by Jon Rami Mroz

I arrived a few minutes past 11:00. Alex, our driver, her partner Jesus and our interpreter Meda had just contacted me to let me know they were running late. Diaa and his hostess Nora greeted me at the door. They graciously suffered my broken Arabic as we greeted each other and engaged in small talk. My linguistic skills exhausted, we switched to English and I commented on Diaa’s recent skiing trip and how I had seen a video of him barreling down a hill on his third attempt at the sport. “He’s fearless,” I remarked. Nora’s reply was curt, “He’s from Gaza.”

We arrived in Manzanita a few hours later. Diaa was proudly wearing a pair of voice activated Ray Ban’s he had received as a gift and eager to take photos of nature. When I last wrote about Diaa in December, he had just arrived in Portland to begin the process of being outfitted with prosthetic limbs at Shriners Hospital as part of a special program developed by the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. I wrote of his dream, of becoming a photographer, and my heart soared as I discovered that technological innovation had found a temporary solution.

Splatters of blood peppered the green hued rocks on the Oregon coastline. Diaa had fallen and without arms, he had split his head open. We stopped the bleeding but the reality set in that an undocumented 15-year-old minor was in our care and while Diaa is in the country legally, the current political climate promised detention by a conservative local sheriff and a lengthy ordeal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) The fear was palpable.

Nevertheless, as responsible adults we rushed him to urgent care and took our chances with the American healthcare system. Fortunately, we were greeted by guardian angels who agreed to examine Diaa and treat his wound without paperwork or identification, and at no charge. Diaa seemed casually unmoved by the experience and we were worried he had a concussion. But he insisted, “I laid next to my blown off limbs, this is nothing.”

“I knew I wasn’t going to make it,” he said, recalling his logic for climbing the rocks despite Meda’s warning, “I was challenging my circumstances and I was going to do it regardless. I can shower myself, I can dress myself and I’m very self-sufficient with all my capabilities at the moment. If there’s something I can try to do, I’m going to go for it. I’m not going to ask for help.”

“Amputated limbs aren’t that bad,” he said, “It’s not like you’re shot in the heart and you’re just dead.”I was on the [Portland] city bus and I was trying to tell the driver where I needed to get off, the next time I’m going to use my leg to pull the string.” I asked Diaa if he would mind sharing what happened to him and he agreed.

“It was the 13th of August [2024] at 10:30 AM, I was sitting at the cafe playing PUBG [a video game], a missile hit the cafe and everyone in there died. I was standing in the front by the door and that’s why I survived, everyone inside died. I was on the floor and I was trying to get up. I didn’t have arms to get up so I used my legs and I was injured in my leg, but I walked for 50 meters and sat under a tree, and then my brothers came looking for me.

They tied my arms to stop the bleeding. They took me to the hospital for surgery. They cut off my left arm right in front of me with no anesthesia, they couldn’t save either arm. When I was going into the surgery room, I knew my arms were gone. The first thing I did was start laughing. My dad completely fell apart when he found out, but my reaction was laughter. And I started to calm down my father. I was the source of positive energy in my family.

They assumed that I would be psychologically destroyed but I came out positive and that’s what helped my family deal with this tragedy. They were able to get through it when I was laughing through it and showing I was ok.”

I asked Diaa how life has been since he arrived in Portland. His answer is direct and comprehensive. “I escaped death. I didn’t feel safe until I got here. This is the first time I have experienced safety in my life.” I asked him why he loved photography. “I love nature and photographing nature. I had a photography teacher in Gaza that made me fall in love with it. That’s what inspired me. I like to capture memories every place I go.”

When I asked him about his family he responded, “In Palestine we were a very big and close knit family. We celebrated everything together, we mourned everything together. This genocide split our family apart, everyone is somewhere now. I got out but everyone in Gaza is now separated.”

I asked Diaa if he had a message for the world. “I want life to go back to normal. My dream is to get my arms so that I can do things again and get my life back together. I want to play PubG. I want to use a camera with my hands, I want to drive a car, ride a bike, I want to be able to do anything a normal person can do with two hands, I just want my life back. And I want everyone to know my name.”

Diaa Al-Haqq is a human being. His future is not expendable and his defiance of his circumstance should serve as a warning to those who believe Palestinians will eventually quit dreaming. As fate would have it, this article was written on the day when tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza began marching north to return to their homes a day after US President Trump publicly floated the possibility of ethnically cleansing the enclave.

A few days prior to our outing, I attended a protest in downtown Portland decrying the new administration’s immigration policies, neglect of the homeless, and disenfranchisement of LGBTQ and other minority groups here in the US and abroad. The desperation and fatigued nihilism of the crowd contrasted sharply with Diaa’s radical determination and cheerful optimism. Our shared humanity gives us the capacity to be fearless. We can be Gazan.

You can follow Diaa on instagram @c.1gz.

Photo Credits: Diaa Al-Haqq