Cairo – Sarah Al-Awady says she was sitting with her family early on October 22, 2024, in her tent in Al-Zawaidi, a city in the center Gauze strip Where the displaced Palestinians removed when the bullet hit her in the head that fired an Israeli square of the drone.
“Suddenly I felt head pain, as if I was hit by an iron bar or something,” 18-year-old Gazan told CBS News this week. “My family started screaming,” bullet, bullet! “They all panicked and took me and rushed to the Shuhad Al-Aqs hospital.”
CBS News asked Israeli defense forces about his reported use of drones equipped with small hands In Gaza Io Al-Awady’s claim, specifically, that he was hit by one weapon at the displaced civilian camp. In a statement sent on Wednesday, the IDF said that “it follows international law, targeting only military goals and takes a feasible precautionary measures to relieve civil damage.”
The army announced that she could not give details about the various aircraft he used, “that they were classified for safety reasons and to avoid endangering IDF operating capabilities,” and added that he could not provide information on Al-Awady’s request without more accurate time and recording site.
Kindness Sarah al-Awady
Doctors did what they could with with what they had a little in the middle Destruction in GazaJust over a year after Hamasov on October 7, 2023, a terrorist attack caused a war in Palestinian territory. They could see that the bullet was located in the al-Awady skull, behind her right eye, but did not have the ability to remove it.
Al-Awady was eventually said that nothing could do anything in Gaza, but she refused to give up hope and insisted that she stay in the hospital. At the very least, she thought, at the hospital, a bad wounded eye would be protected from dusty conditions in her family’s improvised home.
So she stayed, relying on painkillers to deal with painful pain in her head, but without any plan for relief.
In early November, Al-Awady saw a team of volunteer doctors visiting a European hospital near Khan Yenis, southern Gazi. Dr. Mohamed Tawfik, an Egyptian, was among the volunteers, and when he saw Al-Awady, he thought of someone he believed he could help.
Tawfik called his father, a veteran ophthalmologist, to get his medical opinion.
Dr. Ahmed Tawfik, an older doctor, told CBS News that he wanted to go to Gaza to try to help a young woman, but the border crossing of the southern Rafah between the enclave and Egypt was closed.
“I followed this case almost every day. I felt it was my case,” Tawfik said.
But he could not find a way to travel to Gaza and, at the time, with a war that still rages, Israel allowed very few people to leave the enclave, even because of medical treatment.
The doctor returned to Egypt and Al-Awady told CBS News that she started to give up her hope. For months, she said she was living in fear that she would permanently lose sight in the right eye.
“I applied for treatment abroad, like many others. When people asked me, ‘How long have you been waiting for? “I’d say a month.
Finally, a flash of hope would come, about three months after a bullet placed in Al-Awady’s head, with news that Israel and Hamas had agreed to interrupt the fire agree. It came into force on January 19, 2024, and Al-Awady managed to return home to decimated north of Gaza.
She said she was relieved when she found her family’s home among several buildings spared from destruction. She stayed there for a week, until she received a call from the World Health Organization in the evening of February 8, telling her that she would go to Egypt the next day.
“No electricity, so I literally packed my luggage with a candle,” she recalled. Only her mother was allowed to travel with her, but the couple arrived in Egypt the next day, as planned.
It was first sent to the city of the port, on the Egyptian Mediterranean coast. A week later, Dr. Tawfik managed to move her to the hospital where he worked at Al-Sharqia Governors, in the Nile Delta.
Three teams-ocetalmology, neurohirurgija and radiology-they did together, discussing the best approach to removal of the bullet, which has been located next to the al-Awady optic nerve for months.
“We have done a few simulations to find the best path to avoid an optical nerve,” said Dr. Mohamed Khaled Shawky, from the Al Nour Radiology Center, for CBS News. He helped remotely run surgery through a video link from his work station in a separate facility.
By the kindness of Dr. Mohamed Khaled Shawky/Al-Nour Radiological Center
“The bullet landed in the best possible place for the patient, but the worst place for a medical team,” Shawky told CBS News. “If he had moved a millimeter in any direction, he would have caused great damage.”
The doctors agreed that the best option was to try to get a bullet by entering the al-Awady socket so as not to damage her brain.
Tawfik was direct, Al-Awady said there was a 50% chance of success, the risk of internal bleeding, and she could completely lose her eye or her vision is severely damaged.
“I cried. I was very scared, but I prayed and accepted the risk,” she told CBS News.
“His incredible medical team did my best to improve my spirit, that I was psychologically ready, and they succeeded. I went into the operating room laughing and full of joy,” Al-Awady said
The surgery was performed last week, and that was success. Tawfik told CBS News that it was surprised by the amount of infection and abscess caused by a bullet, which over time was rusty in the al-Awady head.
Kindness of the Hospital Dr. Ahmed Tawfik/al-Ferdaws
Even when the bullet pulled out, Al-Awady is not completely out of the forest.
“Three hours later, I opened my eyes and told me that, thanks to God, everything went well,” she recalled. “I started crying again.”
“She’s very stable now and takes medication and gets better,” Tawfik told CBS News. “My goal was first that it ended the pain caused by infection and, secondly, to preserve its current level of vision. I hope that after we got rid of the retinal defense, it would improve.”
A young woman will never look – or see – in the same way as before she was shot.
Like many Palestinians who made him from Gaza to get a desperate medical attention needed, Al-Awady told CBS News that her joy was incomplete. She misses the rest of her family, which she had to leave behind.
Kindness Sarah al-Awady
Asked about the rusty bullet living in her head for four months, she said she planned to keep him.
“I’m thinking of framing him,” she told CBS News.
