When the Bombs Fall on Children

Two Little Survivors Find Each Other in Beirut

Beirut is a long way from Gaza or the villages of southern Lebanon, but in a small apartment there, two children are learning again how to laugh.

Omar is six. Ali is three. Both are orphans. Both lost an arm to an Israeli bomb. And both now call their aunts Amma.

Every evening, they sit together on a green sofa, turning the pages of their new Spider-Man notebooks. Ali, the younger one, is bold. He opens his quickly. Omar fumbles with one hand until Ali leans over and helps. Small acts of friendship that adults would call therapy — the boys just call it play.

They were found beneath the rubble, miles apart, in two different wars that speak the same language of loss. One was pulled from the ruins of Gaza, the other from a shattered home in Sarafand, southern Lebanon. Both were the only survivors of their families.

Their story has now become part of a larger mission led by Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British surgeon known for his work in Gaza and the Middle East. Through the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund, he has brought nearly two hundred wounded children — Lebanese and Palestinian — to Beirut for surgery, prosthetics, and psychological care.

When Maha, Omar’s aunt, reached the rubble in Gaza, fifteen people had already died. Only Omar was alive. She carried him across the border at Rafah for treatment and left her own teenage children behind. “He still wakes up screaming,” she says softly. “But here, he is beginning to draw again.”

Ali’s aunt, Sobhiye, remembers the morning the Israeli shell hit their three-storey house. Fourteen hours later, rescuers found Ali still breathing under two floors of concrete, his small hand gone. “He asks if his parents can still see him,” she says. “I tell him they watch him all the time.”

Now the two boys are neighbours in Hamra, Beirut. They share meals, medicine, and silence. Their laughter fills a room that once held only grief.

More than the physical wounds 

Dr Abu Sittah says these children carry more than physical wounds. “When a child survives war,” he explains, “the body heals slowly, but the mind keeps remembering. They will need care for the rest of their lives.”

For Sri Lankans who remember the North, the shelling, the evacuation buses and the broken classrooms, this story feels painfully familiar. The geography may differ, but the scars — on children, mothers, and memory — are the same.

Omar draws olive trees and butterflies, scenes from a Gaza that no longer exists. “He hopes to go back one day,” says Maha. “To his nursery, his friends — as if nothing ever happened.”

But the truth is simple and heavy: the war has taken everything.

All that remains are two little boys, rebuilding a world out of Spider-Man notebooks, prosthetic arms, and the stubborn will to live.