What Can Palestinian Literature Tell Us About Amputations in Gaza?

By Graham Liddell

Words fail spectacularly in the shadow of 2,000 pound bombs.

Palestinian author Anton Shammas recently described his own incapacity to respond in writing to the slaughter and starvation in Gaza, feeling overwhelmed by rage and “the paralyzing realization that whatever I write will not save a single Gazan child.”

Indeed, the sheer number of children killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza is devastating beyond words — at least 13,000 children in the first six months of the war, a rate of more than 70 per day. But somehow I am even more dumbfounded by the countless stories of children who survived a bombing, but only at the cost of one of their limbs. Month by month, the headlines have become increasingly grim:

In November, “I Want My Legs Back’: The Child Amputees of Gaza’s War.” In December, “…Children in Gaza Face Amputations Without Anesthesia….” In January, a shocking statistic emerged: “More than 10 Children Losing Legs in Gaza Every Day….” In February, the grim turned grotesque: “‘Dining Table Amputation’….”

In the shock of the headline or image, those of us outside Gaza might respond by recoiling, but the sensation usually passes within a few minutes. Our momentary wince does nothing to capture the sustained physical and psychological pain of these traumatic injuries. If we can’t comprehend the pain, how can we begin to find the words to respond to this brutality?

Like many watching the devastation unfold, I have been tongue-tied over the past several months. But gradually, the words of Palestinian literature came to intermingle with the news reports from Gaza that dominated my screens. I realized that in the works of Palestinian literature I have read most closely, amputation plays a key figurative role. And though this literature is powerless to heal wounds, it might be able to help us make meaning out of the nightmare of mass amputation in Gaza.

Amputation as Indignity: Ghassan Kanafani

Ghassan Kanafani’s 1963 novel Men in the Sun is the story of three Palestinian refugees trying to migrate clandestinely from Iraq to Kuwait in search of a better life. Most commentary on the story has focused on the men’s ultimate demise at the border, but as news of lost limbs started flowing out of Gaza, I began to see amputation as an unexplored theme.

The first amputee we meet in Men in the Sun is Shafiqa. She is the stepmother of Marwan, who at 16 is the youngest of the three would-be migrants to Kuwait. Shafiqa is said to have lost her leg “during the bombardment of Jaffa” by Zionist paramilitary groups in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Marwan’s father’s recent marriage to her is purely a means to improve his economic situation by becoming a beneficiary of the money she receives from charity. Now, this “penniless” man will be able to fulfill his dream of living under a concrete roof, an upgrade from his mud hut in the refugee camp. Marwan despises Shafiqa, seeing her as a cause of his family’s splintering. In a letter to his mother, he refers to his new stepmother only as “that deformed woman.” Now that his father has abandoned his family, Marwan must become the breadwinner.

When he goes to Shafiqa’s house to say goodbye to his father before departing for Kuwait, Marwan finds himself strangely intrigued by her condition: “She was sitting on a carpet of goatskin. The stick was lying be­side her, and he thought: ‘I wonder where her thigh ends?’ Her face was beautiful, but hard-featured like the faces of all those who are incurably ill, and her lower lip was twisted as though she were about to cry.” Marwan’s sentiments toward Shafiqa are less those of pity than they are a kind of disgusted curiosity. Her status as a victim makes her an object not of sincere compassion, but of exploitation and revulsion. After her amputation, Shafiqa’s existence is reduced to that of a nefarious leech — off of which others also leech.

So stark is Kanafani’s portrayal of victimhood and its discontents that some readers might question whether he is engaging in victim blaming. The most ruthless example of this attitude comes at the end of the novel, when the main characters suffocate while hiding in a lorry tank. Once their smuggler finally opens the latch of the tank after being delayed at a border checkpoint, the sun shines into the darkness and reveals a tangled mass of bodies whose parts can barely be distinguished from one another. Marwan and his companions have ceased to exist as human beings; they have been reduced to a list of unaffiliated body parts: “a chest,” “a mouth,” “the head,” “the shoulders.”

The smuggler, Abul Khaizuran, deflects blame for his passengers’ deaths, shouting at the corpses, “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank!?” Through this repeated line, Kanafani sends his Palestinian readers an unsparing message: You must not accept your fate, nor be timid in your attempts to change it. Resist your oppressor boldly. As it happens, the absence of any urgent knocking in the novel is haunted by the tap, tap, tap of Shafiqa’s crutch that Marwan had heard after leaving his father’s new house and setting off on his ill-fated journey.

Kanafani’s oft-cited phrase Lā tamut qabla ʾan takūna niddan (“Don’t die before you become a worthy adversary”) calls on Palestinians to refuse to be victims. Yet what makes Abul Khaizuran such a tragic character is that his backstory uncovers the rub of Kanafani’s call to action: even those who resist boldly may be humiliated and debased.

