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Beirut, Lebanon – They wait, smiling mischievously, their eyes bright at the sight of two wrapped Spider-Man notebooks.

Ali, the bolder of the two despite being only three years old, tears his open at once.

Six-year-old Omar fumbles, one-handed, with the plastic, his cheeks reddening with embarrassment. Without hesitation, Ali reaches across, peels it open and sets the notebook back in Omar’s lap.

Soon Omar will have a prosthetic arm like Ali, and the small rituals of childhood, like opening a present, will be possible again.

The boys are not brothers, although they live as if they were.

In Hamra, a bustling district of Beirut where traffic clogs the streets and the Mediterranean glimmers beyond the hotels, they share the same apartment block and the same wounds.

Both were pulled from the rubble. Both were the only survivors of their families, and both had their hands torn off by an Israeli bomb.

Once separated by hundreds of miles, Omar Abu Kuwaik from Gaza, and Ali Khalife from southern Lebanon, are casualties of Israel’s war on children.

They live under the care of their aunts. Maha, who brought Omar out of Gaza, was forced to leave her own teenage children behind.

And Sobhiye, who never had children of her own, vowed to raise Ali after the rest of her family was killed.

Omar and Ali now call their aunties Mama.

“The memories of before are too painful,” Maha said. “They just want to forget.”

‘Ali asks if his parents can still see him’

The Khalife family home in Sarafand, in southern Lebanon, was a three-storey home that once bustled with children.

“We used to go for ice cream and meals, hang out during the day,” Sobhiye recalled.

“That morning felt calm,” she said, describing waking up and going out early on October 29, 2024. By 8:15am, an Israeli shell struck suddenly. She was driving close enough to feel it.

Rescuers worked through the day, digging through concrete and steel. The truck carrying equipment shuttled back and forth, but no signs of life emerged as darkness fell.

Fourteen hours after the shelling, they found two-year-old Ali under two storeys of debris, his small body withered, his hand severed, his breath shallow but still present.
He lay unconscious for a week, kept alive by oxygen. Sobhiye was washing the bodies of the dead when she learned he had survived.

When he opened his eyes at last, he reached for his parents, but they had been killed, along with 13 other members of his family.

“He asked me if his parents can still see him,” she recalled. “I told him they watch you all the time. They will always see you, but you can’t see them.”

Ali fidgets with his prosthetic arm. The laughter from the morning’s gifts has gone, replaced by a restlessness that sits in the room. He calls for “Mama” between his aunt’s sentences, tugging at her sleeve, trying to draw her gaze.

When she doesn’t look up, his voice rises into a cry. “He has a strong personality,” his auntie says, half-smiling. “The doctor says that’s what kept him alive.”

That month, Israel’s war with Hezbollah had escalated from cross-border rocket fire into full bombardment by Israel of Lebanon’s south and capital.

By the time a ceasefire was reached, Israel had killed more than 4,000 people and wounded nearly 17,000. This includes at least 240 children killed, with at least 700 more injured. Despite the truce, Israeli fire has continued to cross the border.

Omar was the only survivor

Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian British surgeon, treated Ali in Lebanon and helped secure his care through the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund, the charity he founded.
The fund has cared for nearly 180 children, 19 Palestinians from Gaza, and 158 Lebanese, all scarred by Israel’s bombs. Some lost limbs, others live with burns, brain trauma, or the scars of sniper fire, tank shells and artillery blasts.

Some are orphans, others have relatives still in Gaza or Lebanon’s south. All are given housing, medical treatment and psychological support, often after surviving the Rafah crossing into Egypt with a family member.

Omar is one of the 19 Palestinian children helped by the fund.

“Ten days after the war started, we were told to evacuate the building,” Maha recalled. “Omar went to his mum’s family’s house in az-Zahra, 15 minutes from where I was staying.”

On the morning of December 6, 2023, the first missile struck. Maha heard it from her home. “You hear these sounds a lot because the bombings are very, very loud,” she said. “But this time was different.”

The Kuwaik home was four floors. “His family were eating breakfast on one side of the house, and Amar was outside riding his bicycle. So when the bomb hit, he flew – that’s when his hand was injured.”

When rescuers reached the rubble, only one child remained alive. “There were 15 people in the building,” Maha said. “Omar was the only survivor.”

