Mohamed Hijazi squirms as his father unwraps a bandage for him. He cries and kicks his feet, but his dad manages to eventually place the bandage over his eye.
“It’s nothing,” Abu Mohamed tells his child, in a last-ditch effort to calm him down. But the boy is inconsolable.
The seven-year-old was playing outside the family home in April with his cousins in Jabalia in northern Gaza, where his family was sheltering, when the children came across a bomb that hadn’t detonated.
“It exploded in front of him,” Abu Mohamed said. “We went down and found [him] full of blood.”
The child was rushed to a nearby hospital to be treated for his injuries and then transferred to a hospital in central Gaza with an ophthalmology department that could perform the surgery he needed. His right eye was removed. He may yet lose the left, too, his father said.
Children drawn to shiny objects
There is no shortage of dangers in Gaza for kids like Mohamed, from airstrikes to disease and malnutrition to the shootings that have become a regular occurrence at aid distribution sites. But the risks posed by the unexploded bombs, mines, booby traps and other munitions that are left lying all around Gaza are particularly insidious.
“They’re different; they’re literally shiny,” said Luke Irving, chief of the UN’s mine action programme in the occupied territories. “A child would be immediately drawn to that.”
Mohamed Hijazi was playing with his cousins near an unexploded bomb in Jabalia when a blast cost him his eyesight.
According to the Hamas-run government media office in Gaza, there could be as much as 6,800 tonnes of unexploded ordnance scattered throughout Gaza. That’s based on United Nations estimates that about five to 10 per cent of all weapons fired into the territory failed to detonate.
Irving said there have been 222 confirmed accidents related to unexploded ordnance since Israel began bombing Gaza in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack that killed some 1,200 people and saw another 250 taken hostage.
There have likely been hundreds more such encounters, but such incidents are not always officially counted, said Irving. With much of the medical infrastructure in ruins, doctors in Gaza are preoccupied with trying to stabilize patients rather than assessing the cause of their injuries or deaths, he said.
Encounters with unexploded munitions are not always fatal but can leave people with catastrophic injuries and lifelong disabilities that are challenging to manage in a war zone with a decimated health-care system.
Just 17 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were considered partially functional, and over 1,000 health-care workers had been killed as of December 2024, according to Doctors Without Borders.
‘Ticking time bombs’
In Mohamed’s case, doctors told him his left eye might be able to be saved, but he would have to be medically evacuated out of Gaza for the surgery. Until then, his father holds his hand and guides his every step, getting him used to having to relearn simple movements and tasks that he previously did without thinking.
“As a father, it’s very difficult to see Hamood [potentially] losing both his eyes and not living his normal life,” said Abu Mohamed, using his son’s nickname. “I see his cousins playing, and Hamood won’t play with them. It’s very difficult for me.”
Operations to clear unexploded ordnance typically can’t get underway until a war ends so in Gaza, as fighting between Hamas and Israel continues and shifts to different parts of the enclave and people are repeatedly displaced and return to heavily bombed areas, the munitions remain a persistent danger.
And they are not easy to spot. The war has not only claimed the lives of an estimated 54,000 Palestinians; it has left roughly 70 per cent of the enclave’s structures destroyed or damaged, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Mixed in with that rubble are hundreds of “ticking time bombs,” said Irving.
“Because it’s been fired and its effective release mechanism is ready to explode, it’s designed to either hit something, or there’s a timer, and it will detonate,” he said. “They’re not designed to sit there, unexploded, and that’s the risk.”
The UN Mine Action Service estimated last year that it could take 14 years to clear Gaza of UXO.
‘No dreams left’
Before the war, Mohamed was in kindergarten, at the top of his class, his father said. He held up a photo of the child taken eight or nine months before the accident. At the time, the family had been displaced to southern Gaza because of fighting in the north. Mohamed is dressed in a black tracksuit and stands in front of the tent he and his family were sheltering in. He smiles big for the camera, a sparkle in his eyes.
When CBC met him, he was sitting in their home, which had been partially destroyed in the war. He had visible wounds from the explosion. His elbow was wrapped in gauze; his remaining eye welled with tears.
Mohamed had always wanted to study engineering, his father said. At first, the accident only further motivated him; he told his father that when he recovered, he’d become an engineer so he could help rebuild Gaza. But the prospect of permanently losing his vision has weakened that resolve.
“This explosion destroyed Hamood’s dreams,” his father said. “And now, because he lost one eye and may lose the other, there are no dreams left.”
