Abdelrahman Al-Chourafa kept his gaze fixed behind rectangular black glasses, his face solemn and his back straight as the physiotherapist pressed down on his leg. His ankle trembled violently under the pressure, wrapped in a white bandage running from his calf to his toes. There were four children from Gaza trying to master their injured little bodies in the large room of the Doctors Without Borders clinic in Marka, in the northeast of Amman, the Jordanian capital. A sudden movement caused the shorts to rise for one of them, a nine-year-old boy, revealing the end of a large metal pin encircling his thigh. Another dragged his feet, shriveled by old burn scars. Abdelrahman nearly lost his leg, shattered by an Israeli drone strike. His frail silhouette contrasted with the teenage phrases that he sometimes let slip, a shield against the horror.

Before he was injured, he encountered his first corpse in December 2023, during aid distributions in northern Gaza. "It was the first time I saw something so strange, his skull was half broken, half intact," he described, in a teenage voice that was searching for its pitch. At 15, he's seen mangled bodies in the courtyard of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, "arms on one side and legs on the other"; a "half-decomposed" body that people covered with a plastic tarp and buried in the sand; and a man bleeding out on the road, he listed off rapidly.

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