By Itto & Mekiya Outini
In 2010, Osama Shamallakh had an idea. At the time, he was studying information technology and computer networks at the Islamic University of Gaza. He was also still adjusting to his prosthetic left leg, a new addition to his life since an incident in 2007. While crossing campus one day, he noticed a fracture in his crutch. Later that evening, he visited a local nonprofit to have it repaired. There, he witnessed a woman attempting to help her daughter enter the building. The organization was dedicated to serving people with disabilities, but its entrance was too narrow to accommodate the daughter’s wheelchair.
“After seeing this, I realized something must be very wrong,” said Osama. “I decided to learn more about the situation.” The survey he conducted revealed that no more than seven percent of the buildings and facilities in Gaza had been adapted for accessibility — even as violence and political instability raged throughout Palestine, leaving more people with disabilities every day.
According to a report released by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics on the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, 2021, 6.8% of the Gaza Strip’s population has some sort of disability. This is almost certainly an undercount. By comparison, in 2022, approximately 26% of US adults were living with disabilities according to the CDC, although the US, unlike Palestine, is not an active combat zone. Moreover, these numbers don’t include people with many types of invisible disabilities, though they do include people with mobility disabilities, who represent 2.9% of Palestinians and 3.5% of the Gaza Strip population, the largest subgroup acknowledged by the report. Even so, the region’s physical infrastructure doesn’t reflect this population’s needs.
Most people, according to Osama, seemed to expect top-down solutions from the institutional level. But institutions, whether public or private, are notoriously slow. “I realized that if those of us with disabilities were going to navigate this environment successfully, we couldn’t keep waiting for action from institutions,” said Osama. “We still need external support, of course, but whenever possible, we have to start taking matters into our own hands.”
The idea that came to Osama in 2010, and subsequently became his thesis in 2013, a passion project in 2019, and a startup in 2022, was ambitious but realistic. He didn’t set out to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on his own, or even to redesign 100 percent of Gaza’s disabling infrastructure. He set out to build an elevator. His invention, eventually funded by the Italian foundation EducAid and designed and built by Osama and a team of engineers, is in many ways the first of its kind.
Instead of riding up and down a closed shaft, the I-CAN Elevator travels on a vertical track that can run up an open shaft or attach to a building’s outer wall. This, along with its convertible-style open top, makes it safer than conventional elevators, easier to escape in the event of fires, malfunctions, or other emergencies. It can be disassembled, moved, and re-installed elsewhere with relative ease, even at sites without concrete foundations. Its use of solar power and its capacity to save excess energy for later reduce its dependence on the power grid, a useful feature in a country where outages are common. When disconnected from an external power source, the I-CAN Elevator can run for up to 50 continuous hours before being recharged. Voice commands make it accessible for passengers who are blind, and its dimensions, 110 by 120 cm (43.3 by 47.2 in), are well suited to wheelchair users. With a capacity of 250 kilograms (approximately 550 pounds), it can carry up to three people at a time.
“For nine years,” said Osama, “the idea stayed on paper. There were many hills to climb.” He didn’t have a laptop for much of this period, so “on paper” wasn’t merely a figure of speech. Nevertheless, he sketched the elevator’s external form and began submitting it to contests and pitching it to possible funders. Time and again, his efforts yielded nothing but rejection. “Funders couldn’t see the benefit of such a machine,” he recalled. “I showed it to many people with disabilities like myself, and even their reactions were mixed: joy that somebody was tackling this problem, coupled with despair because they understood how difficult the implementation would be.”
Hoping to attract support from data-driven institutions, Osama conducted another survey, which indicated that 85 percent of the buildings in Gaza lacked accessible entrances and/or methods for moving between floors. This time, the results did not surprise him, but they didn’t evoke much interest, either. “I began to feel that this idea would only ever be appreciated by the people whom it benefits directly,” said Osama. “That would’ve consigned it to paper forever. Even some people with disabilities didn’t seem to grasp how it would help them. It was a completely new idea. This made it hard to understand.”
