Doctors in America have praised a three-year-old Gazan girl who is walking again just six months after losing both legs.
Rahaf Saed was fitted with her first prosthetic legs last Tuesday in Missouri after she was severely injured in an Israeli bombing of her home in Gaza in August.
She was among eight children who arrived in the US in early December after being granted US visas for specialist medical treatment.
Sky News has followed the children’s journeys of recovery and visited Rahaf a few weeks after she arrived with her mother.
On Tuesday, at Shriners Hospital in St Louis, Missouri, she showed off her walking skills with a broad smile.
“Watching her walk again was an indescribable feeling, I was so happy and proud of her,” Rahaf’s mother, Israa, told Sky News.
Rahaf lost her right leg from below her knee and her left leg is almost completely gone.
Both limbs were amputated by medics in Gaza after her family home was destroyed in an Israeli missile attack in August. She had only just learnt to walk.
“The doctors say she is very smart and can easily face obstacles and challenges in the future,” Israa said.
Children with lost limbs demand a whole extra layer of care because they are still growing.
Rahaf will need new prosthetic limbs frequently as she gets bigger, but for now seems very comfortable with her first set.
“She has started saying ‘I like to stand’. In the past, she didn’t like to wear limbs but when she saw herself walking, she became confident and didn’t want anyone’s help,” her mother said.
Israa was forced to leave Gaza without Rahaf’s father and two young brothers because they were not permitted to leave.
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But she has been showing them Rahaf’s progress.
“In every session with Rahaf, I call my husband and Rahaf’s brothers and they watch Rahaf as she practices walking and they encourage her to do so.”
Rahaf was among a lucky trickle of children permitted to leave Gaza after extensive work by the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF).
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The ceasefire, which took effect yesterday, should now allow for many thousands of others to seek urgent medical care which is not available in Gaza because of the destroyed infrastructure.
Border crossings are to be opened to allow for a massive influx of aid. It’s expected that more injured Gazans will now be permitted to leave.
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Except for in rare cases like Rahaf’s, no injured people have been permitted by Israel, which controls the borders, to leave Gaza since May.
Prosthetists estimate that for every death in a war, there are likely to be three times as many surviving amputees.
According to Hamas-run Gaza authorities, the number of dead in the war has now surpassed 46,600.
According to analysis by the charity Oxfam, more children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military than in the equivalent period in any other conflict of the past 18 years.
Those figures give a sense of the number of amputees, adults and children, still inside Gaza.
