In a video, Mahmoud Ajjour is beaming as he skips into the breeze. He breaks into laughter as he watches his kite flutter in the sky, pulling it along with a string tied around his waist, in a moment that captured the irrepressible joy of childhood.
At 9 years old, Mahmoud has known more trauma than most will see in a lifetime. On Dec. 6, 2023, the fourth grader was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, a blast that severed one of his arms and left the other so badly damaged it had to be amputated. On Thursday, an image of Mahmoud, taken by Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times, was named World Press Photo of the Year, a haunting portrait of the impact of the war on children.
Mahmoud now lives in Doha, Qatar, with his family, after becoming one of a very small number of Palestinians to be evacuated from Gaza for urgent medical treatment.
When Mahmoud smiles, his happiness seems infectious, but some days are harder than others. “There are bad moments for him,” his mother, Nour Ajjour, 36, told NBC News by phone from Doha, Qatar’s capital. “He doesn’t want to play or go outside.”
“We keep him busy and have fun with him,” Ajjour said. She sent videos of him gleefully speeding down a hallway on an electric bike, steering with his feet on the handlebars, and using his feet to play with a lump of bright-green clay.
For now, Ajjour said, there’s not much Mahmoud can do on his own, and he’s impatient for prostheses, asking when he can have them so he can drink water on his own or help his family.
“He likes to help a lot, and I let him help me and carry things on his shoulder,” Ajjour said.
Doctors at Doha’s Hamad Limb Hospital are currently fitting him for protheses, and in another video, he smiles brightly as he tries on a pair of prosthetic arms.
In Gaza, such treatment isn’t possible, and Mahmoud is one of at least 1,000 children in the enclave to have lost at least one limb during the war, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. Many of the children, like many adults, underwent surgery without anesthesia as the health care system buckled under Israel’s siege.
“The first few days were very difficult,” Ajjour said. Both of his hands were gone, and without anesthetic, Mahmoud was in both physical and existential pain.
“He would look at his hands and not see them,” the boy’s mother said. “He would scream and say, ‘Where are my hands,’ and the first thing he said was, ‘How will I hug you, how will I pray?’”
These days, Mahmoud is learning how to type on a computer, write and use a phone with his feet. Ajjour said he dreams of going to university and becoming a journalist so he can tell the stories of Gaza’s children.
