X-rays of War: The Wound as a Living Record

The first war casualty to inhabit my memory was Intissar, a nurse. I never actually saw her wound, nor did I truly feel it whenever I saw her. Perhaps the heroism associated with that wound eclipsed the physical impairment the occupier had sought to inflict. 

Intissar was first wounded in May 1983 during clashes with the Israeli enemy at the junction outside the Jabal Amel Vocational Institute in Burj el-Shemali, Sour — the same intersection that leads to my home. 

On May 7, the enemy tried to capture several feda’iyeen, prompting women from Haraket el-Mahroumin (the Movement of the Deprived) — whom Intissar calls the “daughters of the resistance” — to block the road to the institute with burning tires. As the enemy fired tear gas, an Israeli officer stepped out of a military jeep to seize one of the young men. Intissar intervened, striking the officer with a stick to prevent him from reaching the young man. An occupation soldier then struck her in the back with his rifle, fracturing one of her vertebrae. 

But this was neither only injury nor her final confrontation. In Maarakeh and Tyre, she suffered a corneal injury to her left eye and shrapnel wounds to her head, hand, and foot, before she was eventually detained at the enemy’s military station in Tyre’s al-Zira‘a neighborhood. 

I was struck by the way the body expels it — as if reclaiming a sovereignty that had been taken from it, even after four decades.

Her injuries offer a window into women’s participation in the resistance during confrontations with Israeli forces. Perhaps Intissar takes pride in her injuries, which she describes as a “badge of honor” — proof of being a “resistance fighter, wounded, and imprisoned.” 

In my attempt to understand the long-term effects of war injuries, I came to know shrapnel — the kind lodged in Intissar’s body. I searched for it in the bodies of the wounded. I found it embedded in the skin or protruding from it, still black even 40 years later. I was struck by the way the body expels it — as if reclaiming a sovereignty that had been taken from it, even after four decades. My research was purely biomedical, focused on the remnants of war and the illnesses that persist long after it ends.

But in speaking with the wounded, I came to understand that entire worlds were contained within each wound. Every wound had its own time and place, its site of injury, the people who were present and the political project for which the war was fought. The wound thus transforms from an individual injury into one bound to the collective, with its own characters, layers of meaning and narratives.

On the one hand, Intissar’s injury and scar hold collective significance: They preserve the memory of an episode in which women confronted the occupation with their own living flesh. On the other, they carry a meaning that belongs to Intissar alone: The physical impairment the occupation inflicted on her back — an injury that remains visible to this day — was sustained while she was protecting the feda’i.

But what happens, I wonder, when the wounded are not returning from the front line? How is their relationship with their bodies reshaped after injury? The injury of a feda’i, or of someone wounded in a confrontation, becomes embedded in the collective memory of the people of the land as part of the struggle for liberation. How, then, can the wounded continue to fight an occupation that wages war against their bodies, seeking every day to subdue them in a battle of wills? What meanings emerge from these wounds when Israeli killing becomes inscribed on the body? And how do we name this confrontation?

The X-ray has become the means by which the wounded confront the weapon that sought to kill them — and document their victory over it.

In my conversations with people injured during the war, ongoing since 2023, a new element suddenly emerged: the X-ray. The wounded no longer showed me only the injuries visible on the surface of their skin. Through medical images, I witnessed the brutality of the occupier inside the body itself. The black, protruding shrapnel I had seen 40 years after injury now appeared to me as an occupation of the body from the moment of impact. In one X-ray image, and in another, a short while later, that occupation was gone. I began to wonder: Is this image the title deed of the confrontation? As the wounded body heals and the images accumulate, does this process create its own form of heroism?

The X-ray, an image designed to detect fractures, infections and tumors, has become the means by which the wounded confront the weapon that sought to kill them — and document their victory over it.

These images raise countless questions about every stage of the physical and psychological suffering the wounded endure. How can they transform a wound inflicted by a brutal occupier into a positive force, one that allows them to confront their aggressor as an equal? Some regard their war wounds as a form of participation in liberation. They believe they have offered their wounds as a gift to the land they continually seek to reclaim, even before any talk of recovery. 

Looking at these X-rays, the first questions that inevitably arise are: Whose injury is this? Where and when did it happen? 

I spoke with Mohammad, a paramedic, and Rabea, a mother, nearly a month after they were injured. Our conversations traced their experiences across different temporalities: the moments before injury, the moment of impact and everything that followed.

