Doctor removes bullets from the head of a Palestinian woman after four months of distress

Cairo – Sarah Al Awadi says she was sitting with her family in a tent in the central town of Alzawaida in the early hours of October 22, 2024 Gaza Strip
Where the evacuated Palestinians seized the shelter, when she was hit in the head by a bullet fired by an Israeli quadcopter drone.

“I suddenly felt a pain in my head, like I was hit by an iron bar or something,” 18-year-old Gazan told CBS News this week. “My family began screaming, ‘Bullet, bullet!” Everyone was in panic and they carried me and rushed me to the shuhada al-aqsa hospital. ”

CBS News asked the Israeli Defence Forces about reported use of small equipment drones in Gaza, in particular that she was attacked by one of the weapons in refugees camps. In a statement sent Wednesday, the IDF said, “In accordance with international law, we will target only military targets and take viable precautions to mitigate harm to civilians.”

The military said it could not provide details about the various aircraft used “to avoid breach of the IDF’s operational capabilities” and added that it could not provide information on Al-Awady’s claims without more accurate information about the time and location of the filming.

The doctors did what they could do with what they had The devastation of Gaza
just a year after Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023 caused a war on Palestinian territory. They could see the bullet reside in Al Awadi’s skull behind her right eye, but they were not capable of removing it.

Al Awadi was ultimately told that there was nothing more that Gaza doctors could do, but she refused to give up hope and insisted on staying in the hospital. At least she thought that in the hospital, her severely wounded eyes would be protected from the dusty state of the house that was met with family members.

So she relied on painkillers to deal with the unbearable pain in her head, but she had no plans for relief.

In early November, Al Awadi was seen by a volunteer medical team visiting a European hospital near Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. Egyptian Dr. Mohamed Taufik was one of the volunteers and when he saw Al Awadi he thought of someone he believed would help.

Tawfik called his father, a veteran ophthalmologist, to get his medical opinion.

Elder doctor Dr. Ahmed Taufik told CBS News he wanted to go to Gaza to help the young woman, but the passing South Rafa border between the enclave and Egypt has been closed.

“I followed this case almost every day. I felt this was my case,” Tawfik said.

However, he could not find a way to travel to Gaza, and at the time the war was still raging, so Israel allowed very few people to leave the enclave, even for medical treatment.

The doctor’s son returned to Egypt and Al-Awadi told CBS News that he had begun to give up hope. For months she said she lived in fear that she would lose sight of her forever in her right eye.

“I, like many others, applied for treatment abroad. When people asked me, I say, ‘How long did you wait?’ They’ll say to me, ‘Forget that, we’ve been waiting longer.’

A faint hope of hope will finally come about three months after the bullet was locked up in Al-Awadi’s head, along with the news that Israel and Hamas had. I agreed to a ceasefire
transaction. It came into effect on January 19, 2024, allowing Al Awadi to return to her cutoff home north of Gaza.

She said she was relieved to find her family’s home among the several buildings that she had escaped from destruction. She stayed there for a week and received a call from the World Health Organization on the evening of February 8th, informing her that she would be leaving for Egypt the next day.

“I didn’t have electricity so I literally packed my bags with candlelight,” she recalled. Only her mother was allowed to travel with her, but as planned, the pair arrived in Egypt the next day.

She was first sent to Port city on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. A week later, Dr. Tawfik managed to move her to the hospital, where she worked for Governor Al-Sharqia, the Nile Delta.

Three teams, Ophthalmology, Neurosurgery and Radiology, worked together to discuss the best approach to removing bullets that had remained right next to Al Awadi’s optic nerve for months.

“We performed some simulations to find the best route to avoid the optic nerve,” Dr. Mohamed Khaled Shawky of the Al Nour Radiology Center told CBS News. He helped lead the surgery remotely via video links from a workstation at another facility.

“The bullet landed in the best possible location for patients, but the worst location for the medical team,” Shokey told CBS News. “If I had moved millimeters in every direction, I would have done a lot of damage.”

The doctor agreed that there is the best option to avoid brain damage: trying to reach the bullet by passing through Al Awadi’s eye socket.

Tawfik is direct and Al-Awady has a 50% chance of success, risk of internal bleeding, and she may lose her eyes completely or seriously impair her vision.

“I cried. I was very scared, but I prayed and accepted the risk,” she told CBS News.

“His incredible medical team did their best to improve my mind and prepare me psychologically.

The surgery was performed last week and was a success. Tawfik told CBS News that he was surprised by the amount of infection and abscess caused by bullets that had been rusting over time in Al-Awady’s head.

Even if a bullet comes out, Al Awadi isn’t entirely out of the forest.

“Three hours later, I opened my eyes and said that because of God, everything went well,” she recalled. “I started crying again.”

“She’s very stable now and she’s getting better with her medication,” Tawfik told CBS News. “My goal was to first end the pain caused by the infection and then maintain her current vision level. I hope that her vision will improve after dealing with retinal separation.”

The young woman’s eyes have never seen or never seen, just like she did before she was shot.

Al-Awady told CBS News that her joy was incomplete, like many Palestinians who came out of Gaza to receive the medical assistance they desperately needed. She missed the rest of the family and she had to leave.

She was asked about the rusty bullet that had lived in her head for four months and she said she was going to hold it.

“I’m thinking about framing it,” she told CBS News.

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