Yassin shakes hands with the Atlanta-based doctor who treated him at a hospital in Gaza in April 2024. (Sophia Qureshi/285 South)
Applause and ululations erupted as 12-year-old Yassin Alghalban emerged through sliding doors in the arrivals hall of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Sunday, his mother pushing him in a courtesy wheelchair.
His three-year-old brother Zeinnedin, sitting between the stumps of Yassin’s amputated legs, smiled shyly at the crowd. His two sisters, Nusaiba and Zeena, struggled with stacked suitcases containing enough belongings for the year. Yassin — who lost both his legs in an explosion in Gaza in April 2024 — is expected to undergo surgical treatment and be fitted for prosthetic limbs at an Atlanta-area medical facility over the next 12 months.
Yassin is one of 11 Gazan children who arrived in airports around the U.S. early this week for medical treatment — in the “largest single evacuation of injured children from Gaza,” according to the nonprofit Heal Palestine, which sponsored the evacuation. The 12-year-old is also the second child from Gaza to come to Atlanta for medical treatment since the beginning of Israel’s war on the Palestinian territory in October 2023, a military campaign that’s widely recognized as a genocide. Earlier this year, another injured 12-year-old, Habiba, came to Atlanta for a cranioplasty.
Doctor who treated Yassin in Gaza was at Atlanta airport
According to Heal Palestine, Yassin lost both his legs in an explosion on April 12, 2024, just a few days after his birthday. Four months earlier, the family had been forced to flee their home in Khan Yunis and had taken shelter in Rafah. When they were finally able to return, they found that their home had been reduced to rubble. Yassin was rummaging through what was left “to find his toys and his school reports,” his mother, Fadwa, recalled in Arabic. (A volunteer for Heal Palestine translated.) There was an explosion, and she remembers calling out, “Yassin!” She eventually found him. He had survived, but lost his legs.
After waiting for two hours, they were finally able to get Yassin into a tuktuk, and he was rushed to a hospital in southern Gaza.
One of the doctors who treated him at that hospital was at the Atlanta airport on Sunday. The doctor didn’t want his name shared, out of security concerns, but he explained that he had been volunteering in Gaza in April 2024 and had seen Yassin every day during his time there. “He had extensive wounds that we were treating,” the doctor recalled. “He had open amputations for a number of weeks, if not months.”
Yassin was struggling with more than the loss of his legs — even before he was injured, in December 2023, his father had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on an UNRWA facility where the family had been sheltering, according to Heal Palestine. “He rarely smiled, because I think he was still under the trauma of losing family members,” the doctor said. “You could tell he was depressed. I would try to talk to him every now and then, and he’d smile.”
The destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system meant that long-term care — which required surgery and prosthetics — was nearly impossible. The doctor reached out to his office in Atlanta, which had a prosthetics practice, to see if they could help out with fitting Yassin with prosthetic legs and helping with surgery if needed. They said they could.
How Yassin made it from Gaza to Atlanta
That was more than 15 months ago. The process of getting Yassin here was drawn out, mostly because Yassin’s mother kept getting denied entry by COGAT, said Ghada Elnajjar, an Atlanta-based volunteer with Heal Palestine. COGAT, which stands for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, describes itself on its website as “the official Israeli unit tasked with the coordination and facilitation of humanitarian initiatives, doing so in coordination with the international community.”
“That’s a lot of lost time, and it makes it much harder now also to be able to walk again, even when he gets legs, as he hasn’t used his legs in so long,” the doctor said. “He’s been sitting for a year and a half, so it’s really made it much more difficult for his rehab from here on out,” he said, adding that, “in America, you would never have somebody waiting a year and a half to get prosthetic legs.”
As Yassin and his family shook hands and greeted well-wishers, a soft-spoken woman watched from the side. The woman, who also did not want to be named, is hosting Yassin and his family in her home for their first few weeks in Atlanta. Taking in a child from Gaza isn’t new for her. In 2006, she hosted a young boy who came to Atlanta because he needed a glass eye. “This little boy had a stone that had hit him in the eye, so it caused this tremendous pressure, and they ended up having to remove the eye,” she said.
The woman’s son, now an adult, is half Palestinian and stood beside her at the airport, remembering playing video games as a kid with the boy from Gaza. A year ago, the son said, he saw a photo of a grown man in Gaza with a glass eye — he thinks it might have been the same person. Otherwise, he’s not sure what happened to the boy who stayed with them. “We were worried, obviously, because of the safety of everyone there,” he said. “But that was the last time we really ever saw him.”
Also among the crowd on Sunday: Valerie Tarazi, an Olympic swimmer who happened to be on the same flight as Yassin — she was coming from the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore and had a connecting flight in Doha, where Yassin and his family were also connecting en route to the U.S. “I got off the plane [and] I saw the Palestinian flag. Then I saw so many keffiyehs and I was like, ‘Oh, I bet you they have someone coming in,’” said Valerie, the flag bearer for Palestine at the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics. When she found out, she joined the crowd in welcoming Yassin.
Valerie Tarazi, an Olympic swimmer representing Palestine, just happened to be on the same Doha to Atlanta flight as Yassin. (Sophia Qureshi/285 South)
Atlanta resident Feifei Sun and her two small children were also there to welcome Yassin. They had been working on a poster to greet the family earlier that day. “The struggle that the people have gone through and the genocide that they’re facing now, but also the horrific actions that they have faced for years. . . [is] something that I think a lot of people are not aware of,” she said, holding her 1-year old baby. Feifei said she was grateful that there was an opportunity to show up for Palestine in this way, but still, “it just always feels like it’s not quite enough and I wish that there were more we could do.”
Feifei Sun (left) with her three-year-old daughter, joined other well-wishers at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Sunday, Aug 3, 2025. (Sophia Qureshi/285 South)
Heal Palestine representatives said they are still looking for people to help out with hosting the family long term — everything from providing transportation to finding accommodations for them over the year.
At the airport on Sunday, cameras and reporters surrounded the family, asking Yassin’s mother directly about the explosion that caused him to lose his legs. Others who had come to welcome Yassin watched him with his family solemnly, some tearing up at just the sight of him. Yassin, for his part, played with a yellow smiley-face balloon, pulling on the string and watching it go up and down.
Yassin is just one child among untold numbers of maimed and injured children — the United Nations has reported that Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world.
“I saw tons of kids like him. He was one of them,” the doctor said. “We had a little bit of a bond, so I’m happy that he’s coming. But, you know, this is something that we [would] see in the hospital every day. There are other people that had all kinds of other problems that were not being treated. This is just a small microcosm of what’s going on. He’s one of the lucky ones.”
This story was provided by WABE media partner 285 South.