When funding for the elevator did eventually materialize, it was by serendipitous means. Starting in 2018, EducAid, an Italian nonprofit founded in 2000, began to sponsor the construction of Gaza’s I-CAN Independent Living Center, a community-center-cum-library where peer counselors, advocates and educators would gather to advance the interests of people with disabilities. (I-CAN stands for Independence — Capability, Autonomy, and iNclusion.) Due to environmental constraints at the construction site, the center had to occupy multiple floors of multiple buildings. No one involved knew how to make this infrastructure simultaneously accessible and structurally sound. This brought the project to a temporary standstill. Twelve elevator companies were invited to survey the site, and 11 concluded that installing an elevator wouldn’t be feasible. The twelfth, a subsidiary of a larger Turkish company, offered to design a special elevator for the site, but gave a quote of $85,000.
Faced with this impasse and a limited budget, Professor Hussain Abu Mansour, the “spiritual father” of the I-CAN Independent Living Center’s peer mentorship program, suggested that EducAid commission a locally built custom elevator. He already knew about Osama, who’d participated in a training program he’d organized in 2016, and he arranged a meeting between Osama and the EducAid funders. It soon became clear that, entirely by chance and without ever having surveyed the site, Osama had designed the perfect elevator for the I-CAN Independent Living Center.
EducAid offered to sponsor Osama and help him assemble a team. The engineer Mohammad Abdel Hakim Abu Al-Shaer, a specialist in general mechanics, was brought onboard. He was followed by Muhammad Ayman Al-Yazuri, who focused on computerized engineering, custom part design, and the study of loads. The last man to join the team was Fadl Muhammad Hatht, an expert in electricity and programming. Together, they set out to bring Osama’s decade-long dream to fruition.
“All the honor,” said Osama, “goes to Sketch Engineering.” Founded in 2014, the Palestinian company Sketch for Engineering Solutions Ltd. provides three main services: training engineers, generating new product designs, and manufacturing mechatronic products (i.e., devices that draw from multiple branches of engineering to integrate mechanical, electronic, robotic, digital, and sometimes even telecommunications systems). With specialization in solar-powered systems and assistive technologies for people with mobility disabilities, Sketch has established itself as a regional leader in innovative product design. In collaboration with aid and charity organizations, they’ve brought electric light to more than 1,000 homes in refugee camps and marginalized areas of Gaza since 2014. In 2019, they helped Osama build his I-CAN Elevator.
“It took another four months,” Osama recalled. “I’d already completed the external design, so we turned our attention to the internal structure: the mechanical movement unit, the suspension and parallel load unit, the electrical and mechanical safety unit, the electrical power unit, and finally the door. Work on each unit proceeded in parallel. We worked nonstop all day, every day, getting up early and staying in the workshop until after midnight. Sometimes our ideas didn’t work as expected. Sometimes the parts we needed didn’t come. At one point, we even had to pause the work for ten days because of Israeli airstrikes. We never let those obstacles deter us. We pushed on.”
All four engineers give credit to their friends and loved ones for their unflagging support throughout this challenging, exhilarating time. Of his family, Osama said simply, “They made this possible.”
In a 2021 episode of the Palestinian television program Nqat Tahwiil, one of Osama’s colleagues stands beside a prototype of the I-CAN Elevator. “We made this elevator completely from scratch,” he announces. “It’s affordable because it was done here in Gaza. It’s our work and ours alone.”
In truth, the story of the I-CAN Elevator did not begin in 2019, nor in 2013, nor even in 2010, but rather in 2007. Then, as now, throughout Palestine’s occupied territories, no meaningful distinction existed between residential areas and active combat zones. No such distinction has existed for a very long time.
For Osama, born in 1989 and educated at the Anas bin Malik School in Gaza City, daily life had always been harrowing. Ambling through a residential neighborhood could easily turn into dodging bullets or diving for cover as missiles shrieked overhead. When he left home on the morning of May 15th, 2007 to visit an English teacher, then, it wasn’t with a prevailing impression of safety. At the same time, though, nothing about that morning in particular warned 18-year-old Osama that in a few short hours, his entire life would change.
“My friend Wissam and I were going to visit our teacher, Mahmoud, in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood,” said Osama. “We were preparing for the high school exams, and he’d offered to give us a private lesson. We were nervous. The exams were only 20 days away.” Osama had already established himself as an excellent student, one of the best in his school. He kept a busy schedule, switching between back-to-back private classes and extracurricular study sessions, and wore a wristwatch everywhere he went, signifying his punctuality. He’d already set his sights on going to the university.
