Real Lives
Eight prosthetists remain in Gaza and they keep fitting limbs
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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There is a trade in Gaza practised now by eight people. The World Health Organization's count of the prosthetists left in the Strip is that number, and between them they serve a population of amputees that the war built at a speed no health system was designed for.
Roughly five thousand people in Gaza have lost a limb since October 2023, and about a quarter of them are children. Added to those who were already living without a limb before the war, the Strip's rate of amputation per head of population has passed Cambodia's — the comparison the field's own literature reaches for when it wants to describe the worst.
Making a leg is slow, physical, unglamorous work. A technician casts the stump in plaster, builds a socket around the cast, aligns the joint, fits, watches the patient walk, takes it apart and does it again. Each limb is one person's measurements and nobody else's. A child's has to be remade as the child grows.
The amputation itself is not just a lost limb. It's lost hope, it's lost independence.
Heba Bashir, prosthetic and orthotic officer, Humanity & Inclusion
Working with what crosses#
The Artificial Limbs and Polio Centre, supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross, is the main workshop, and the plaster of Paris its casting depends on has been almost entirely blocked from entry for months at a stretch, the ICRC has said. Plastic components arrive against the same obstacle: construction materials appear on Israel's dual-use lists, and a socket is, in that classification, construction.
So the workshops improvise, and the improvisation is where the craft shows. Limbs left behind by the dead are refitted for the living. Plastic piping and planed wood stand in for components that have not come through a crossing. Humanity & Inclusion fitted a hundred and eighteen temporary prostheses from early 2025 onward, most of them stopgaps built to hold a patient upright until a proper limb becomes possible.
At Sheikh Hamad Hospital in the north — a hundred beds, opened in 2019 with Qatari funding, the Strip's designated rehabilitation centre — the prosthetics department fitted around a hundred cases in 2025.
Its general director, Ahmed Naim, said in April that no supplies had reached the hospital during the war and that maintenance of existing limbs was all it could offer, because there are no local substitutes for the materials.
The eight#
Nothing about staying was automatic. Prosthetists are trained professionals with the credentials to work anywhere, in a place where the hospitals themselves have been struck and where colleagues in every medical trade have been killed, displaced or driven out.
Eight stayed. They are why a fourteen-year-old in Gaza who lost both legs to a drone strike has anyone at all measuring him for the next pair, and why the sentence a rehabilitation worker uses about lost independence is still a description of a problem being worked on rather than a verdict.
The shortage that matters most is not equipment. Equipment can be flown in the week a crossing opens. Eight prosthetists is a number that takes years of training to change, and the training is not happening while the workshops are rationing plaster.
