Rami Ghab is a Gaza-based board member of the Gaza Forum Association for the Visually Impaired (GFVIP). He has managed humanitarian aid and development programs for 17 years.
Marina Salman founded the U.S. chapter of the Disability Justice for Palestine (DJ4P) global coalition. She is a long-time disability activist, serving as a social service practitioner for one of the largest centers for independent living in the United States.
When Israeli military aircraft scatter leaflets ordering Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to evacuate, a practice that has continued throughout its 1,000-day war, it assumes that those receiving the messages can read them. But what happens when someone cannot see the leaflet as it falls from the sky, nor read the map identifying a so-called "safe zone?" What if, as a community is forced to suddenly run for cover, with individual footsteps fading into the distance, those who cannot see are left behind?
For Gaza's blind community, these are not hypothetical questions. They are part of everyday survival. In a war that can leave those failing to comply with forced displacement orders facing death, supposed "communication failures" can be catastrophic. This situation is life-threatening by design.
Before October 2023, Gaza was home to over 10,000 blind or visually impaired Palestinians. Since then, thousands more have permanently or partially lost their sight as a direct consequence of the war.
For decades, despite Israel's blockade of the Strip and Gaza's chronic shortages, a fragile but functioning ecosystem supported blind Palestinians. Since 1962, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) operated the Rehabilitation Centre for the Visually Impaired (RCVI), the only institution of its kind in the Gaza Strip. Every year, children learned braille alongside orientation and mobility skills and other independent living techniques before joining mainstream schools around the sixth grade.
For decades, despite Israel's blockade of the Strip and Gaza's chronic shortages, a fragile but functioning ecosystem supported blind Palestinians.
- Rami Ghab and Marina Salman
For generations of families, the center represented far more than a school. It was where six-year-old children first learned to read their names with their fingertips before proudly returning home to read them aloud to their parents. Government schools later provided secondary education for blind students, while the Islamic University of Gaza welcomed visually impaired students into its academic programs.
Even under Israel's blockade, there was a system for Gaza's blind community. Sure, it was small, underfunded and fragile. Yet it worked. Today, however, most of it no longer exists.
Israel's war on Gaza has produced new blindness in three distinct but overlapping ways. The first is immediate and violent: bombardment.
More than 3,000 Palestinians have lost their sight since October 2023, according to the Gaza Eye Hospital. Israel's attacks have caused an estimated 17,000 eye injuries during the war, roughly a fifth of them among children. These life-changing injuries occur in a variety of horrifying Israeli attacks: Flying shrapnel tears through eyes. Blast waves destroy optic nerves. Sniper fire strikes faces.
H.M., a 32-year-old woman from Gaza City's Shuja'iyya neighborhood, had lived for years with limited vision. She could still cook, enlarge the text on her phone and navigate daily life with relatively little assistance. Then, in December 2023, a nearby explosion injured her eyes, causing severe retinal bleeding.
Without access to an ophthalmologist or even basic medication, she lost the remainder of her vision within weeks. "I used to see half the world," she said in an interview with Democracy in Exile. "Now I see nothing. My children ask me why I no longer look at them." Her story is not exceptional. It has become a pattern.
The second mechanism is less direct but equally devastating: denial of treatment.
Around 4,000 glaucoma patients now face complete blindness because essential eye drops remain unavailable in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health. More broadly, between 4,000 and 5,000 patients are at risk of blindness because they cannot access the ophthalmic treatment they need. Israel blocks this aid and much more. That collapse is compounded by Israel's destruction of key medical facilities, including the Specialized Eye Hospital, which now operates with a single functioning laser machine for the entire Strip.
The third mechanism is even more indirect: starvation.
Months of food deprivation have taken a quieter toll on eyesight. According to the World Health Organization, vitamin A deficiency is the world's leading preventable cause of childhood blindness. It damages the cornea and retina, contributing to irreversible vision loss. In Gaza, where Israel's blockade has produced a sharp rise in acute malnutrition since October 2023 and access to eggs, vegetables and other vitamin A-rich foods has largely disappeared, prolonged nutritional deficiencies have fostered and are likely to worsen existing eye conditions, increasing the risk of irreversible vision loss.
