‘I Thought I Was Dead’: At Boston Event, Victims of Israeli Bombings Tell of Horror and Death in Gaza

You may have seen Nada before, in an image that she never wanted to be taken, in an image that changed her life.

In it, her face is sharply lit by a single fluorescent lamp as her dust-streaked arms press into the earth beneath the rubble of her home. Her eyes gaze up at the sky or at the workers trying to free her body. Nada’s family just moved into a new apartment building two months earlier; now its remains are pinning her down. Although you can’t see her, Nada’s three-year-old sister Elham is there, too, clinging onto Nada’s right leg. Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza took a photo by the rescue worker’s light, and it was selected by Time magazine as a photo of the year in 2023.

That Oct. 31, Al-Muhandiseen (The Engineers’) Tower in Gaza was bombed by Israeli warplanes, killing at least 106 civilians of the several hundred sheltering there. As the dead were found, Nada’s sisters Wala’, Salma, Farah, Sama, and little Elham were among them. So was 4-year-old Youssef, the only boy in the family and spoiled because of it.

Eighteen-year-old Nada told her story earlier this spring in a Harvard Medical School amphitheater at the event “Healing Gaza’s Children Abroad,” organized by the Harvard Medical School Student Alliance for Health Equity in Palestine, with the humanitarian organization Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Along with two other Gazan youth, in-person and one online, she talked about her life in Gaza, her injuries, and connecting with the Children’s Relief Fund to continue her treatment abroad.

Nada’s Story

“I thought I was dead,” Nada said, going back to that moment when she was trapped beneath the rubble. “Dust filled my lungs. I couldn’t see anything. They dug a small opening — that’s when Motaz took the photo.”

Sitting on a plastic chair in front of a projector screen, Nada read from her phone in Arabic as photos and the English translation of her words appeared behind her. She sported dark green Converse and neat blue jeans, with a keffiyeh wrapped around her shoulders and a chocolate brown hijab over her head. As she spoke, her left Converse bounced up and down. The right one was still.

The journey from Gaza to Egypt to Tunisia to the United States took a year, Nada said, and in that time, she’s had over 70 surgeries. In the initial surgeries, she was told again and again that she might wake up with an amputated leg. After losing her family and their life together, she was desperate to keep her leg if it could be done.

Finding out that Motaz’s photograph had reached the right people, including Dr. Sami Tuffaha at Johns Hopkins University, gave her hope. But even after she came to the United States, the surgery to save her leg had less than a fifty percent chance of working. Sitting in the front row, Nada’s mother watched and cried as her daughter retold the painful story.

At the event in April, Nada had been discharged from the hospital for one month. She was able to walk, slowly, up and down the steep stairs of the theater.

“I don’t know if I can say I still have dreams,” Nada said at the end of her talk. “I don’t like being far from my father. After losing my family, the meaning of life is gone. Maybe one day I’ll be okay… I hope so.”

Motassembellah and 6 Wars

The eye sees first a tall, sharply dressed young man in an all-black ensemble from the long jacket and slacks to the shiny boots. Only afterward does it see that one arm of the jacket is loose, its cuff neatly tucked into the left pocket. The tuck projects ease, an ease reflected in past photos of Motassembellah as a teenager.

“I’m 18-years old, and I’ve already lived through six wars,” he told the audience of medical students and Harvard affiliates. “And with every war, I don’t just lose people I love — I lose parts of my soul… my sense of being alive.”

Motassembellah gave his story in Arabic while standing up, a microphone clipped onto his lapel as he spoke about his father’s dream and warning.

Just a few days into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, he met his cousins to talk and pray. Shortly after dawn, his father called, saying he had a dream that Motassembellah had lost an arm or a leg. He warned his son not to go near a specific place.

“But I did,” Motassembellah said. “In that exact place, I heard the explosion.”

He described the shrapnel entering his body.

First, it tore through his stomach.

Then, pain exploded up his arm.

He kept repeating the Shahada, the declaration of faith in God. All around him, there was blood and broken bodies.

Somehow, he walked until he found an ambulance, his left arm dragging behind him, his right hand split in two. This hand now has four fingers, which at the Medical School event he deftly maneuvered to hold his phone while reading from his script. Matching the evening’s color palette, one finger was decorated with a black ring.

Motassembellah said that he didn’t want to show pain in front of his father, who never liked to see him or his brothers hurt. That he’s had over sixty surgeries, many without anesthesia. That his arm and fingers kept on rotting, and after every procedure he came out with his body changed irrevocably.

Eventually, his father got in contact with the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, and in October of 2024, he flew to South Carolina. Being treated in the United States with access to pain medication, he can finally be comfortable in his recovery journey.

Motassembellah smiles easily, but the pain enters his voice when talks about what is left behind in Gaza. He heard about the death of one friend and soul brother, Audai, while living in the United States.

“I used to spend all my time with him and the other guys,” he said. “Some of them… I picked up their pieces with my own hands.”

