When the Israeli military ordered evacuations in part of northern Gaza about a year ago, Zuhair Abu Odeh rushed out with his 9-year-old daughter, who uses a wheelchair, in search of a safer place.
In his haste, he ran her chair into a crack in a road, jamming a wheel and forcing them to abandon it. Mr. Abu Odeh and his sons carried his daughter, Lara, on their backs for four and a half hours until they reached Nuseirat, nine miles to the south.
“We’re living through impossible times,” Mr. Abu Odeh, 46, said in a phone interview from a makeshift shelter in Khan Younis, where the family has since fled.
The war has forced most of Gaza’s roughly two million residents from their homes, an experience defined by daily struggles to find food, water, clean bathrooms and power. But it has been particularly punishing for people with disabilities and their families.
The suffering of disabled people — the blind, deaf, physically and cognitively impaired — has been compounded by steep shortages in devices to aid them, like wheelchairs and hearing aids, and in damage to roads, sidewalks and homes with accessible features.
Until Mr. Abu Odeh found Lara a new wheelchair in February, he and his children carried her to the market, the hospital and the beach. While the chair has brought some relief, it has still been difficult to push through dirt paths in the makeshift camps set up for people seeking shelter.
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