Jasbir Puar, a professor of gender and disability studies at Rutgers University, describes this phenomenon through the concept of "the right to maim," which examines how violence can produce lasting disability, leaving people dependent on others and more vulnerable. In her work on Palestine, Puar uses this concept to highlight how disablement can extend the effects of injury far beyond the initial harm.
On paper, Palestinians with disabilities are protected by law. Palestinian Law No. 4 of 1999 guarantees the rights of persons with disabilities to healthcare, rehabilitation, education and employment. In 2014, Palestine acceded to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Israel, for its part, ratified the same convention two years earlier.
Yet in most countries, disability rights remain unfulfilled because governments fail to implement their own laws due to bureaucratic neglect, inadequate funding or lack of political will. Gaza presents a different reality entirely.
Even if Palestinian authorities wished to fully implement every protection guaranteed under the law, they lack the sovereignty to do so. Israel controls who and what enters the territory. Its blockade determines whether eye drops enter, often blocking such products while citing "dual use" concerns related to military purposes. The gap between legal protections and their realization on the ground is stark.
The infrastructure underpinning disability rights under the law has been severely damaged, from bombing rehabilitation centers and blocking assistive devices to leaving more Palestinians with permanent disabilities every day. Some disability scholars and advocates have described this contradiction as "disability washing," in which Israel invokes the language of disability inclusion and accessibility in one context while simultaneously pursuing policies that cause disabilities or strip disabled people of their fundamental rights in another. The contradiction is not accidental, reflecting a broader pattern identified by researchers working at the intersection of disability studies and settler colonialism.
More than 3,000 Palestinians have lost their sight since October 2023, according to the Gaza Eye Hospital. Israel's attacks have caused an estimated 17,000 eye injuries during the war, roughly a fifth of them among children.
- Rami Ghab and Marina Salman
For Palestinians who were blind before the war, the question is brutally simple: How do you survive in a landscape built entirely for people who can see?
Blind people spend years constructing mental maps of their surroundings. Every curb, every intersection, every familiar sound becomes part of an internal geography built through repetition. Repeated displacement erases that map.
Some blind Palestinians have been forced to flee more than twenty times since October 2023. Each displacement returns them to unfamiliar terrain. When they eventually return home, if they return at all, they often discover that the neighborhood they once memorized no longer exists.
The road to the water point has disappeared. The corner grocery store that served as an audio landmark is gone. The familiar distance between home and the mosque has become a field of rubble. Even collecting drinking water now means navigating obstacles that cannot be seen and have not been experienced.
That destruction extends beyond physical space. More than 83% of people with disabilities in Gaza have lost their assistive devices. Blind Palestinians have also lost access to essential tools such as white canes and braille devices because of repeated displacement and the destruction of specialized rehabilitation services. Even smartphones, once powerful tools of independence, become almost useless without electricity, internet access or functioning telecommunications systems, which have all become scarce due to Israel's bombardment of the Strip.
Food distribution presents yet another barrier. Aid points — including those previously operated by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which shut down in November 2025 after months of deadly violence at its sites — have historically been organized around visual information like signs, queues and movement through dense crowds. United Nations experts had warned that these sites were especially difficult to access for people with disabilities.
Blind women and girls face additional risks inside overcrowded displacement camps, where maintaining personal hygiene and privacy becomes nearly impossible without being able to see the people around them.
In this context, the community has not waited for the war to end to respond. In 2023, as bombs leveled schools, rehabilitation centers and universities, local experts and service providers established the Gaza Forum Association for the Visually Impaired (GFVIP), where one of our authors is a board member. It was meant to provide an emergency response to the crisis.
"We reached a point where almost nothing remained," said Ali Tu'aymah, Director of GFVIP, in an interview with Democracy in Exile. "Blind children were living in tents without any services. Patients were losing their eyesight because even eye drops were unavailable."
"We asked ourselves," he said, "If we don't begin now, in the worst possible moment, then when?"
What distinguishes GFVIP is that blind Palestinians are both beneficiaries and those delivering services. Blind staff members coordinate field activities, document needs, visit tents and accompany visually impaired patients to medical appointments.
"When a blind outreach worker knocks on the door of another blind person's tent and says, 'I'm like you, and I've come to help,' everything changes," Tu'aymah explained.
