Fourteen-year-old Fadel Al Naji used to be a keen footballer but is now largely confined to his home in Gaza City since both legs were severed in an Israeli drone attack in September. He sits sullenly on a couch with one hollow pant leg dangling and the other tucked into his waist beside his 11-year-old brother who lost an eye in the same strike.
“He has become withdrawn and isolated,” said his mother Najwa Al Naji, showing old videos of him doing kick-ups on her phone.
“It is as if he is dying slowly, and I wish that they would fit him with prosthetic limbs.”
But those are in scarce supply for Gaza’s nearly 5,000 war amputees – a quarter of whom are children like Al Naji – because of Israeli restrictions on materials like plaster of Paris, seven aid and medical sources told Reuters.
Israel, which fought a two-year war with Hamas fighters in the Palestinian enclave, cites security concerns as the reason for restrictions.
Taken together with Gaza’s pre-war amputee population provided by Palestinian health officials, its per capita amputee rate now exceeds even Cambodia, which had been the worst due to landmines, aid group Humanity & Inclusion said. Such is the need that two medical centres said they were trying to reuse old prosthetic limbs recovered from people killed in the war.
Others are creating makeshift artificial limbs with plastic piping or wooden planks, medics said, though this risks damaging the stump or causing infection.
Gaza’s amputees are a symbol of unfulfilled pledges from the October ceasefire and US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan envisaging full aid “without interference”.
It also foresaw the reopening of the Rafah border crossing – Gaza’s sole route out to Egypt – but medical evacuations including for amputees have been irregular.
Israel restricts imports of items it says have potential military as well as civilian use under a policy pre-dating the two-year war.
While plaster of Paris and other plastic components for prostheses are not specified on Israeli lists of so-called dual use items, “construction products” are there, an Israeli export control document showed.
Israel’s COGAT military agency, which controls access to Gaza, says it facilitates the regular entry of medical equipment but will not permit materials that could be used by Hamas for a “terrorist build-up”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which supports the Artificial Limbs and Polio Centre in Gaza, the main centre for prosthetics, said imports of plaster of Paris have been almost completely restricted for over four months with supplies left only to June or July.
“What we are producing now are very small quantities compared to the actual need,” said Hosni Mhana, the centre’s spokesperson, without giving numbers.
The Qatari-funded Shaikh Hamad Hospital said no supplies have been received during the war and that it has run out.
It can now only offer maintenance on existing prostheses. “There are no local alternatives for prosthetic manufacturing materials,” said the hospital’s general director Ahmed Naim.
Humanity & Inclusion, which has fit 118 temporary prostheses in Gaza since early 2025, said supplies from its last shipment in December 2024 are dwindling.
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