“When he first woke up, he wasn’t fully awake… I hugged him, and he said, “But how am I going to hug you, Mom?” starts her story Nour Ajjour, Mahmoud’s mother.
Summer of 2023. Ten-year-old Mahmoud Ajjour darted through the narrow alleyways of Al-Daraj in central Gaza, a soccer ball at his feet and Real Madrid in his heart. He was a boy who solved math problems with ease, recited verses from memory, and chased dreams as freely as he ran.
Summer of 2025: Now 12, Mahmoud sits quietly in Doha, learning to open doors, write, and play video games—all with his feet.
Mahmoud lost both arms in an airstrike that tore through his neighbourhood, part of a genocidal war that has claimed more than homes and buildings. It took childhoods—abruptly, without warning.
In Mahmoud’s story, there is no bitterness. There is only focus, quiet determination, and the stubborn joy of a boy still dreaming, still learning, still cheering for his favourite team.
That world ended in a flash.
An airstrike by Israel shattered the neighbourhood. When the dust settled, Mahmoud had lost both his arms.
It happened on December 6, 2023. He had just stepped into a room with his father when the missile hit. The explosion ripped through concrete—and through his small frame. His mother, Nour Ajjour, ran toward the sound, through smoke and splintered walls, searching for her son.
“I found him in a far place, lying on his stomach,” she said. “His right arm was not there, and his left arm was severely wounded. I gathered his left arm to be able to carry him.”
But as she tried to lift him, another strike came.
The sky shrieked with the sound of incoming fire. The walls trembled again. And in that moment, surrounded by falling debris and panic, her boy—10 years old, bleeding, broken—looked up at her and said:
“Mom, please go. I’m going to be martyred. Just go and save yourself.”
But she didn’t leave. She refused to.
She held onto him, even as everything around them collapsed. And somehow, through the chaos, they survived.
Together with his father, they dragged Mahmoud outside, stumbling over shattered stone and glass, the boy’s blood marking the path they carved through what was once their home. A group of men—neighbors, strangers—rushed to help, lifting Mahmoud’s limp, torn body into a car.
There were no ambulances. There was no time.
They made it to a small medical centre, then pushed on to Gaza’s Baptist Hospital—overcrowded, under siege, and running on scraps of supplies. There, amid screaming patients and collapsing infrastructure, Mahmoud was rushed into a surgery.
There was no anesthesia.
The doctors did what they could while he was awake—conscious through the cutting, the stitching, the reshaping of a body altered by war.
“I just kept praying, praying, praying that he stays alive,” Nour said.” I was hoping that at least one of his arms would be saved.”
But deep down, she already knew that his small hands were gone. And with them, the future he once imagined. When Mahmoud saw other children around him, the questions began to pour out: “How am I going to pray now? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that?”
In the face of so much loss, his mother clung to the only strength she had left. “What else can keep someone patient,” she whispered, “other than their relationship with God?”
The children of Gaza, a generation of mutilated
Mahmoud is now among thousands of children in Gaza living as amputees. According to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), by the end of 2024, Gaza had more child amputees per capita than anywhere else in the world.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates more than 7,000 patients had been evacuated for medical treatment by March 2025, but at least 11,000 more remain trapped, with no access to basic care.
“They operated without anaesthetics,” Mahmoud recalled. “The entire hospital probably heard me scream during my surgery. We waited three hours outside. Flies were all over me. Wounded people were dying next to me.”
In that grim hospital corridor, he became one of the few who survived.
“There was probably a new wounded person every second. There was an airstrike every five minutes, people were dying around me” Mahmoud tells.
There was no access to medicine, no food to nourish the living, and not even clean water to drink, only the bare, brutal absence of everything a child in pain might need to survive.
“I looked at both sides where my hands were, and I felt sad.” Mahmoud remembers.
“We either got martyred or left,”
Once stabilised, the Ajjour family knew Gaza could no longer keep him alive. With no food, no medicine, and no hope of recovery, with constant Israeli airstrikes, they joined thousands fleeing south toward Rafah, from where they would be evacuated.
“We either got martyred or left,” Mahmoud said. “My dad told us to keep asking for God’s forgiveness along the way.”
On the dangerous road, they passed Israeli tanks, walked over rubble, and dodged sniper fire and drones. “They shot anyone who looked down,” he remembered. “They’d be martyred.”
Eventually, Mahmoud was received at Egypt’s El-Arish Port by Lolwah Al-Khater, then Qatar’s Minister of State for International Cooperation.
By March 2024, he had reached Doha for treatment.
Life after the blast and learning to live again
Mahmoud is now being treated at Hamad General Hospital and Sidra Medicine in Doha. He studies at the Palestinian School, where classmates help him eat, write, and drink water.
“I can’t help myself at school,” he says plainly. “My friends and the teachers help me with everything.”
He’s slowly teaching himself how to use his feet, to text, to play games, even to open doors. But the emotional scars run deeper than the physical ones.
“Life was beautiful before the war,” Mahmoud remembers. “There was no place more beautiful than Gaza.”
Before the bombs fell and his world crumbled, Mahmoud was just a boy running errands for his family, carrying bags of vegetables home from the market. “I used to carry two kilograms of vegetables in my hand,” he says. He fondly remembers the neighbourhood restaurant, Akilah: “It was always busy and loud, filled with families and laughter.”
Now, that Gaza exists only in memory, a vivid, vanished world eclipsed by devastation of Israel’s war on Gaza.
“A cry from the silence” World Press Photo of the Year 2025
In early 2025, a portrait of Mahmoud, arms gone, eyes wide with resilience, captured by Gazan photojournalist Samar Abu Elouf, was named the World Press Photo of the Year.
Selected from over 60,000 submissions, the image was described by the jury as “a cry from the silence.”
“This image has many meanings,” Mahmoud said. “It embodies the suffering of Gaza’s children. More than 100,000 people probably saw it. So I tell the world: stand with Gaza.”
Mahmoud dreams of returning to a rebuilt Gaza, “because before the war, it was beautiful,” he said and then traveling the world.
“I want to go to Egypt, the Gulf, the UK, and Spain,” he says. “I want to become a journalist. I want to share the stories of those martyred, the wounded, and the suffering of Gaza.”
One journalist who championed his evacuation, Ismail Al-Ghoul, was killed in an airstrike.
“I loved him a lot,” Mahmoud says. “He was my dad’s friend. He shared my suffering.”
He now carries that legacy.
“This child from Gaza is enduring the same pain as yours. So, you need to be patient like him,” he tells those who view the photo. “Gaza is on its own. There’s no medicine, no food.’
Still, he softly says Alhamdulillah (praise be to God) a quiet expression of gratitude, faith and hope that, somehow, someday, loss will be replaced with something far better, Gods way of rewarding for patience.
“I kept asking myself, ‘What did that image do for me?’ It’s just pain and sorrow,” Mahmoud reflects. “But maybe, just maybe, it will make someone care enough.”
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