Osama and Wissam hailed a taxi and joined two women they knew from the neighborhood. One of them was pregnant, on her way to the hospital. “We were passing by a temporary military barracks,” Osama remembered, “when suddenly, heavy gunfire cut us off.” Bullets tore through the taxi’s undercarriage, pelting their feet and knees. Driven by adrenaline, Osama managed to scramble from the taxi, but before he could pull his friend after him, an armed man dealt him a blow to the head. He lost consciousness.
When he woke a short time later, he found himself sprawled on the asphalt, bound hand and foot with ropes, and relieved of his books, watch, and pocket change.
The fighters battling in the Gaza Strip belong to many different factions: government forces, resistance militias, private security services, foreign-backed terrorist cells, and more. None are effectively regulated by national or international laws. Combatants rarely bother to license their weapons, much less concern themselves with the finer points of the Geneva Convention.
“I was interrogated,” said Osama. “A big man came to talk to me. He verified my identity. I answered all his questions. I proved to him that I was a civilian. I had no weapons. I had nothing to do with the armed groups. I told him everything, but he didn’t even seem to be listening. I felt like I was talking to a robot, a machine that had no feelings and was only carrying out instructions.”
When he finished questioning Osama, the big man ordered guards to handcuff and blindfold him. They stuffed him into the trunk of the taxi he’d been riding in earlier, took him back to the main street in his neighborhood, dragged him out of the car, and shot him at close range. The last thing Osama remembers is fainting from pain.
“I woke up two days later in intensive care,” he said. “I was in Al-Shifa, the largest hospital operated by the central government.” He memorized his diagnosis and still knows it to this day: “serious injury to the lower extremities (legs) with a number of bullets, fractures in the bones of the right thigh, and a laceration in the left knee.”
After four days, his condition showed signs of deteriorating, and he was referred for treatment inside Israel. At Akhlouf Hospital in Tel Aviv, a doctor of Palestinian origin promised to do everything in his power to preserve Osama’s injured limbs.
“I went into a nine-hour surgery,” said Osama, “and woke up the next day to find that my left leg was gone.”
By the time he left the hospital, high school exams had come and gone. “I returned to my family after 22 days,” he said. “There was a terrible sadness within me. I couldn’t understand why this had happened to me, why I’d suffered such trauma and mutilation, which I’d done nothing to deserve.”
His loved ones welcomed him with open arms, but grief lurked just behind their eyes and curdled the atmosphere in their home, accenting every sound and silence, every gesture, every word. “My mother was especially affected,” Osama recalled.
It was his mother’s pain as much as his own that inspired Osama to action. Soon after leaving the hospital, he submitted a complaint to the International Red Cross in Gaza, condemning the acts of wanton violence perpetrated by armed groups throughout the region. Some people lose their lives, some are left with permanent disabilities, some suffer only temporary injuries or property damage, but all live in fear. This was the world into which he’d been born. This was the world he set out to change.
Now 33 years old, Osama has remade himself, becoming an educator, an inventor, an activist, an athlete, a family man, and even an entrepreneur. The specter of violence still haunts him, as it haunts so many in the region, but he’s put the worst of his trauma behind him and incorporated his disability into a productive and fulfilling life.
In 2009, having passed his high school exams, Osama enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza. After graduating in 2013, he went on to study automotive electronics engineering at the University College of Applied Sciences. In 2015, he finished that degree and added a certification as a modern auto mechanic technician from the Deir al-Balah Industrial School, part of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education in Gaza. In 2016, having finished these degrees and purchased a house and a car, he decided it was time to marry. Shortly after learning of his prosthetic leg, his fiancée, Basima, was asked if she really still wanted to go through with the marriage. She replied without missing a beat: “Of course I do. What matters is that he’s a wonderful human being.”
Their commitment to each other has held steady ever since. 2019 brought the birth of their first child, Ziad. Their second, Massa, was born in 2021.
In 2016, Osama received a phone call from Professor Hussain Abu Mansour, who offered to sponsor him to travel to Bethlehem and complete a one-week training course for people with disabilities. He accepted the offer, initially thinking it would amount to no more than a break from routine and a chance to tour Bethlehem. Alongside four other men and seven women, all of whom had disabilities, Osama completed the program, which was led by the Italian professor Gampiroa Gervoa, and found his worldview — and especially his way of understanding disability — radically changed.
