Gazan amputees are delivering aid to children by bike during the Israel-Hamas war

Grabbing his bicycle, Mohammed Abu Asfour, peddled frantically towards the local school as unfathomable chaos engulfed him and his family.

Moments before, Mohammed couldn’t tell how close the bombs where to his family home. Boom after boom, it all sounded the same.

As his family fled their home on foot, Mohammed had one choice: grab his bike and pedal for his life alongside them. If he didn’t there was no way he could survive. 

Being an amputee, it would have been impossible for the 24-year-old labourer to keep up with his petrified loved ones. 

By the time they reached the school, now turned into a makeshift bomb shelter, Mohammed’s bike was covered in the blood of those wounded by the Israeli airplanes above him.

His bike had helped him escape the war but like the neighbourhood he had called home, it was bombed and ruined.

Israeli attacks have flattened buildings in the Gaza Strip during the war (Picture: Anadolu)

But Mohammed was one of the ‘lucky’ ones. He and his family had survived an Israeli strike on Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza where many Palestinians had sought shelter in to escape the Israeli bombardment in northern Gaza.

Mohammed hand’t always been disabled.

As a teenager, he clocked hours at a small market stand to support his family on top of his job as a labourer. It was something many Palestinian young people did – and still do – given that unemployment is nearly 50% in the territory.

However, Mohammed and his family’s lives were upended when he was shot in 2019 during the Great Return March, a 20-month-long string of protests along the border of Israel.

At that time, demonstrators were calling for, among other things, an end to the blockade held in place by Israel and Egypt which restricts imports and prevents most people from leaving.

One month after the injury, Mohammad had to have his right leg below the knee amputated. He was just 19 years old.

‘I used to go to work every day,’ the now 23-year-old Mohammed tells Metro.co.uk through a translator. ‘But after the injury, I could only do one day a week.

‘My amputation was literally crippling and it was very difficult adjusting. I also felt very ostracised from society, it took a while but I eventually adjusted.’

Mohammed, who uses a prosthetic leg, is among the 150,000 people in Gaza – around 7% of the population – who are disabled. This also includes over 3,000 amputated people.

‘I was being blamed by people around me for my own injury,’ Moahammed says. ‘They questioned why we went to the march to begin with. What did we gain.’

In 2020, a year on from his lifechanging injury, Mohammed joined the Gaza Sunbirds, a professional para-cycling team made up of others who have lost limbs in previous bombardments.

The Gaza Sunbirds are made up of amputees injured by Israeli forces, its co-founder says (Picture: Gaza Sunbirds)

The team provides people living in the coastal enclave the opportunity for rehabilitation through sport, offering equipment and coaching.

Before the war, the athletes biked across the Gazan coastline overlooking the Mediterranean Sea or along Salah al-Din Street, the strip’s main north-south highway and longest road at 27 miles.

‘Sport is huge in my life, I enjoy all of it from football to cycling,’ Mohammed says. ‘I was very active before my injury, and continue to be now.’

However, Mohammed and his teammates ride their bikes for a very different reason these days.

More than a month since Hamas’ Ocotber 7 rampage that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and saw roughly 240 people held captive for weeks, Gaza has been plunged into a humanitarian catastrophe.

On top of thousands of retaliatory air strikes, Israel, aided by Egypt, imposed a ‘complete’ blockade on the region, preventing most basic necessities and aid from coming in.

Tens of thousands of kilograms worth of food and other necessities have been distributed so far (Picture: Gaza Sunbirds)

Athletes have been peddling supplies to children affected by the war (Picture: Gaza Sunbirds)

According to the media office for Hamas, the militant group which governs Gaza, more than 14,800 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict. Health officials put the casualty toll at about 38,000.

Until recently, Mohammed had one dream: ‘To win and raise the Palestinian flag abroad,’ he says, speaking of the Gaza Sunbirds team’s aim to take part in the 2024 Paralympics in Paris.

‘But now under the bombing, it has been shattered. There is zero motivation to do anything and what’s now gone will need a million years to repair.’

Watching communities scrape by with little food and water, Mohammed and his teammates knew they had to do something to help – and they knew how they could do it.

Since October 19, the Gaza Sunbirds have helped distribute nearly £40,000 worth of supplies, including 34,000kg of food, baby essentials, blankets and female sanitary products, by bike across the southern region of Rafah. All items that are now extraordinarily scarce due to the siege.

The bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes are buried in a mass grave in Khan Younis (Picture: Reuters)

The para-cyclists have also launched a campaign, Athletes for Palestine, calling on the international sporting community to demand a sustained cease-fire and the end of the Israeli occupation in Palestinian territories.

