BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip — When I first met Abdullah Alathamna four years ago, he was laid up at a children’s hospital in Los Angeles, his right leg in a cast. He was pale, and grouchy from the pain pills. He was not interested in answering a reporter’s questions.
He was an 11-year-old kid, injured and without his family, more than 7,000 miles from his home in the northern Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian youngster lost a foot in 2006 when the Israeli military accidentally shelled his house and several others while targeting militants who had launched rockets into Israel. Nineteen people were killed, including Abdullah’s mother and two sisters.
A nonprofit that provides treatment for injured Palestinian children had flown him to California to undergo surgery and be fitted for an artificial leg. Two previous procedures, one in the U.S., the other in Dubai, failed.
When he wasn’t at the hospital, Abdullah stayed with host parents George and Joan Abuhamad in Yorba Linda. They were warm and accommodating, and he got along well with their children. But when I joined them for lunch one day in the family’s shady backyard, Abdullah looked sad. Confined to a wheelchair, he couldn’t play like the others.
Last month I walked through the heavily fortified border crossing that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip. I had come to do some reporting in Gaza and arranged to visit Abdullah.
Over coffee and slices of sweet persimmon in his family’s living room, Abdullah updated me on his life.
He said he was a top student at his high school and hopes to be a doctor. His father, Ramiz, remarried; wife Mayada is pregnant with their third child. For Abdullah, fun consists of horsing around with siblings, watching Egyptian comedies and playing soccer.
He not only walks without a limp, he also can play sports. Under tight jeans, the outline of his prosthetic leg was only faintly visible.
I asked him how it felt. “My leg is very well,” he replied, his accent reflecting the polite British English spoken by his schoolteachers.
When I asked Abdullah whether he was afraid for his safety and of future attacks, he smiled and breezily said, “No.”
The vulnerability I saw on his face four years ago in L.A. seemed to have faded. Maybe it was simply masked.
Living in a violent region, there isn’t always time to dwell on anger or fear. To move on is to keep living. I have a strong feeling that the Israelis targeted by rocket attacks on the other side of the border have acquired similar coping techniques.
At one point, I tried to draw Abdullah’s stepmother into a conversation about Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza.
“You want hummus?” she said.
“No,” I said, laughing. “Hamas. What do you think about Hamas?”
“I will make some hummus,” she said.
No doubt she understood my question, and it was her way of telling me she didn’t want to talk politics.
Instead she wanted to discuss Abdullah’s birthday. The next day he was turning 15. The family was having a party, and she wanted to know whether I would join them for cake.
