This story first appeared on the front page of the Boston Globe on Oct. 20, 2024. It placed second in the Hearst Journalism Awards, the “College Pulitzers,” for best feature story in the United States.
Anas Abumuhaisen stared out the Boston hospital lobby window and saw a bright red fire truck rolling by with its sirens and lights off, no emergency to which to hurry.
As Anas, 13, observed the truck, he imagined one coming to the rescue after an Israeli rocket struck his Gaza home in January. The blast killed much of his family, including his parents.
“I wish I saw that when our house was gone,” Anas said in Arabic through Nour-Saïda Harzallah, a translator and volunteer for the organization that brought Anas and his younger brother, Aser Abumuhaisen, 6, to Boston for medical treatments.
Anas, who is covered in skin grafts from fourth-degree burns suffered in the explosion, and Aser, whose right leg had to be amputated, have been in Boston with their grandmother since March receiving life-saving, world-class treatment. It was made possible by HEAL Palestine, a nonprofit organization that addresses the humanitarian needs of youth in Gaza, where medical care dwindles by the day.
Thousands of Palestinians have been subjected to unrelenting violence as Israel seeks to destroy Hamas after the militant group’s brutal attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Nearly 26,000 children have been killed or injured in Gaza as of April, according to the international group Save the Children. The war has decimated the health system in Gaza, with only 10 partially functional hospitals, according to the World Health Organization.
“You don’t have to be Palestinian to be connected to this issue, because it is one that should resonate with every human being,” Steve Sosebee, who cofounded HEAL Palestine this year, said in a phone interview.
The nonprofit arranges the travel and documents Palestinian kids need to get treatment in the United States. Since its founding, HEAL has brought more than 20 Palestinian children to different US cities, such as Houston, San Francisco, and Chicago.
Three are in Boston: Anas, who has undergone multiple painful skin grafts; Aser, who underwent corrective amputation surgery and is to receive a prosthetic leg; and one-year-old Walid Yehia Alastal, who had cranial surgery to treat a condition he was born with.
Anas’s and Aser’s journey to Boston
On a recent day in August, Aser emerged from the elevator into the hospital lobby, scooting himself in his wheelchair with his left leg and carrying a water gun in his lap. No one was safe: He sprayed everyone in sight.
Afterward, the water formed puddles on the couches and drenched his targets, but the young boy laughed heartily and hopped around on one leg after stirring trouble. The boys’ grandma — or Teta, as the boys call her — scolded him.
Aser’s moments of joy belie his recent tragedies.
After the strike destroyed their home, Anas and Aser were in a hospital and put on a humanitarian list to get flown to Egypt. The boys needed extensive medical attention.
Medical staff didn’t have hope Anas would live. His severe burns and inability to move made him fragile for transportation out of Gaza, and medics wanted to give the spot to someone with a better chance of survival. But his grandmother, Amira Abumuhaisen, unaccepting of the response, advocated for his transportation.
“He was a corpse pretty much,” Abumuhaisen, 59, said in Arabic through a translator.
Aser was also critically wounded. His right leg needed to be amputated. By the time they left for Egypt, Aser had already undergone three amputations with no anesthesia or antibiotics for the infection, Abumuhaisen said through a translator.n First it was just his foot, cut at the ankle, but more needed to be taken each time. After the three amputations, everything below Aser’s knee was gone.
The boys and their teta made it to Egypt in February, a month after their home was pulverized. They got to Boston in March, and have since been receiving care in a local hospital, where they also live. The hospital, which requested to not be named for security reasons, is covering the cost of their treatment.
Anas was in the inpatient burn unit for four months.
Aser was fit for and received a prosthetic leg. But he had trouble using it because his procedures in Gaza weren’t done correctly. So, he underwent a fourth, corrective surgery in September to amputate even more.
The surgery makes wearing a prosthetic more comfortable, but that’s not enough for Aser.
“I want a real leg to grow out from here,” Aser said in Arabic last month through volunteer Nour-Saïda Harzallah.
Harzallah is one of the main anchors of support for the HEAL families in Boston. Harzallah, 26, an MD-PhD student at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accompanies them to medical appointments to translate, coordinate visits, and keep them company.
Keeping up with the news about the war triggers despair, guilt, and hopelessness, but Harzallah said she feels “the least I can do, if I can’t help, is to bear witness.”