Before becoming a smuggler, Abul Khaizuran had been a resistance fighter in the 1948 war, and he sustained an injury in battle that resulted in him undergoing a different kind of amputation: surgical castration: “For ten long years he had been trying to accept the situa­tion. But what situation? To confess quite simply that he had lost his manhood for the sake of the homeland? And what good had it done? He had lost his manhood and his homeland, and damn it all to hell!” Abul Khaizuran’s character reveals the sensitive humanistic genius beneath Kanafani’s hardened image as the “brave commando who never fired a gun.” Through Abul Khaizuran, Kanafani acknowledges the excruciating truth: fighting for one’s dignity is not in the slightest guaranteed to preserve it.

Indeed, Abul Khaizuran’s actions are far from dignified. When we first meet him, he appears as a shifty man preying upon Marwan, taking advantage of the boy’s naïveté to get him to agree to hire him as a smuggler. Readers are quick to parse Abul Khaizuran as the novel’s villain, but as they discover more of his backstory, they can’t help but feel compassion for him, perhaps even more than the titular men themselves. The revelation of Abul Khaizuran’s castration transforms him from a villain into an antihero. By the end of the novel, after he tosses the bodies into a garbage heap and strips them of any valuables, readers are disgusted and wonder how they are still capable of sympathizing with him. This readerly experience mirrors the way Marwan views Shafiqa — first with utter contempt, then with pity and an almost dehumanizing fascination.

Is there a similar element of spectacle around Gaza’s child amputees? Do non-Palestinians peer at them through our screens as attendees of a freak show peered at the “human oddities” of their day, with a mixture of disgust, pity, and enthrallment? Certainly some residents of Gaza feel this way. As one resident of northern Gaza recently asked viewers in an interview with Al Jazeera, “Are you enjoying this … horror movie?”

In Kanafani’s novel, a doctor tries to reason with an inconsolable Abul Khaizuran following his operation. “At least it’s better than dying,” he says.

“No,” Abul Khaizuran responds. “It’s better to be dead.”

Palestinians undergoing amputation today are confronted with the “impossible choice” between life and limb. Experts say that in normal circumstances, many of the amputations taking place in Gaza could be avoided. But because of unsanitary conditions and extremely limited access to hospital care, doctors do not have adequate means to prevent infection, causing them to resort to amputation as a lifesaving measure. In other cases, patients in need of amputation are unable to receive the operation immediately due to overcrowding and die of sepsis while waiting for treatment.

Modern medicine generally allows child amputees to have a healthy future if significant and regular interventions are made, but such interventions are impracticable under current conditions in Gaza (and were very limited even before October 7). With the healthcare system ravaged by Israel’s frequent bombardment of hospital complexes and its blockage of medical supplies, every step in the process of amputation — from the operation itself to postoperative treatment to disability management — is marred by pain and indignity.

Kanafani himself, having clearly become a “worthy adversary,” was assassinated by Israeli Mossad operatives in Beirut in 1972. His wife Anni kissed her husband goodbye and sent him and his niece Lamees on their way downtown, and moments later an explosion rocked their house. Anni immediately ran downstairs and found the wreckage of their car, Lamees’s body, and Kanafani’s left leg.

Amputation as Disunity: Yousri Alghoul

One present-day Palestinian author who is inspired by Kanafani’s work is Yousri Alghoul, who grew up in Al-Shati refugee camp and who is currently enduring daily life in the northern Gaza Strip with his family. A recurring theme in Alghoul’s work is the disruption of burial rituals and the mourning process when human remains cannot be fully recovered or identified. His writing meditates on the visceral horror of the very concept of the body being separated from itself. The individual Palestinian body, now in pieces, becomes a synecdoche — a stand-in for the Palestinian body politic.

In Alghoul’s 2021 novel Gallows of Darkness, the character who undergoes amputation is Hudhayfah, a man who has made it his life’s mission to end infighting between Palestinian factions and bring them together in order to forge a unified confrontation with the Israeli occupation. Hudhayfah is a high-profile Hamas member released in the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal. When he returns to Gaza, he immediately takes it upon himself to quell tensions between Hamas and its rival faction Fatah. He even marries a Fatah-aligned woman who has previously been detained by Hamas police forces for political dissent.

During the novel’s depiction of Israel’s 2012 military campaign in Gaza, Hudhayfah works to coordinate war efforts with fighters representing other Palestinian groups, including Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). But in the midst of the war, Hamas fighters show up at his door to take him away, supposedly in an effort to save him from an imminent Israeli assassination attempt about which they have received intelligence. They say they want to bring him down into the tunnels to safety. As he descends in a makeshift elevator, it malfunctions and falls down its shaft.