After returning to Gaza, Osama started advocating for people with disabilities in Palestine. At first, he focused on networking and building a database of individuals and institutions that offer services to people with disabilities. He also became a peer mentor, organizing small but diverse (mixed-gender, cross-disability) discussion groups where individuals gathered to compare their experiences. Using personal narratives infused with humor and supported by multimedia presentations, Osama shared information about the civil and human rights of people with disabilities under Palestinian and international law. He also made himself available to anyone who wished to talk about sensitive matters one-on-one.
“The more I led these sessions,” reflected Osama, “the more I came to understand just how much danger, injustice, and marginalization people with disabilities face in Palestine. We represent a major part of Palestinian society, but for so many reasons, we’re silenced. We must have a voice of our own.”
For a while, Osama led peer mentor sessions at the newly built I-CAN Independent Living Center, but in 2020, he made the difficult decision to step back from that role so that he could start a new chapter. He signed a contract with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and served for over a year as a social entrepreneurship officer with the Country Office in Gaza, offering technical and administrative supervision for various projects in the region.
In this role, he visited universities and research centers and assessed the solutions they were developing to problems such as soil conservation, climate change mitigation, industrial initiatives, and waste recycling programs. Whenever he learned of an especially promising project, he recommended that it be sponsored by UNDP.
“Three things I’m very proud of,” said Osama, “are closing the files on pending projects from previous years, contributing to a study of the Palestinian economy in the West Bank with a focus on the causes of labor evasion, and helping to bring the Tadamon Crowdfunding Academy to Palestine.”
Tademon offers institutions in several countries the tools and training necessary to conduct crowdfunding campaigns so they can pursue projects without waiting for private donations. The Academy is sponsored by the Islamic Solidarity Fund for Development, managed by the Islamic Development Bank, and implemented on the ground by UNDP. Launched on January 15th, 2022, the Palestinian branch is already working with thirty institutions to accelerate responses to grassroots-level problems, empower individuals and communities, and reduce the institutional sloth that frustrated Osama a dozen years ago.
“Every institution whose work affects people with disabilities,” said Osama, “must have, at the very least, an ambassador with firsthand knowledge of disabilities who can explain their experiences and those of their peers. Only with an ambassador — or, better yet, employees with disabilities — can organizations like UNDP hope to incorporate our feedback and provide us with quality services.”
These days, Osama leads a multifaceted and rewarding life. When he’s not working or spending time with his family, he might be found swimming in salt water, pumping iron at the gym, or taking his motorcycle out for a spin. Even after moving on to greater feats of engineering, he retains his original passion for auto mechanics and still enjoys restoring old or damaged cars. Someday soon, he hopes to travel outside Palestine.
Most recently, after completing his tenure at UNDP, Osama and his collaborator Mohammad Abu al-Shaer were awarded BuildPalestine Fellowships. They’re now working together to incorporate the Palestine Company for Elevators, after which they’ll set about refining, manufacturing, and marketing their product at scale. If all goes well, they’ll soon be doing business with construction firms, but they’ve pledged not to lose sight of the people most affected by their work: those who live with disabilities themselves.
Even with all these accomplishments under his belt, though, a note of pain still lingers in Osama’s voice when he speaks of 2007. In his 2021 interview with Nqat Tahwiil, he sits poised on a stool on a terrace against a backdrop of tropical flowers and speaks directly to the camera: “I required a lot of psychological and emotional support during that period. For that, I’ll never be ashamed.” His normally easy bearing crystalizes into an alert intensity, and a new, sober timbre gives weight to his words. “Nobody should ever be ashamed to ask for help when help is needed. I’ll say that to anyone. Others should do the same. It’s up to us to get rid of the stigma. Receiving assistance should never bring anyone shame.”
A few seconds pass, and then, as quickly as it slipped away, Osama’s warmth returns. “Everyone’s affected by the people around them,” he says. “I might have inner strength, but it only grows when nurtured by the supportive energy of friends and loved ones.” Remembering a mentor with a disability similar to his own, Osama describes how the other man helped him shift his mental state “from one of lethargy and despair to one of empowerment and determination.”
“I could’ve become a very frustrated, unproductive person,” he reflects. “Instead, my life is wonderful. My disability doesn’t hold me back in any way. I’m surrounded by a loving family. I’m giving back to my community. I’m fulfilling my highest potential. I wouldn’t ask for any life besides my own.”
NOTE: Itto interviewed Osama Shamallakh in Palestinian Arabic. We collaborated on this English-language profile using Itto’s translation of the transcript.