In April 2024, the organization completed one of Gaza's first field assessments of blind and visually impaired Palestinians during the war, surveying more than 450 participants across the Strip. That documentation process helped kick off more efforts.
In January 2026, GFVIP opened an integrated primary healthcare clinic that includes specialized ophthalmology services. Within three months, the clinic reached more than 1,400 patients, roughly three-quarters of them children. The overwhelming majority were displaced.
"We are treating many women whose eyesight has deteriorated, or who have developed entirely new eye conditions, because they cook over open fires every day," Said A.N., an ophthalmologist with GFVIP, in an interview with Democracy in Exile. "Inside the tents, there are no kitchens and almost no ventilation. Smoke fills their eyes for months. These are problems we rarely saw before the war."
They explained that children with blindness or impaired vision constitute a particular challenge for service providers in Gaza. "A six-year-old comes to us having never seen an eye doctor since the war began," they said, explaining that exemptions can reveal new problems requiring immediate attention. In many instances, "Their vision could have been saved with something as simple as eye drops or with routine follow-up that completely stopped after October 2023."
Even with these efforts, GFVIP is severely under-resourced. "We have no retinal imaging equipment. We have no laser treatment. We do not have enough medication for even half the cases we receive," said A.N. "We are preventing an even greater catastrophe. But we are not truly treating it."
In February 2026, UNRWA resumed services at the damaged RCVI through temporary classrooms made of wooden panels and tarpaulin sheets to fill the gap. Only 56 children returned. Before the war, the center served roughly 500. The return was important, but it struggled to reach a tenth of those in need, even as children continue to sustain complex eye injuries that can lead to permanent vision loss.
Despite these shortcomings, Gaza's blind community has continued to act.
Mo'men Al-Baytar, a 25-year-old blind sports journalist, was once a member of Gaza's blind karate team, a program founded to prove that blindness does not mean dependence. Since the war began, his family — all of whom are blind — has been displaced more than twenty times. He lost his work. He lost his sport. He lost the life he once knew.
Yet he refused to disappear.
Using nothing more than his mobile phone, he created an online platform documenting the experiences of blind Palestinians throughout the war. "This war taught me never to surrender," he said in an interview with Democracy in Exile. "I am determined to make our voices heard. We live in darkness twice: once because of our disability, and once because of this war."
Ahmad Abu Al-Jadyan, a blind graduate in English literature, once wrote and performed a stage play before a large audience at the Islamic university. That university has since been destroyed.
Today he lives in a tent in Deir al-Balah, as his home in Jabalia lies in ruins. His laptop remains buried beneath the rubble, while his freelance career as a content writer has all but vanished. "Even during the ceasefire, life has lost its meaning," he said in an interview with Electronic Intifada. Still, he continues to write.
Twenty-three-year-old Mohammad Mihni, who is also visually impaired, was displaced from Jabalia to Deir al-Balah. At one point, he nearly starved. Food was available, but he could not safely reach it amid the chaos surrounding aid distribution. In August 2024, he forced himself back into work, selling wallets, bags and ID card holders in a local market to feed his family.
"I had no choice. We received no assistance at all," he explained in an interview with Democracy in Exile.
It is within this context that Israeli evacuation leaflets continue to fall from the sky over Gaza. They still assume that the people below can see them. For many, the only clarity is that Israel does not care.
An entire generation of blind children has now lost two years or more of braille education and orientation training, the very skills that determine whether a blind child grows into an independent adult or remains dependent for life. Most rehabilitation centers have disappeared. Assistive devices lie buried beneath rubble or remain blocked at border crossings. Teachers have been displaced or killed.
Yet amid the devastation, people continue to resist disappearance. A community organization born during the war is preventing avoidable blindness with limited resources. Blind outreach workers continue knocking on tent doors to tell others that they are not alone. A blind journalist has turned his phone into a newsroom. Children who lost their sight because of this war are learning, in makeshift classrooms, how to build a future beyond it.
Gaza's blind community is not asking for pity. It is asking to be seen, not as symbols of tragedy but as a people whose rights, dignity and futures remain worth defending, even in a war that was never designed to see them.
The views and positions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DAWN.
