SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Even if the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas holds, the two-year Gaza war will have taken a horrific toll. Not only were tens of thousands of people killed, according to Gaza health authorities, but 170,000 have been wounded and many of them have lost limbs. A warning that this report by NPR's Jane Arraf contains disturbing details of death and injury, including a young doctor in Gaza who describes being run over by a truck at an aid site.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Dr. Mahmoud Saleh came back to Gaza just two months before the war started in October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people, according to Israel. Saleh didn't want to get trapped in Sudan where he was studying. Instead, he ended up trapped in Gaza. He was a medical intern at Indonesian Hospital in North Gaza during the war. Gaza's medical staff have suffered the same fate as other people in Gaza - killed by airstrikes, starved, displaced.
MAHMOUD SALEH: Seeking safety and food during the famine, we displaced many times - I think seven times - fleeing from the area of war zone to what's called the humanitarian areas.
ARRAF: Displaced to the south, the only food distribution sites were run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the GHF, a U.S.-backed operation involving armed security guards and surrounded by Israeli forces. Saleh knew it was dangerous. The U.N. says more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to get food, most near GHF aid sites. Israel says it has fired warning shots at what its soldiers perceived as threats. On a Saturday in early September, he says he was at Ashakush Distribution Center when a woman stepped out from behind a metal barrier to try to get a box of food.
SALEH: As soon as she showed her head, the sniper fired, hitting her with a direct explosive round to the head. Her brain matter splattered everyone nearby, including myself. Nothing remained with the woman head.
ARRAF: He kept going. His family was starving. He managed to get a 50-pound sack of flour, he says. Another time, he says he was racing with thousands of others to get 1 of only 1,000 food boxes when security forces began firing. The Israeli military has acknowledged opening fire near distribution sites but says it only fires warning shots.
SALEH: I was running, and the bullets were explode on the asphalt just beneath my feet.
ARRAF: He said one of the bullets hit a 10-year-old boy next to him. His name was Abdullah Ahmed.
SALEH: The bullet rebound to hit him in the wrist, and the impact caused the bullet to explode, so instantly severing his left hand.
ARRAF: He stopped the bleeding with his shirt and rushed the boy to hospital. On Saturday, September 14, Gaza health authorities say at least four Palestinians were killed and 25 injured while seeking aid at the same aid site, Ashakush. Saleh was one of them. Someone threw grenades into the site. It's impossible to know whom. One blew out a truck tire and the vehicle veered into the crowd.
SALEH: I was one of those severely injured. The truck ran over both of my leg from the knee down.
ARRAF: It left a bone in his left leg sticking out. In the chaos, Saleh used his clothing as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. And then he pushed his calf bone back in.
SALEH: So I pushed back it into place so I could walk again. I walked seven minutes on my leg.
ARRAF: A car took him the rest of the way. He was able to limp into hospital and should have been OK. But he wasn't.
SALEH: The resources here are scarce, and that my wound weren't properly cleaned until 32 hour after the incident.
ARRAF: In the more than two days he waited for treatment, bacteria was eating his flesh.
SALEH: My worst fear has become realized, and they amputated my left leg above the knee.
ARRAF: Saleh is 28 years old. He's responsible for his father, his widowed sister and his nieces. When I spoke with him, he was recovering along with other patients in a tent on the Nasser Hospital grounds. It was a few days before the start of the ceasefire in October. As we talk, an Israeli drone starts hovering over the hospital.
SALEH: OK, I see a big drone above. It's so close.
ARRAF: He says he can see it's carrying rockets and says he needs to go inside. He wants people to know this.
SALEH: I want everyone hear my voice to understand I was not a soldier or a fighter. I still a doctor. I was simply a son or a brother trying to keep his family from starvation.
ARRAF: When I speak to him a few days later, he says he's overjoyed at the ceasefire but worried that, like the last one, it's a temporary reprieve.
Jane Arraf, NPR News, Amman. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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