This Palestinian boy lost his eye to an unexploded bomb. Thousands of tonnes of explosives may remain in Gaza

Mohamed Hijazi squirms as his father unwraps a bandage for him. He cries and kicks his feet, but his dad manages to eventually place the bandage over his eye. 

"It's nothing," Abu Mohamed tells his child, in a last-ditch effort to calm him down. But the boy is inconsolable. 

The seven-year-old was playing outside the family home in April with his cousins in Jabalia in northern Gaza, where his family was sheltering, when the children came across a bomb that hadn't detonated. 

"It exploded in front of him," Abu Mohamed said. "We went down and found [him] full of blood." 

The child was rushed to a nearby hospital to be treated for his injuries and then transferred to a hospital in central Gaza with an ophthalmology department that could perform the surgery he needed. His right eye was removed. He may yet lose the left, too, his father said. 

There is no shortage of dangers in Gaza for kids like Mohamed, from airstrikes to disease and malnutrition to the shootings that have become a regular occurrence at aid distribution sites. But the risks posed by the unexploded bombs, mines, booby traps and other munitions that are left lying all around Gaza are particularly insidious.

"They're different; they're literally shiny," said Luke Irving, chief of the UN's mine action programme in the occupied territories. "A child would be immediately drawn to that."

The Hamas-run government media office in Gaza said that based on UN estimates of the volume of unexploded ordnance, there could be as much as 6,800 tonnes of unexploded ordnance scattered throughout Gaza. The United Nations estimated in January that about five to 10 per cent of all weapons fired into the territory failed to detonate.

Irving said there have been 222 accidents that have been confirmed to be related to unexploded ordnance since Israel began bombing Gaza in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack that killed some 1,200 people and saw another 250 taken hostage. 

There have likely been hundreds more such encounters, but such incidents are not always officially counted, said Irving. With much of the medical infrastructure in ruins, doctors in Gaza are preoccupied with trying to stabilize patients rather than assessing the cause of their injuries or deaths, he said.  

Encounters with unexploded munitions are not always fatal but can leave people with catastrophic injuries and lifelong disabilities that are challenging to manage in a war zone with a decimated health-care system.

Just 17 of Gaza's 36 hospitals were considered partially functional, and over 1,000 health-care workers had been killed as of December 2024, according to Doctors Without Borders.

In Mohamed's case, doctors told him his left eye might be able to be saved, but he would have to be medically evacuated out of Gaza for the surgery. Until then, his father holds his hand and guides his every step, getting him used to having to relearn simple movements and tasks that he previously did without thinking. 

"As a father, it's very difficult to see Hamood [potentially] losing both his eyes and not living his normal life," said Abu Mohamed, using his son's nickname. "I see his cousins playing, and Hamood won't play with them. It's very difficult for me."