Gaza City: Mohamed al-Sillak was standing next to an ambulance outside a crowded marketplace in Gaza, holding the body of one of his children in his arms, when the second Israeli air strike hit.
Seven months later he is standing in front of a ramp in a rehabilitation centre in Gaza, trying out his new leg.
Next to him is Australian Greg Halford, an ortho-prosthetist from the International Committee of the Red Cross, who is three months into a 14-month assignment in the Gaza Strip.
The 38-year-old from Melbourne, fresh from a two-year term in Afghanistan and a month in Pakistan, is in Gaza to work with local health experts to help the dozens of amputees trying to recover after last year's devastating Israel-Gaza war in which at least 2200 Palestinians died and 10,700 were wounded. The United Nations and human rights groups estimate that at least 65 per cent of those were civilians.
Five Israeli civilians, a Thai agricultural worker and 66 Israeli soldiers also died.
"There's a lot of people here needing limbs," Halford says. "And unlike other situations they [are] mostly recent amputees, so a lot of them are at the one stage of rehabilitation."
As he walks from room to room, speaking to local staff, meeting patients, he says with quiet understatement: "We're very busy."
Partnering with the local Artificial Limbs and Polio Centre in Gaza City, the International Committee of the Red Cross program helps to mentor and train Palestinian staff in the assessment of patient needs, the creation and fitting of the prosthesis and the rehabilitation and after-care needed to help people become used to the new limb.
"One of the problems here is an absence of hope," Halford says. "People can definitely feel that the future is fairly bleak and it is my job to show them what is possible."
The date of July 30 is seared in the memory of Sillak, who lost two sons and one daughter as well as seven other family members in the Israeli air strikes that day on the market of the besieged town of Shujaiya in the north of Gaza.
After moving his family from the Zeitoun neighbourhood to his father's house – about 200 metres from the markets – four shells hit the rooftop where his father and children were taking care of the family's chickens.
Among the dead were Abdul Aziz, three, Layan, three, Abdul Halim, five, Malak, seven, Ameena, eight, Lina, nine, Alaa, 10, Mustafa, 18, Alaa, 35, and his 70-year-old father, Abdul Karim.
"I took the bodies of my children to the ambulances downstairs and that is when the second missile hit ... a paramedic was also killed," he says, hanging on to a rail in the centre's rehabilitation room, trying out the weight of his new leg.
Now the 32-year-old accountant is trying to put his life back together. He wants to return to his job at local computer company and he and his wife want to have more children. "Life has to go on," he says quietly. "I'd like it to go back to the way it was before I was injured."
Halford says every step people take on the way to recovery can be difficult. Seeing how other amputees cope and having their new limbs made specifically for their home or work setting can make all the difference.
"What we can do by building a limb for someone is to give them hope and the possibility of getting back into life, the idea that there can be progress – to create a moment where people can imagine a better future."
On March 19, the Israel Defence Forces Military Advocate-General (MAG), Major-General Danny Efroni, released details of the IDF's internal investigation into the shells that hit the Sillak family's house. It found: "One of the shells from the first round of fire carried out by IDF forces apparently struck the roof of the Al-Salak [sic] family, at a time when the family was on the roof, and killed seven family members; and that two shells from the second round of fire carried out by IDF forces apparently struck the crowd which had gathered next to the Al-Salak house in the wake of the first strike."
Although most of the dead were children under 10, the IDF concluded that six of the dead were in fact militants and that "the possibility that the harm to civilians ... resulted from a misfire by a Palestinian terror organisation has not been ruled out, in light of the extensive enemy mortar fire emanating from the area at the time".
The IDF's investigation found its fire was aimed at the militants operating mortars who were attacking IDF ground forces inside Gaza and that it had taken precautions to avoid harm to civilians. "In light of these findings," it added "The MAG ordered the case to be closed."