The Abumuhaisens have received support from Boston’s Arab community,Abumuhaisen said. Many people brought them clothes, toys, and food.
“I felt like all the Arabs in Boston were coming to see me,” Abumuhaisen said.
Walid’s road to recovery
One child is recovering in a local home.
In Chestnut Hill, at the house of a host family, one-year-old Walid Yehia Alastal tossed a mini basketball back and forth with his mother, Heba Belal Alastal, on the living room floor. When he lost interest, he shimmied a few feet away on his. stomach and laid like a penguin, finding ways to entertain himself with toys piled near the fireplace.
Walid is recovering from cranial surgery he had at a Boston hospital. He was born with craniosynostosis, a disorder that makes the bones of the baby’s skull close before the brain is fully formed.
Walid’s brain was growing into his skull, misshaping his head.
After his first surgery, Walid sported a helmet to help mold his head into a normal shape and allow regular brain growth. He needed another surgery in August to further shape his skull.
The ear-to-ear surgery scar, like a headband, is healing.
For her son to receive surgeries, Alastal, 27, had to leave her husband and twob daughters, Eleen, 6, and Sila, 4, behind. They are in a humanitarian safe zone in Gaza, but not together. Their home was also bombed, and today they live apart inmakeshift tents, Alastal said in Arabic through a translator.
“I do see how people live here [in Boston], and I’m like, ‘Why? Why can’t we liveb this way? Why can’t I be sure that my kids will be safe?’ ” she said. “Allah cursed us with this, but maybe we will find some sort of peace in the afterlife. . . . We have faith that God has a plan and that this struggle won’t be in vain.”
Here, she and her son have been embraced by the host family, Mark and Miriam Gorman and their sons.
“It’s been pretty inspiring and humbling to see Heba’s strength and courage and what she has endured to get Walid here,” said Mark Gorman.
“She’s so strong and just she has an attitude of hope,” said Miriam Gorman.
Path to healing
After Aser’s surgery, Abumuhaisen shared photos of nurses tending to him as he lay in the hospital bed with a velvet blanket draped on him. He grimaced at a nurse as she handled his IV port, and another caressed his head of curly brown hair.
Toys were scattered around him. A Spider-Man mask by his head, a smiley face pillow next to his shoulder, a teddy bear on the edge of the bed.
He was tired after surgery, his grandmother said, in pain, and fearful. He understood that the surgery was to help him walk again, but, Harzallah said, it will likely be hard for him to process after the bandages on his legs come off. The start of his prosthetic rehabilitation will depend on how he heals.
Walid is recuperating, as well.
When he arrived here in March, he was visibly underweight, Miriam Gorman said.
But in the seven months since, his hair is growing, starting to cover his scar, and he’s learning to do something akin to a crawl. He doesn’t get on his hands and knees, exactly, but puts his tiny hands in front of him and drives the rest of his body forward, like a baby seal using its flippers to slide on snow. He’s babbling in English.
Anas, Aser, and Walid hang out sometimes. Alastal said Aser and Anas consider Walid a little brother. An ocean away from peril and destruction, the mom and grandma can let their boys be kids together.
But grief weighs them down, too.
The brothers didn’t just lose their parents. Three of their siblings, ages 16, 14, and 11, perished in the bombing, too.
The mention of their deaths caused Anas to curl up in the hospital lobby couch. He brought his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around his legs, and tucked his head.
His little brother’s squeaky voice tried to comfort him: “They’re in heaven, and if you cry they won’t be in heaven.”
Longing for home
Both families will go back to Egypt eventually, but the date isn’t set.
Walid does physical therapy once a week. The one-year-old is medically cleared to travel back to Egypt, but travel restrictions have made it difficult to return. He and his mother will stay in Boston in the meantime, and have recently moved in with another host family in Lexington.
Alastal longs to step foot in Gaza and reunite with her daughters. She hopes that by the time she goes back the war will be over.
“I’m waiting impatiently for the moment I can return,” Alastal said through a translator. “The separation and absence have been too long.”
For Aser, Anas, and their grandmother, their return to Egypt depends on the treatment the boys are still undergoing.
“I want to go back to Gaza,” Aser tells the nurses at the hospital, Harzallah said. “I want to stop the fire on my house, rebuild our house.”