The injuries the enemy deliberately inflicts reveal that when he fails to kill, he seeks instead to impose functional paralysis on the body, preventing it from returning to its former daily life. This is true at the individual level. But this paralysis extends further, affecting the wounded body’s role and relationships within the community: the injuries of paramedics and medical workers, of mothers above all, of children and of journalists. In other words, if he cannot kill these people, he must erase their physical capacity for any activity at all — even running simply for the sake of running, not only to rescue someone or pursue a news story. We began to notice a pattern: The injuries are similar, numerous and severe, often concentrated within a single body. Rabea describes one of her injuries as a kind of “shattering.” 

The two accounts that follow reveal how the wounded continue to discover new medical sutures across their bodies, day after day. 

In trying to understand the body’s capacity to endure immense pain, new relationships emerge between the wounded person and all the “ammunition” they still possess. Mohammad, for instance, spoke of religious values that become a source of strength in the face of layered and complex wound. When he saw his back torn apart by shrapnel, his skin no longer visible beneath the blood, he endured the pain because he felt he was sharing in the suffering of al-Sayyeda Ruqayya, daughter of Imam Hussein. Sometimes, if the wounded cannot find the immediacy of liberation in their war wounds, they seek consolation in the religious beliefs they have carried throughout their lives. 

But there is also the relationship to the object of desire, that which sustains the will to continue. For Mohammad, this object of desire takes the form of return. He wants to see the wound in this image heal because its recovery brings him closer to returning to his work as a paramedic. 

The Injured Paramedic — Mohammad’s Story
Tuesday March 24, 2026, 12:30pm 

The last thing that Mohammad, a paramedic, did before the two missiles struck was to tend to a martyr and deliver his body to the martyrs’ morgue in the Tyre district. The paramedics had divided into two groups to avoid being killed together, because the war had become a war on paramedics. When the Israeli genocidal machinery came for them, it fired two missiles. After the first struck, they fled their station. Mohammad was the last one to leave. Then came the second missile.

“A step, two, three. On the fourth, I was thrown to the ground. I never lost consciousness. I said to myself that I didn’t want to die. Our lives depend on being heard — the more I cried out, the faster a paramedic would come,” he recalled. 

All he knew at that moment was that his legs were injured. He did not know whether they had been severed. He began guiding me toward the injuries across his body: 

“Here I have a fracture, and here I have a fracture, and here I have a fracture too. I was covered in blood. My entire back was shrapnel. And stitches, stitches, stitches. I even have around nine stitches on my head that I barely know about. Every day, I discovered another piece.”

Mohammad has two companions: the painkillers he hates and tries to befriend — until morphine becomes ‘Abu Ali Morphine’ — and the wheelchair, which he describes as his “identity as a hero.”

He explains: “The wheelchair was never a mark of weakness. On the contrary, it’s what forced me to leave. I don’t want anyone to look at me and think I’ve recovered. If I had recovered, I’d be back in my village. This wheelchair means that I am still in a place that’s not mine.”

The Injury of Steadfastness — Rabea’s Story
Hanaway, Tyre, Thursday, April 9, 2026, the day after Black Wednesday

It was a Friday night, Rabea recalls. She was spending the evening with her daughter Rayan — “a typical evening means smoking a shisha,” she says — when the first missile struck the tiled roof of the terrace in front of their house at 9 p.m. When Rabea begins recounting the first missile strike that injured her, she speaks first of Rayan’s martyrdom. 

“That was the first time I did not sit beside her. Every day, we would sit next to each other and recite a prayer. That was the first day I sat facing her. One piece of shrapnel struck her head, and she leaned onto the sofa. Another entered her jaw from one side and exited the other. She was martyred instantly.”

Her account stops there, at the first seconds of her daughter’s martyrdom and the shrapnel that became Rayan’s death certificate. After a silence, she responds to a question about her own injuries, counting them one by one: 

“A piece came off the missile and pierced my leg, shattering 12 centimeters of my bones. That was the first injury. The second injury broke my arm at the elbow, and they put in a plate and screws. But the most critical injury was to my intestines; much of them had been cut through. My whole body was filled with shrapnel, and my face too. This was all from the first missile.” 

The second missile struck five minutes later, as her husband was trying to save them. Rabea is now waiting for her body to expel a fragment lodged in her foot, to see it disappear from the image. “I don't know what it will take to get rid of the shrapnel swimming in my body.” She feels it moving through her, as if it might “tear through my skin.” The sensation brings her a kind of joy, she says, because she feels her body spitting out what the enemy tried to plant inside it.