At fifteen years old, Mahmoud Abou Nusair remembers his passion for football, before Israeli fire in Gaza took his leg and his ambitions away. He is one of more than 450 Palestinian amputees receiving medical care and artificial limbs at a centre in Amman and within Gaza. The initiative is run by Jordan’s Restoring Hope Society.
On October 31, 2025, during a ceasefire agreed that month, Mahmoud was searching for firewood in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip when a bullet struck his right leg. Gaza’s health care system was shattered after three years of war. His injury worsened, and he required an amputation below the knee.
The doctor came to see me and told me, We have to amputate your foot, he said.
My mother said, No, doctor, that is his soul. What will he do if he wants to go out, play football, skate or go to the beach? It is a sin to cut off his foot.
My first reaction was to scream, he said. Then I took a look at the injured people around me in the hospital. They all had amputated arms and legs, so I told myself: my injury is better.
After the shooting, he waited half an hour until a horse-drawn cart arrived to transport him to Al-Aqsa hospital. He was later transferred to Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where he spent two weeks. He still mourns the loss of his sports equipment and five footballs, destroyed when his home was demolished.
At the medical facility in Amman, seventeen-year-old Zuhdi Abou Shanab stated that he lost his entire right leg in a strike that killed nine people and injured 28 others on September 8, 2025. I was on my way to buy groceries for my mother and I ran into a friend so we stopped to talk, he said.
When they struck the building we were standing next to, I lost consciousness and when I woke up, I found myself wounded and bleeding. A week later, the doctors told me that I was suffering from an infection in the artery in my leg and that three veins and three arteries in my leg had been severed. An operation to reattach the blood vessels failed, leading to the amputation.
The war has devastated us and torn us away from our friends, he added. Despite this, he holds on to hope that his condition will improve, dreaming of returning to Gaza.
Abdulrahman Rihan lost the use of his legs when his family home in Jabalia in northern Gaza was bombed on the morning of January 12, 2025. Both Abdulrahman and his father sustained severe wounds and moved through multiple hospitals in Gaza for difficult and painful surgeries. Three of his brothers were also wounded in the blast.
Their father, 42-year-old Imad Rihan, lost his left leg. He recounted that he had to undergo some surgeries without anaesthetic in Gaza. This war was very hard on us, he said. No matter how much we talk about the war, or how much you have seen of it, all of this remains but a drop in the ocean compared to the reality that we witnessed with our own eyes.