Now he sits quietly in the corner. Ali has gone out with his aunt, and Omar watches the space where his friend was. The room feels emptier without his presence. Maha speaks softly, as if her words might wake something fragile.

She explains how she got him onto a medical evacuation list and they crossed Rafah into an Egyptian hospital, where she was able to apply for him to go to the United States for surgery and a prosthetic.

But his treatment wasn’t completed in the US, and they were returned to Egypt without a proper fitting or physiotherapy. Then, Maha learned about the Ghassan Abu Sittah fund and was able to apply for Omar’s treatment to be completed, as he needed a whole new prosthetic and the therapy to allow him to use it.

She had left her three teenage children behind in Gaza to keep him alive.

At the mention of the doctor’s name, Omar’s face lights up. It is because of Dr Abu Sittah, Omar will soon have his new arm.

The ‘genocidal machine’s’ attacks on healthcare

Abu-Sittah has spent most of his life moving in and out of Palestine.

He first entered Gaza in 1989 as a young medical student during the first Intifada. He returned during the second Intifada, then again in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, and during the Great March of Return in 2018.

When Israel’s assault on Gaza began in October 2023, Abu-Sittah crossed the border once more.

At al-Shifa Hospital with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), and later at al-Ahli, he operated for 45 days straight, stitching together children, women and men torn apart by Israeli artillery and air strikes – all while under bombardment himself.

Barred now by Israel from re-entering Gaza, he travelled to The Hague, where he gave evidence to the International Criminal Court. Investigators later found a plausible case for genocide against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

In December 2023, he established the fund in Beirut to care for Palestinian and Lebanese children. Working with NGOs and doctors on the ground, the fund identifies the worst cases, brings children to Beirut for surgery at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, and houses them with their family members in apartments while they recover. Families are offered a year’s accommodation, along with social welfare and psychological care, before returning home.

“When children are wounded in war, it is not just their bodies,” Abu Sittah said. “They are emotionally wounded, socially wounded, existentially wounded. Their whole view of the world is altered. They will need care for the rest of their lives.”

In Lebanon, he explained, the most common injury is traumatic brain injury. In Gaza, it’s amputations. “Children who might have kept their limbs with proper surgery are instead left without them.”

Of Gaza’s five cardiologists, only two remain, says Abu Sittah. The kidney specialists are gone, and every board-certified emergency doctor has been killed.

Of all the healthcare facilities in the enclave, 94 percent have been damaged or destroyed by Israel. The World Health Organization (WHO) has documented at least 735 attacks on health infrastructure between October 2023 and June 2025.

“It’s part of making Gaza uninhabitable,” Abu Sittah said. “It makes the genocidal machine more resilient.”

The fund now hopes to evacuate 30 more Palestinian children from Gaza with the help of the WHO.

“We know who the children are,” he says. “We are getting them passports … They had no documentation, as some have lived their whole lives under bombardment.”

But Israel blocks their passage, he added, leaving 30 wounded children in need of life-saving care. In total, 15,600 patients, including 3,800 children, are waiting for medical evacuation from Gaza to receive lifesaving care outside of Gaza, according to the WHO.

“Children are absolutely being targeted,” Abu Sittah said. “Everything is a target: children, buildings, healthcare, journalists. Everything.”

Waking up screaming

Ali returns to the room, small and busy, unbothered by the adults talking. The boys catch each other’s eyes and smile, as if sharing a secret joke only they understand.

Omar’s aunt Maha recalls the nights when he could not sleep. “He would sleep two hours, then wake up screaming. He was scared to sleep. He thought he would never wake up.”

She would try to show him photographs of his parents, but he turned away. Ali still calls out for his parents, adds Sobhiye.

The women, carrying the weight of both grief and guardianship, admit they struggle to find the words to keep the children steady.

Maha’s husband and three teenage children remain in Rafah, displaced in a camp by the sea. With Israel striking areas it claims are “safe zones”, Maha knows she may never see them again.

The boys, bored now by adult sorrow, return to their notebooks. Ali traces over the Spider-Man figure in his notepad.

Omar is beginning to sleep better now in Beirut, Maha says, but he still dreams of a past that no longer exists.

In his new notepad, Omar sketches the Gaza of his memory: olive trees, butterflies and the birds that once rested in his garden.