Mohammed himself organised a hot meal programme for more than 900 people, many displaced from northern Gaza, living in Khan Younis in early November.

Only a few weeks after he did so, more than a hundred bodies wrapped in bright blue bags arrived in a shipping container on the back of a truck in Khan Younis. His hometown had become a graveyard.

Karim Ali, whose family originate from Haifa and Sabareen, is a London-based Palestinian advocate.

He co-founded the Gaza Sunbirds alongside the now team captain, Alaa Al-Dali, who was the first professional para-cyclist in the Gaza Strip.

‘The Israeli occupation has shaped the lives of Palestinians,’ the 24-year-old Karim tells Metro.co.uk. ‘Some people say that the very notion of the Palestinian identity was in resistance to the colonisation of free people.

More than half of the population of Gaza is under 18 (Picture: Reuters)

Karim Ali co-founded the team and works from London as their international coordinator (Picture: Gaza Sunbirds)

‘People in Gaza have been raised in an open-air prison by the occupation with no choice in it. They were born there. They have to live out their entire lives there in poverty, with little to no electricity, water or food.’

Israeli and Egyptian officials have long cited security concerns to justify the blockade – imported electronics could be used to make weapons, and beefed-up borders prevent the flow of arms.

Yet Karim sees it as a punishment that worsens living conditions.

The Gaza Sunbirds are unable to leave the enclave due to the siege to take part in races or tournaments. Palestinians in Gaza must apply for permits to leave to work or seek treatment in the West Bank or Israel.

They often train without safety equipment such as helmets or have to duck-tape their feet to the pedals as they don’t have cleats, Karim says. Training sessions are interrupted by air raids.

‘It’s almost like a weird weather event in Gaza,’ Karim says, ‘suddenly it’s raining bombs. It just happens.’

Karim says life in Gaza has always been tough for civilians (Picture: Gaza Sunbirds)

Medicine is scarce in Gaza (Picture: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Karim says the more than two million people living in the Gaza Strip have gone from just about getting by to ‘struggling to survive’ due to the war.

The Gaza Sunbirds have spent weeks handing out crowd-funded aid packages to civilians. On October 21, for example, 200 packages were handed out by the team’s coach Hassan Abu Ali, captain al Dali and athlete Hazem, the latter two being amputees and so each distributed to the thousands on one leg.

‘They’re athletes, they’re not aid workers, they’ve never done this before in their life,’ Karim stresses.

‘People don’t understand the full absurdity of it. These guys are doing this on one leg, in the places where people are scared to leave their houses.’

‘I’m very proud of the way they’ve been able to step up and come together to help their commutes and keep their spirits and morale up,’ he adds.

Seeing the war play out some 2,200 miles away has been ‘harrowing’ for Karim.

One Sunbird, he says, couldn’t find water for three days. The family of another, including an 86-year-old woman with dementia, has become stranded in northern Gaza after they tried to head south to escape the bombardment.

The athletes haven’t been immune to the bloodshed around them. ‘No one has a home to go back to. Everyone has lost family members,’ Karim says.

‘Everyone is facing grief and poverty. Rich or poor, there’s no difference anymore.’

Thanks to Instagram users across the world who have been donating by the thousands to the team, the Sunbirds aren’t stopping their humanitarian efforts anytime soon.

While Karim raises an eyebrow at the response from international leaders to the calamity facing regular Gazans, he says everyone from students at a diving school in Barcelona, refugees in Greece and British artists have all organised fund-raisers to support them.

‘Our story in the last few months has really been a big collective effort from a lot of people around the world trying to help out,’ Karim says.

The Gaza Sunsbirds mainly rely on donations to keep their aid efforts going (Picture: Gaza Sunbirds)

‘It’s a testament to show how wide the belief in what these guys are doing and how much support they’re able to galvanise even though we haven’t invested a single dollar in marketing or a single dollar in advertising.’

The days-long ceasefire, which has seen dozens of hostages freed by Hamas and Palestinians released from Israeli jails, has been cautiously welcomed by Palestinians such as Mohammed.

For him, though, hope is something that is hard to feel right now.

‘Hope has already gone, because everything is gone, nothing is left including my childhood dreams,’ he says.

‘We are in deep despair as we witness all the brutality, bloodshed, and the mass killing of Palestinians.’

‘Enough injustice,’ he adds. ‘We are innocent.’

You can donate to the Gaza Sunbirds here.

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