When Hudhayfah awakens and discovers his leg has been amputated, he gets the strange sense that his fellow Hamas members who are with him underground are happy that he is in this condition. Has this all been a deliberate attempt on his life by his fellow fighters, who saw his unifying efforts as a threat to their movement? His punishment for attempting to bring Palestinians together is to have his own body severed from itself.

Hudhayfah is given the option of being spirited out of Gaza by a smuggler in order to ultimately be treated in a European hospital. But he doesn’t think this is realistic, and, true to form, he seeks unity — this time not political unity, but rather the physical unity of his own body. His leg has already been buried in a cemetery in Gaza, in accordance with Islamic custom. Hudhayfah jokes that if he were to die abroad, his body and leg would be buried separately, and when he woke up on the Day of Resurrection, he would be forced to hop around on one leg, looking for his other one. He dies a few days later.

Israel has long helped prop up Hamas as a part of a divide-and-rule strategy, benefiting from the Islamist movement as a cudgel against nationalist and leftist Palestinian groups. When Hudhayfah’s efforts toward ending this division fail, the discordant violence that he aims to end is meted out upon him, severing his very self from itself. While the reader is left to assume that the cause of the elevator malfunction was foul play from Hamas members who saw Hudhayfah’s actions as disloyal, the possibility remains that the elevator malfunction was the result of an Israeli attack. The ambiguity of responsibility for Hudayfah’s fate might be read as an indication of Israel’s role in creating the circumstances for his death. Even if Palestinian infighting is the direct cause of the incident, Israel’s divide-and-rule strategy is also an important factor at play.

The severing of limbs appears again in a yet-to-be-published short story by Alghoul entitled “A Life Dipped in Blood,” written and set during the current Gaza war. The story’s main character goes out to search for food in north Gaza, rummaging through bombed-out houses whose residents have fled south. There is an Israeli drone strike, and everyone in his group of scavengers is killed except him. He flees back to the abandoned home where he and his family are squatting after theirs was destroyed. But when his wife asks whether their children will have to go another night without eating, the man decides to retrace his steps to find the bags of canned food he’d dropped in his flight. He knows he also must face the sight of his companions’ dead bodies and be responsible for ensuring their burial:

My cohorts were waiting for me to carry their body parts back to the refugee camp. Perhaps I could have turned them into a Frankenstein’s monster powerful enough to avenge their blessed souls, but I failed to distinguish their features from one another in order to rearrange them so they could depart unto God in a proper state. So I buried them together in a large tunnel…

Out of the unidentifiable shreds of Palestinian bodies, the man can only conceivably create a monster reminiscent of Ahmad Saddawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad. These humans have been obliterated to the extent that the unity of their immortal souls has been compromised. It is as if, when they meet their maker on the Day of Resurrection, He will not recognize them.

Sheikhs insist that God will gather together all of the pieces of each of His human creations on that Day, no matter how far apart they’ve been buried. But just as Judaism and Christianity teach that humans are made in the image of God, Islam teaches that God breathed His sacred spirit into Adam. According to the Qur’an, God “perfected [our] design, molding [us] in whatever form He willed” (82:7-8). When shrapnel from US-provided bombs rips limbs from bodies on a daily basis in Gaza, God’s sacred spirit is violated. It is as if the victims are stripped of the mark of their Creator, never again to be molded in the “form He willed.”

Alghoul’s dark literary fixation on the literal and figurative disunity of the Palestinian body begins to articulate the depth of spiritual horror arising from the spectacle of mass amputation in Gaza.

Amputated Stories: Emile Habiby

To end this essay, let us turn to Emile Habiby, the late Palestinian writer and politician who, after the creation of Israel in 1948, resolutely “remain[ed] in Haifa,” as his tombstone in that city reads. Habiby’s collection of short stories, Sextet of the Six-Day War, describes the pain felt by Palestinian citizens of Israel for the 19 years in which their loved ones outside Israeli territory were completely “cut off” from them.

The book was written soon after Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Now that these portions of Palestine had come under Israeli control, it became possible for those living in the lands captured in 1967 to travel (with an Israeli-issued permit) to the lands captured in 1948 — lands from which many of them had been expelled. While the occupation was an enormous “setback” (Naksa) for Pan-Arabism and for Palestinian self-determination, it was also a bittersweet moment of reunion for Habiby and his fellow Palestinian citizens of Israel, who could finally see their friends and relatives again. Now, all the Palestinians living in historic Palestine were locked up by the same jailors, as Habiby puts it in one of the stories: “…one people, meeting together after a long separation, under one roof, the roof of the prison cell.”