“He hopes to go back one day,” Maha says. “To his nursery, his friends – as if nothing ever happened.

Names marked with an asterisk have been changed to protect identities.

In 2024, Mohammed* flew into St Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, on his first trip abroad.

With its perfect grid, imposing imperial palaces and “white nights”, when the proximity to the Arctic Circle makes darkness disappear in late summer, St Petersburg was a far cry from home.

Mohammed arrived from Dushanbe, the sun-parched and overpopulated capital of Tajikistan, the poorest nation of ex-Soviet Central Asia.

He saw the trip as a way of boosting his income and sending remittances home, like millions of Central Asian economic migrants who travel to Russia each year or live there full-time.

He entered Russia visa-free, paid 6,000 rubles ($74) a month for a renewable work permit, and shared a shabby rented apartment with six others while working at a food stall.

But months after arriving, the life he had carefully carved out was shattered.

He told Al Jazeera that, having forgotten to pay the fee for the work permit, he was rounded up by police, beaten and denied food. In detention, Russian military officers forced him to sign up to the army, he said.

He said he had no choice but to serve.

He travelled to Ukraine and fought alongside Russian troops and foreign fighters on Moscow’s side.

Earlier this year, however, Ukrainian troops captured him. He is now a prisoner of war (PoW).

Ukraine’s military gave Al Jazeera rare access to Mohammed, one of dozens of Central Asian prisoners of war. Al Jazeera did not witness Mohammed speaking under duress, however an officer was present at the interview in a prison, in a town close to the front line.

Al Jazeera is concealing Mohammed’s identity for safety reasons.

According to international laws, prisoners of war must be treated humanely.

But several former PoWs interviewed in Ukraine and swapped later have been sentenced to jail for “spreading fake news”. Both Kyiv and Moscow have also traded accusations of mistreatment, torture and execution of PoWs. Some of the claims have been confirmed by gruesome videos posted online or on Telegram channels.

Mohammed lamented Russia during the interview. In addition to alleging police brutality, he claimed to have observed anti-Muslim discrimination at military training centres.

Russia and Ukraine have swapped thousands of prisoners of war since the start of the conflict in early 2022. There is no official data on the number of PoWs each side holds. Mohammed said he hopes he is not transferred back to Russia and is allowed to fight on Ukraine’s side instead.

It is a claim that feels familiar in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. In July, Russian lawmaker Viktor Vodolatsky said that a number of Ukrainian PoWs refused to return and wanted to fight for Moscow. An activist said at the time that it was “very unlikely, or almost impossible, that prisoners would agree to this sort of thing voluntarily”.

Mohammed said that back in Russia, he realised he had signed a one-year military service contract with a signing bonus of 1.6 million rubles ($19,644) and a monthly salary of 210,000 rubles ($2,580) – only after he was allegedly forced to do so.

The officers promised he would serve as a “guard” far from the front line and would receive a Russian passport in six months.

“They fooled me,” he said.

He then spent weeks training in western Russia. The training was perfunctory, he said. His AK-47 assault rifle was old and kept jamming.

“My weapon didn’t work, I swear. Seriously,” he said.

‘Kremlin’s policy of recruiting manpower’

Russia has long been accused of forcibly conscripting Central Asian migrants, allegedly with a heavy hand.

Like Mohammed, others who have survived to tell their stories say they were promised hefty salaries, “safe” jobs far from the front line, and Russian citizenship.

“Behind all that is the Kremlin’s policy of recruiting manpower by any means necessary and avoiding the forced mobilisation of Russians,” Alisher Ilkhamov, the head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a London-based think tank, told Al Jazeera.

In the training centres, where dozens of recruits slept in unheated barracks, there were other Muslims from outside Russia – including nationals of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan.

Some volunteered, but most were forced to enlist, Mohammed said.

He claimed that the Muslims were not allowed to pray and were subject to daily racial and religious slurs from drill officers, who allegedly forced them to shave off their beards and clean toilets in and out of the barracks.

The number of Russians was low and limited to convicts who volunteered to serve in exchange for presidential pardons, he said.

Moscow denies racially or religiously profiling potential recruits, but has emphasised the “duty” of economic migrants who have received or desire Russian citizenship to serve their new home.

