Boy, 8, maimed in Gaza describes ordeal as Yvette Cooper makes hospital plea
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper spoke to children who had been evacuated from Gaza as she vowed to work with allies to help rebuild Gaza’s healthcare system
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper met brave youngsters who have been evacuated from Gaza for critical medical care.
Mohammed, 8, lost his leg after bombs struck near his home in Khan Younis four months ago. He was taken to a Jordanian field hospital in Gaza and then evacuated to Amman, in Jordan, where he was treated and fitted with a prosthesis.
It took him three months to learn to walk again on his prosthetic leg – but the football-mad youngster can now walk, run, and go up and down the stairs He met Ms Cooper at the Specialty Hospital in Amman, where doctors are caring for patients medically evacuated from the war-torn enclave.
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She told Mohammed: “You’re very brave.” He said he wanted to become a policeman like his dad Akram, so he can “catch all the burglars and the bad guys”.
Ms Cooper agreed, saying: “I think you will make a very good policeman. No one is stealing anything near you.” Mohammed is now studying online, including his favourite subjects of English, Arabic and Maths, and following his favourite football team, Real Madrid.
The Foreign Secretary also spoke to sisters Sarraa, 17, and Sara, 15, who suffered terrible injuries in December 2024 when a bomb struck their home as they slept. They were trapped under the rubble for more than an hour before they were rescued.
The sisters were taken to a nearby hospital in Gaza City but there was no MRI machine to assess the damage of the injury to Sara’s spine. Meanwhile, Sarraa had suffered a fracture in her left leg, as well as a head injury and shrapnel had pierced her right eye.
They were then forced to live in tents in the rubble of their old house for six months, before they were evacuated to Jordan in June. Since arriving in Amman, Sarraa has had plastic surgery on a wound in her forehead, and surgery on her eye to remove the shrapnel, as well as another surgery on her leg.
Sara, who had been completely paralysed, now has some use of her upper body and can use a wheelchair. Dr Osama Hamed, a surgeon at the hospital, has been into Gaza three times since the conflict began.
“It’s like hell,” he told the Mirror. On his first visit in early 2024, there was already a rapidly escalating shortage of medical supplies.
By his second trip in June and July last year, he said he saw significant malnutrition and muscle wasting in patients, with significant numbers of casualties. As much of the healthcare system has been destroyed, doctors were forced to make impossible choices.
He said: “We had a lot of casualties, a lot of injured patients that we could not treat because of the limited resources and the limited supplies.
“We just let them die because we did not have the resources or anything else to help them.” When he went in February and March this year, he said medical supplies had been decimated.
“People are not recovering from the significant malnutrition and there were large numbers of casualties, also lots of typically cold cases that have been neglected for so many months that we have to deal with. So things were very, very hard.”
Asked about the state of healthcare in Gaza, he said: “It has been destroyed by all means, attacking the hospitals, destroying hospitals, attacking healthcare providers.” He said: “The Palestinian surgeons have been working under severe, unimaginable conditions over the last two years.”
Ms Cooper told the Mirror that the UK is pressing hard to rebuild Gaza’s shattered healthcare system. Britain also stands ready to take more patients who have been medically evacuated for NHS treatment, after the first group arrived last month, she said.
She said: “We are ready to continue to help but we also want to help restore and rebuild Gaza’s health service as well. I was talking to the Saudis about how we can improve the health support for Gaza but also talking to Germany, there are other countries that are interested in what more can be done to help get health services back up and running in Gaza.
“But we also stand ready to continue to help through medevac processes as well.”