Ayham, Only 13, and Too Many Brutal Truths

Thirteen-year-old Ayham was the youngest speaker in-person at the event and boldly decided to give his presentation in English. He’s been learning since arriving to the United States a year ago. His host dad, Tareq Hailat, is the director of Global Patient Affairs for the Relief Fund, as well as a third-year medical student in South Carolina and an informal English teacher. Hailat, who was a speaker at the Medical School event, joked that Ayham understands everything he says now, even when it’s not convenient.

Ayham spoke earnestly, hesitating at some words and correcting his own pronunciation in the moment. He talked about his life before the occupation, how he loved playing soccer, going to school with his brothers and friends, and the small house he was born in. He remembered eating sugarcane with his father on Oct. 10, 2023, his father’s birthday. They didn’t have any other food to celebrate with, but Ayham was happy that they were together.

After the Israeli army came, all of that was destroyed. “It broke our dreams and took our friends,” he said.

“Now, my friends and family are dead or far away. I cannot talk to them.”

He remembers the day in December 2023 when his family home was destroyed, as an Israeli airstrike targeted a neighbor’s home. He described the sound of the missiles, the dead bodies among the dust and rubble. The ambulance he was put into contained the limp bodies of his friends, and he screamed to be moved to a different car.

When they got to the hospital, doctors saw that his left leg was severely fractured, but they didn’t have the resources to treat it. On screen, an image appears of Ayham in a cast that extends from his ankle to midway up his thigh. His family didn’t know what to do, until his older brother Ismail got a call from the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

After receiving medical care in Egypt and then arriving to Greenville, South Carolina, for his continued treatment, Ayham is able to walk again with a crutch and a full leg brace.

“I want the world to see what is happening in Gaza. I want people to understand our pain,” he said in closing. “To my family — I miss you. To my country — We will come back one day, God willing.”

Like all the over 250 children evacuated by the Relief Fund from Gaza, Ayham’s family was split up by his treatment journey. The Israeli military allows one or sometimes two people to accompany the patients abroad, said Hailat. In Ayham’s case, it was Ismail who traveled with him to South Carolina.

Dressed up in a button-down shirt, the teenager couldn’t contain his smile as he finished his whole speech and received a thunderous round of applause.

Fadi, a Child of War

Before the war, images of 7-year-old Fadi show a smiling boy with pale skin and light brown hair. In a photo with his twin brother Hamdan, he is noticeably skinnier, but their bright faces and thumbs up are the same.

Fadi has cystic fibrosis, and was taking nutritional supplements and the medication Creon to help him digest food. Once the occupation started, he lost access to those lifesaving medications.

In April, he and his mother were in Egypt, and called into the evening panel despite it being past midnight there. Fadi’s mother, Shaima Al Zant, gave the presentation while Fadi sat sleepily by her side, his new glasses sitting large on a small face.

She recalls fasting during Ramadan, but not having anything to break the fast. Her three children were crying from hunger, and she didn’t have anything to give them.

“I — the grown-up, the mother — could barely take it,” she said. “So how could my sick child?”

The images of Fadi during the war are harrowing. His ribs protrude in stark relief from the rest of his thin body. They jut out on each side, covered in a taut layer of skin. Journalists came to visit him and take photos, then share those photos with the world. As the photos spread and people saw the toll of the war on Gaza’s children, organizations began to advocate for Fadi. He was the first child allowed to leave the North of Gaza to the South, and from there, the Relief Fund coordinated his evacuation to Egypt.

In May 2024, Fadi flew to the United States to recover from extreme dehydration and malnutrition for three months. To give him access to that care, his mother had to make the hardest decision of her life — to leave her other children in Egypt while Fadi received his treatment abroad. Thanks to the medical teams that supported Fadi, he has regained the lost weight and life has come back into him.

“I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when he saw his siblings again, or the joy on their faces when they were reunited,” Al Zant said. “Thank God Fadi got a chance. But many mothers in Gaza … their hearts are still burning.”

As many as 71,000 children under the age of 5 are projected to be acutely malnourished over the next year, reported the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification this May. These children and their parents are facing the same threats Fadi did, but have no path towards evacuation.

Fadi, Ayham, Motassembellah, Nada, and over 200 more were granted permission by the Israeli military to leave Gaza through a process initiated by Gazan hospitals and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. The process of evacuating a patient can take anywhere from three months to a year, said Hailat, who has been working with the Relief Fund since 2024. But there are always more patients who need treatment abroad than can be evacuated. Since October 2023, over 50,000 children in Gaza have been killed or injured, according to a statement by Unicef Regional Director Edouard Beigbeder.

Two months after traveling to Boston, Ayham still talks about the event, Hailat said. He corrected the tenses as Ayham workshopped a sentence in English. His voice came brightly over the phone. “I was very happy,” he said, “that I spoke at Harvard and people listened to my story.”