In May 2023, Russia’s top prosecutor Aleksander Bastrykin said that “while Russians are on the front lines, the migrants are attacking our rear… If they are Russian nationals, have citizenship, please, go to the front line. If you don’t fulfil your duty, go back to your motherland.”

A year later, he said forced recruitment is “a good feature that led to the situation when migrants started slowly leaving Russia”.

After the training, Mohammed was taken to an eastern Ukraine region that was home to heavy fighting. He was handed an assault rifle, magazines and hand grenades.

He was partnered with another foreign fighter, who told him he had volunteered in exchange for a Russian passport.

The pair appeared to have become part of Moscow’s new stratagem of dispatching handfuls of servicemen to infiltrate Ukrainian positions and amass manpower and ammunition before clashing with Ukrainian forces.

“This is a tactic of extra-small storm groups; it has been used since spring, in certain locations since late last year,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University, who has authored copious analytical reports on the Russian-Ukrainian war, told Al Jazeera.

“It decreases losses, especially if there’s foliage” that hides the troops “and sharply increases the means to destroy them, around tenfold”, he said.

Mohammed and other servicemen had their phones, documents and debit cards taken away by their officers.

They received cheap smartphones with just one app – Alpine Quest, a topographic programme that lets users move around using coded coordinates without web access and GPS.

They did not know the names of the villages and farms they were tasked to move to by their commanding officer, who radioed them from a distance and whose name or whereabouts they never found out.

Every day, they walked for hours in small groups. One of the servicemen carried a backpack with a portable jamming system that immobilised Ukrainian drones.

He said he saw several killed Russian soldiers: “Some had no heads, some no arms.”

They trudged on despite hunger and thirst – drone-delivered rations consisted of a small bottle of water and two or three chocolate bars a day.

When Mohammed saw a gravely wounded, bleeding Russian soldier, his commanding officer warned him by radio against helping him.

To Mohammed, that was the moment of a harrowing revelation – his life meant nothing, and he might also be left to die.

Amid a spell of intense fighting, Mohammed and his partner were ordered to hide in an abandoned, fire-damaged Ukrainian village.

With no drone-delivered food for days, they rummaged through kitchens and basements only to find some pasta, which they chewed raw.

But Ukrainian drones tracked them down.

‘Mohammed expressed a wish to serve for Ukraine’

Mohammed claimed that during his time in the army, he did not fire his gun or throw a single grenade. Ukrainians take such claims with a grain of salt.

“In the years of my service since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no Russian prisoner of war has ever admitted he’d killed Ukrainian servicemen, civilians. Not a single one,” the Ukrainian officer who oversaw Mohammed told Al Jazeera.

Mohammed “was a Russian storm-trooper. He was captured while storming Ukrainian positions in Donetsk,” the officer said.

Mohammed said he was fearful of Ukrainian detention, having heard rumours that Russian captives had been tortured and mutilated.

He has been treated better than he had expected, he said.

“I swear, they give me whatever I want – cigarettes any time, food, drinks. They say, ‘Take it, little brother,’” he said.

He also called his father for the first time: “My dad cried a little, said, ‘What matters is that you’re alive.’”

He fears the possibility of being swapped, as Russia, according to human rights groups and ex-soldiers, has disregarded international rules by returning prisoners of war to the front line.

“They will get me back to the war, 100 percent, until I die or lose an arm or a leg,” he said.

He cannot return to Tajikistan, either, as he could face 12 years in jail for joining another nation’s army.

Hochu Jit (I Want to Live), a Ukrainian government group that monitors and helps PoWs, said in April it had verified the names of 931 Tajik nationals aged 18 to 70 fighting for Russia. It said 196 of them had died, as their life expectancy on the front lines was 140 days, and specified that the real number could be “much higher”.

Mohammed believes his only way to survive is to enlist in the Ukrainian army to obtain Ukrainian citizenship and get his family out of Tajikistan.

“When the war is over – if the war is over – I will tell my dad in Tajikistan: Come on, sell the house, come to Ukraine, buy a house here,” he said.

The officer overseeing Mohammed said his enlistment plea is being considered.

Dozens of Russian PoWs have volunteered to fight for Ukraine since 2022, and many joined two military units that consist of Russian nationals.

At least three people have died and several are missing after torrential rain from Typhoon Matmo caused widespread flooding across northern Vietnam.