Doctors remove bullet from Palestinian woman's head after 4 months of agony
Cairo — Sarah al-Awady says she was sitting with her family early on the morning of Oct. 22, 2024, in their tent in Al-Zawaida, the town in the central Gaza Strip where the displaced Palestinians had taken shelter, when she was struck in the head by a bullet fired by an Israeli quadcopter drone.
"Suddenly I felt pain in my head, like I had been hit with an iron bar or something," the 18-year-old Gazan told CBS News this week. "My family started screaming, 'a bullet, a bullet!' Everyone was panicking and they carried me and rushed me to Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital."
CBS News has asked the Israel Defense Forces about its reported use of small-arms-equipped drones in Gaza, and about al-Awady's claim, specifically, that she was hit by one of the weapons in a camp for displaced civilians. In a statement sent Wednesday, the IDF said it "follows international law, targeting only military objectives and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm."
The military said it could not give details about the various aircraft it uses, "as they are classified for security reasons, and to avoid compromising the operational capabilities of the IDF," and added that it could not provide information about al-Awady's claim without more precise information on the time and location of the shooting.
The doctors did what they could with what little they had amid the devastation in Gaza, just over a year after Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack sparked the war in the Palestinian territory. They could see that the bullet was lodged in al-Awady's skull, behind her right eye, but they didn't have the capacity to remove it.
Al-Awady was eventually told there was nothing more the doctors in Gaza could do, but she refused to give up hope and insisted on staying in the hospital. At the very least, she thought, inside the hospital her badly wounded eye would be protected from the dusty conditions in her family's makeshift home.
So she remained, relying on painkillers to cope with the excruciating pain in her head, but without any plan for relief in sight.
In early November, al-Awady was seen by a team of volunteer medics visiting the European Hospital near Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. Dr. Mohamed Tawfik, an Egyptian, was among the volunteers, and when he saw al-Awady, he thought of someone he believed could help.
Tawfik called his father, a veteran ophthalmologist, to get his medical opinion.
Dr. Ahmed Tawfik, the elder doctor, told CBS News he wanted to go to Gaza to try to help the young woman, but the southern Rafah border crossing between the enclave and Egypt was closed.
"I followed this case almost daily. I felt this was my case," Tawfik said.
But he could not find a way to travel to Gaza and, at the time, with the war still raging, Israel was permitting very few people to leave the enclave, even for medical treatment.
The doctor's son returned to Egypt, and al-Awady told CBS News she started giving up hope. For months she said she lived in fear that she would permanently lose sight in her right eye.
"I applied for treatment abroad, like many others. When people asked me, 'How long have you been waiting?' I'd say a month. They'd tell me, 'Forget it, we've been waiting for so much longer.'"
A glimmer of hope would finally come, about three months after the bullet lodged in al-Awady's head, with the news that Israel and Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire deal. It came into effect on Jan. 19, 2024, and al-Awady was able to return to her home in the decimated north of Gaza.
She said she was relieved to find her family's home among the few buildings spared from the destruction. She stayed there for a week, until, on the evening of February 8, she received a call from the World Health Organization, telling her she would be leaving the following day for Egypt.
"There is no electricity, so I literally packed my luggage by candlelight," she recalled. Only her mother was permitted to travel with her, but the pair reached Egypt the next day, as planned.
She was sent first to the city of Port Said, on Egypt's Mediterranean coast. A week later, Dr. Tawfik managed to get her moved to the hospital where he works in Al-Sharqia Governorate, in the Nile Delta.
Three teams — ophthalmology, neurosurgery and radiology — worked together, debating the best approach to remove the bullet that had been lodged for months right next to al-Awady's optic nerve.
"We ran several 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 guide the surgery remotely via a video link from his workstation at the separate facility.
"The bullet landed in the best possible place for the patient, but the worst place for a medical team," Shawky told CBS News. "Had it moved a millimeter in any direction, it would have caused great damage."
The doctors agreed the best option was to try to reach the bullet by entering through al-Awady's eye socket, to avoid damaging her brain.
Tawfik was direct, telling al-Awady there was a 50% chance of success, a risk of internal bleeding, and she could lose her eye entirely or have her vision severely impaired.
"I cried. I was very scared, but I prayed and accepted the risk," she told CBS News.
"His amazing medical team tried their best to improve my spirit, to make me psychologically ready, and they did. I entered the operating room laughing and full of joy," al-Awady said
The surgery was carried out last week, and it was a success. Tawfik told CBS News he was surprised by the amount of infection and abscess caused by the bullet, which had rusted over time inside al-Awady's head.
Even with the bullet out, al-Awady is not fully out of the woods.
"Three hours later, I opened my eyes and they told me that, thanks to God, all went well," she recalled. "I started crying again."
"She is very stable now, and she is taking her meds and getting better," Tawfik told CBS News. "My goal was first to end the pain caused by the infection and, second, to preserve her current eyesight level. I am hoping that after we deal with the retinal detachment her sight will improve."
The young woman's eye will never look — or see — the same way it did before she was shot.
Like many Palestinians who have made it out of Gaza to receive desperately needed medical help, al-Awady told CBS News that her joy is incomplete. She misses the rest of her family, who she had to leave behind.
Asked about the rusty bullet that lived in her head for four months, she said she planned to hold onto it.
"I am thinking of framing it," she told CBS News.
