 2026:
Abdul-Rahman al-Nashash, 11, holds onto the edge of a chair and pushes his left leg into a plastic prosthetic that doesn’t fit him anymore. The bone that was cut two years ago has kept growing inside, and it presses painfully against his skin. His doctors told him to stop wearing it. He wears it anyway, every morning, pulling the straps tight and rolling his pants down so no one sees the plastic before he takes his first step. He bites his lip when it hurts and holds his shoulders straight so no one can tell he is limping. “He forces himself to wear it,” his mother said, “just so no one knows he has a disability.”
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As a child grows, the bone in the amputated leg grows too, but the prosthetic doesn’t. At some point it stops fitting, and sometimes the child needs another operation before he can get a new one. In Gaza, that often means starting over with surgery, then rehabilitation, then a new limb if one can be made at all, because Israel restricts the parts and materials needed to make and repair them. Some children in Gaza have outgrown their limbs and are waiting for new ones. Others never received one, because there are none in Gaza that fit them.
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The World Health Organization estimates that more than 5,000 people in Gaza have lost limbs since October 2023, and that one in five of them is a child. Of 2,277 amputees the WHO evaluated between September 2024 and May 2026, only 502 had been fitted with a prosthetic. Eighteen percent were children, and 32 percent had above-knee amputations. 225 needed revision surgery on what remained of their limb, and only eight prosthetists were working in the entire Strip.
According to the same report, no rehabilitation equipment entered Gaza between May 2024 and April 14, 2026. By that date, 18 shipments, including prosthetic limbs and children’s wheelchairs, were still waiting for clearance, for 136 days on average and 526 days in the longest case. In the six months before that, four shipments were rejected.