'I want someone to come and take me out of here': 12-year-old amputee in Gaza on what the war cost him

Before the war started in Gaza, Moustafa Ahmed Shehda would run around and play with his friends. Now, the 12-year-old is one of a growing number of Palestinians in the territory who've lost a limb in a bombing.

Moustafa is from Jabalia in northern Gaza, which has been hit particularly hard in the fighting. Early on in the war between Israel and Hamas, he was visiting his uncle when the apartment building was bombed.

"I was under the rubble. I couldn't feel anything. I couldn't breathe," Moustafa told Mohamed El Saife, a freelance journalist in Gaza working for CBC News.

His uncle was killed, and Moustafa was pulled from the rubble. Because of the extent of his injuries, his right leg had to later be amputated below the knee.

"Before the war, I used to play with my friends," he said. "I can't play because of my injury. I can't play, and I don't have friends, and I don't have anything."

Palestinian health officials said on Saturday that 26,257 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel began bombing the small enclave of 2.3 million people in retaliation for the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas-led militants while nearly 65,000 have been wounded.

It's unclear how many suffered amputations as a result, but UNICEF has estimated that since the start of the war through to the end of last November, about 1,000 children have had one or both of their legs amputated. The United Nations agency doesn't have updated numbers.

About 1,200 people were killed in Israel during the Oct. 7 attack, and about 250 were taken hostage, according to Israeli officials. Of the 132 remaining in Gaza, about 25 have been killed.

Moustafa was sent to Egypt for treatment but soon returned to Gaza. He ended up in the southern region of Rafah and now stays with his sister, her husband and two children in a makeshift camp. He said he's desperate to go home to see his parents, who are trapped in the north.

"We only have two mats, and we sleep on top of each other," Moustafa said. "No one looks at me. I want someone to come and take me out of here."

Moustafa requires additional treatment for his leg, but his uncle in Rafah said it's been a challenge getting him to a hospital in nearby Khan Younis.

Aldo Rodriguez, a surgeon working with Doctors Without Borders, spent five weeks in Gaza at the end of last year. Most of his cases were traumatic amputations, meaning patients arrived at the hospital missing limbs from an explosion.

But, he said, it's the babies he can't get out of his mind. For the first time in his life, he had to amputate the leg of a one-year-old to the groin.

"I didn't understand why a patient ... one year, two years, baby had to suffer an amputation of the leg or the arm — and not just one or two patients. Many, many children with amputations," he said.