Gaza home for largest group of paediatric amputees in modern history

“Prosthetic legs do not walk on rubble”.

This was accredited photojournalist Eman Mohammed’s succinct and shocking description of the ongoing horror being visited on the children of Gaza by Israel.

Ms Mohammed was speaking to The Derry News in the city’s Museum of Free Derry, where her powerful exhibition ‘Layan’s Steps’ is currently on display.

‘Layan’s Steps’ tells the story of the extraordinary journey of 13-year-old Layan al-Baz who lost both of her legs in an Israeli airstrike and found hope and healing in the United States.

Eman said she was drawn to document Layan’s story because there are so many amputations taking place in Gaza as a result of the actions of the Israeli Army.

'Layan's Steps' by Eman Mohammed - @DerryNow digital report thread.

“Prosthetic legs do not walk on rubble”

This was accredited photojournalist Eman Mohammed’s (@emangaza48) succinct and shocking description of the ongoing horror being visited on the children of Gaza by… pic.twitter.com/Bgv3fj6lqb

— Catherine McGinty (@CathMcGin_Tea) May 29, 2025

“I felt like we were going to end up with an entire generation of amputees and that turned out to be true,” she said.

“Dr Ghassas Abu-Sittah, a Palestinian-British doctor based in London who worked heavily in Gaza at the time of the genocide, was co-operating with other doctors to gather information about the amputation cases. He started to ring the bell; this might be something catastrophic and the entire world is going to suffer the consequences of it.

“Later on, through this investigation, it was confirmed. Gaza became the home for the largest group of paediatric amputees in modern history. 

“This is absolutely deliberate. I think the goal is to kill the  children not to cause amputees but in the process that happens. Targeting 70% women and children that is what genocide looks like.

“And the children, no matter how many times we see their images, we are not getting desensitised to them. Nobody can. It is too brutal. We got desensitised to women going about their lives. Feminist organisations completely failed them, looked the other way but it remains impossible to be desensitised to the murder and maiming of children.

“Children are everything, future, present, everything.”

The United Nations confirmed Dr Ghassas Abu-Sittah’s findings in March 2025, eight months after he published them.

His work led Eman Mohammed to find out about ‘Heal Palestine’, a local NGO in the US which she said was “facilitating literally the goal which governments should have done”.

“‘Heal Palestine’ evacuates children from Palestine to the United States. It fundraises for each child at that time. It was fundraising for Layan, to bring her to the US, and found her a host family there,” added Ms Mohammed.

“And I could not leave that story without documenting it. It was challenging to find a publishing platform. No-one wanted to touch it because the media has been complicit in denying the genocide. 

“Layan is a double amputee so no doctor would authorise her going back to Gaza because prosthetic legs do not walk on rubble. They are not designed to walk on rubble.

“And, because you can’t send her back to Gaza, you have to send her to a different country so why not keep her in the United States. This raises questions about our humanity level and where we are at.

“Some of this I knew beforehand but I did not fully realise all that I was documenting.”

Eman lived in Gaza all of her life recalled seeing these stories happening and wanting to document them “and show them from our reality rather than narratives that had already been put out”.

“Genocide is so overwhelming,” she said. “It is huge and it is the first time it happened in our lifetime. Ethnic cleansing had always been present but this level of continuation of atrocities, just one after the other, overwhelmed us as photojournalists.

“I was grappling with the idea of how many stories will go untold and unseen and unheard. So many categories of our community have been completely destroyed, annihilated but the children stick with you. 

“And it is not because they are easy; there is no debate that can happen over whether a child should live or not. 

“However, because the theme of this genocide was Israeli officials and Israeli people saying they needed to kill the children and the children would grow up to be what they describe as ‘terrorists’, had always been my focus in Gaza and even when I left in 2014 to travel to the US with my daughter who required medical intervention.

“My daughter had US citizenship, so she was privileged to get that opportunity in a much smoother way than other children. I have always felt this survivor's guilt over it.

“We had the best case scenario a Palestinian child could have - she was in US hospitals and I was with her.

“The children helped by ‘Heal Palestine’ have to leave without their parents. They have to go to a foreign country which they don’t know, on their own. 

“If their parents do manage to get out, they leave other children behind; it is tearing families apart so one way or another we are losing. Even if we evacuate the children they are still losing and it is shattering their entire family’s life like my daughter’s injuries shattered ours. And that is not on the child, that is on the international community and us that are watching and letting it happen. 

“It has always been so bad that it is hard to tell when it became worse but at the beginning we had European countries coming out and saying we can’t take Palestinian children because we have too many Ukrainian children and it was just too blunt. 

“Your hospitals are not overwhelmed. There are no hospitals in Gaza. So that is the kind of dystopian reality that we are living in.”

It is extremely difficult to get a child out of Gaza according to Ms Mohammed. 

They have to go through the Israeli Army which denies “almost everyone”.

“It denies and denies and denies and stalls and then the host country, the US in Layan’s case, has to give permission for her to get a visa. There are too many visas. There are too many things,” she explained.

“And even when the Israeli army said yes to letting Layan out, they didn’t allow any companions, so you have a 13-year-old child by herself, crossing desert to the airport - an almost  eight hour drive. Then she has to get on a plane for the first time in her life. So, ‘Heal Palestine’ had to send someone from their small team to go to Egypt to bring her in. 

“Each child also has a time limit. They have to heal in three months and they get sent back. That  is insane for someone who needs to learn how to walk in prosthetic legs. 

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“Layan has a wonderful host family that is very protective of her . They love her so much and they have been extremely supportive. They have been fighting for her to not have to go back yet. 

“She has suffered the loss of her brother who was killed while she was in treatment, said Ms Mohammed, who added: “Layan has become this beautiful ambassador to other children with amputations who are coming for recovery; she goes and meets them while she is walking on her prosthetic legs.”

Eman was keen to highlight that Palestinian and Irish people were often led to believe the situation in Gaza was “bleak and we are hopeless and helpless”.

“We are told there is nothing else that can be done but stories like Layan’s show that there is, if we gather our efforts towards basic values on which we cannot disagree,” she said.

“We cannot disagree with anyone about protecting the children and putting enough pressure on to protect an entire generation from being erased. 

“It is very much possible. It is reversible. Some of the injuries are not reversible but this situation is and anything that people would take from this story is that there is always a route, you just need to be informed about the details and I hope ‘Layan’s Steps’ provides that.”

‘Layan’s Steps’ will be on display in The Museum of Free Derry until July.