The motif of being cut off runs throughout the Sextet. The main character from the story is a boy whose relatives were all displaced in the Nakba, and he is described as maqṭūʿ al-ʾaṣl wa-l-faṣl (roughly, “cut off from root and branch”). The second story is about two childhood friends who, since the creation of Israel, have been “completely cut off” from one another. But the most striking “cutoff” of the collection comes in the third story. This piece ends prematurely when the narrator interrupts it by describing a bedtime story that his grandmother used to tell:

She was past 90, and she was getting things mixed up. So she’d start the story of Clever Hasan in the middle:

“And Clever Hasan took his magic wand and hit the giant with it.”

“What magic wand, Grandma?”

But she paid no attention to our cries. And she’d continue with her story. And not once did we stay awake until the end of the story, and not once did she make it to the end without falling asleep.

And when we grew up we’d remember my grandma and her story, which we called “al-batrāʾ” [the incomplete — literally, the amputated] and we’d drown in laughter.

As if it were the logical thing for a story to have a beginning, and for it to have an end.

But is that the logical thing, really?

And even if it were logical, would it be logical in our country?

In Arabic, the word batrāʾ calls to mind a famously eloquent 7th-century khuṭbah delivered by the Umayyad ruler of Basra and Kufa, Ziyad ibn Abihi. The speech is known as Al-Khuṭbah Al-Batrāʾ (“The Amputated/Incomplete Khuṭbah”) because it did not begin in the formal manner of praising God — just as Habiby’s grandmother’s story, for all its brilliance, would always be deemed incomplete. And in the same fashion, in place of an ending to his story, Habiby simply inserts the anecdote about the grandmother’s story, adding, “Let this story remain batrāʾ, until we write its ending together.”

We know from Habiby’s earlier pieces in the Sextet that the real “amputee” is Palestine — its map and lands physically cut into pieces. On the world stage today, and for many years before, it is the story of Palestine whose beginnings, middles, and ends have been amputated.

Mainstream Western media regularly commits this kind of narrative violence against Palestine. Case in point: the current “Israel-Hamas war” is invariably described as beginning on October 7, even though, before the Hamas attack, Israeli forces had killed more Palestinians in the West Bank in 2023 than in any year for the past two decades. Also cut from the narrative is the fact that Israeli forces responded to the overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations of the 2018-19 Great March of Return by killing scores of Gazan protesters and maiming others, causing 156 amputations. Not to mention the fact that the Gaza Strip has been under a crippling Israeli blockade since 2007. These and many other crucial details of the Palestinian narrative have been amputated from Western media coverage.

And yet, one of Habiby’s best known authorial traits is his ability to trudge absurdly through catastrophe to find tiny nuggets of positivity, a modus operandi dubbed “pessoptimism” (at-tashāʾul) after the eponymous character of his most famous novel.

If Habiby could speak to us from beyond the grave, he might well encourage us to indulge in a bit of pessoptimism ourselves. In that vein, what would it look like to “write” the “ending” of this heinous war in Gaza together? If Gaza has been amputated from Palestine and the rest of the world, how can it be grafted back on again?

The truth is that heroic efforts at this kind of figurative prosthesis have been underway since the beginning of the war. Two important examples come to mind. First, Palestinian journalists in Gaza have refused to let the stories of life under the bombs go untold, despite the regular communications blackouts and the unprecedented number of press workers killed by the Israeli military. Palestinian journalists are risking their lives every day to provide detailed accounts of both suffering and resilience that Western media outlets have not been able to ignore. These brave journalists have thus managed to maintain a tenuous link between Gaza and the outside world.

Secondly and finally, one act of international solidarity stands out beyond the rest: namely, South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice requesting Israel be tried for genocide. Though the case will take years to try, it is clear that this attempt to hold Israel accountable is among the most significant ones in history — given the court’s January ruling that it is “plausible” Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The late South African icon Nelson Mandela famously said “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” It is genuinely moving to see these words put into action by his compatriots, whose international legal action is consolidating fraternal bonds between historically oppressed peoples.

But despite these profound efforts at prosthesis, many of Gaza’s wounds will never heal. Even literal prosthetic treatment on a massive scale wouldn’t give Gaza’s children back their legs. No words can change that.

My pessoptimistic wish is only that we allow the rich corpus of Palestinian literature to speak into the void created by our stunned silence.

Author’s Note: The quoted passages from Men in the Sun are taken from Hilary Kilpatrick’s translation, with a few minor adjustments. Translations of passages from all other literary works quoted in this essay are my own. My thanks to Anton Shammas for his insights on the word batrāʾ and to Imam Mohammad Mardini for his insights on Islamic teachings on the sacredness of the human body.

Editor’s note: A shorter version of this essay appears in The Conversation.