Back in May 2025, Arabic media outlets and other Israel-haters posted the tragic story of Obaida al Qarra, a Gazan child who they claimed was completely paralyzed and rendered blind and deaf as a result of Israeli shelling while evacuating from east Khan Younis. His family was pleading that they be allowed to travel with him for treatment abroad.
Urgent Humanitarian Appeal
— Eye on Palestine (@EyeonPalestine) June 6, 2025
10-year-old Obaida Al-Qarra is fighting for his life after being critically injured by shrapnel that lodged in his brain, resulting in total paralysis, loss of sight and hearing, recurrent seizures, and dangerously high fever.
His condition is extremely… pic.twitter.com/vKtDfJAsUI
Young Obaida touched hearts over the world, even prompting someone to immortalize him in a sketch:
But things were apparently about to get worse for Obaida. In a LA Times feature titled Famine’s toll on the children of Gaza: The world shouldn’t look away from June 2025, he appeared alongside other allegedly emaciated Gazan children – but now with bonus chicken pox:
Obaida Al-Qarra, 10, receives treatment for malnutrition at Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip on July 27, 2025. He recently contracted chicken pox.
Yet something was very odd about this. Why no mention of his paralysis, as well as the loss of his sight and hearing? You’d think that would earn a mention surely!
Alas, just a few months later and praise be to Allah!
Note here no mention of the supposed blindness and deafness – just paralysis and malnutrition.
By January of this year, Obaida was even standing on his own two feet:
Paralysis cured. Blindness reversed. Deafness healed. Chickenpox gone. To quote Boy George, it’s a miracle.
Now I am no doctor, but I imagine for a projectile to cause total quadriplegia, blindness, and deafness, it would have to cause catastrophic, widespread destruction to the brainstem or multiple distinct cranial nerves and motor pathways. But even assuming that Obaida did receive treatment that helped bring him back to health, why the shifting stories? Why was he at one stage supposedly blind and death, and then this was not mentioned at all by the LA Times, let alone the Gazan journalist whose tweet appears above?
I believe Obaida al Qarra’s story isn’t so much a medical miracle as a masterclass in anti-Israel propaganda.
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