Doctor Hani Bseiso was forced to make a painful decision when his young niece, Ahed Bseiso, was injured in the Israeli bombing that targeted her home in Gaza City. He either amputated her leg or left her at risk of bleeding to death.

Using small scissors and some gauze that was in his medical bag, the doctor, who could not reach the hospital, removed the lower part of the girl’s right leg in an operation performed on a dining table without anesthesia.

Video clips spread on Instagram showed the doctor wiping blood from the remaining part of her right leg while she was lying on a table with one of her brothers holding her steady, while the other was holding two mobile phones to provide better lighting.

The house is only about 1.8 kilometers away from Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza, which takes six minutes by car or 25 minutes on foot, but Bseiso said that the intense Israeli bombing in the area made trying to get there very dangerous.

Bseiso noted in an interview with Reuters this week in the room where the girl's leg was amputated in December, "Unfortunately, I had no other choice. It was one of two choices: either let the girl be a martyr, or try to the best of my abilities. Of course, the capabilities are zero."

Bseiso added, "Am I able to take her to the hospital? Of course not, because we were besieged for fifteen days and the tanks were at the door of the house. We made the decision. The decision is that I must try to do anything for the girl to save her. The first decision is that I amputate the leg because he is bleeding."

Ahed Bseiso (18 years old) is one of the generation of young people who have been subjected to amputations in the war that has been going on in Gaza since October 7.

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Doctors stated that many of those who were killed in the Gaza Strip since then could have been saved if they had been able to reach hospitals.

Ahed Bseiso, while lying in bed several weeks after the amputation, explained that she found an Israeli tank near her house when she went out at 10:30 in the morning to pick up a transmission to call her father, who lives abroad.

She explained that she and her sister went inside and closed the curtains of the house in case it would be bombed. Pointing out that the building was bombed shortly afterwards and she was injured.

She realized that she lost feeling in her leg when her family members tried to help her and remove the shrapnel from her body.

She said, "They made me sit at the dining table. There was no medical equipment. My uncle saw the loofah that we used to wrap the dishes and the wire in... and the chlorine caught them and started to rub my feet. He left my feet without anesthesia and without anything in the house."

In response to a question about how she tolerated the pain, she said, “I was just talking, thank God, and reading the Qur’an, and thank God I didn’t feel much. Thanks to God’s grace, patience was bestowed upon me, but of course there was pain, the sight, and the shock.”

Ahed has since undergone further operations in the hospital to treat her injuries.

Many others, including children, had their limbs amputated due to the severity of their injuries during the Israeli attack.

According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), more than a thousand children had their legs amputated in Gaza by the end of last November.

Poor hygiene and shortages of medicines are further putting lives at risk, and doctors complain that the delivery of supplies to hospitals is being hampered.