Before Aidan Hartley went to Gaza to film Unreported World: Going for Gold in Gaza, he was told that, people with physical disabilities were often shunned by society, that they might not have the care and support one finds in a Western country. On the ground he found the contrary to be the case.
Paraplegics or amputees especially are a very common sight on many streets. Thousands of amputees are victims of bullets and bombs; poverty is another cause, and it makes it harder for those with disabilities to deal with life. Doctors say some are disabled due to congenital birth defects caused by intermarriage in tiny, besieged Gaza, which is surrounded by Israeli concrete walls, machinegun nests and razor wire.
Disability is such a pressing social issue in Gaza that one welfare organisation arranges mass weddings for blind or paraplegic people.
Many disabled people in Gaza may give in; others overcome their problems in various ways. Some go back to war with the Israelis.
The spiritual leader of Gaza's ruling party Hamas was Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a nearly blind, wheelchair-bound quadriplegic Islamist.
Yassin was killed in an Israeli helicopter gunship air strike in 2004 but huge billboards still sport his smiling image all over the Strip.
One evening we arranged a secret rendezvous with the militant group Islamic jihad. We walked through eerily quiet streets into a complex of olive groves where we were surrounded by shadowy armed figures and led into a house where we came face-to-face with black-clad men in balaclavas who bristled with weaponry. They were war-wounded amputees who in any other society might be regarded as invalids. One had a prosthetic right leg, another operated his AK-47 rifle with only his right hand since he had no left, another had a leg mashed by shrapnel. It was a bizarre interview in which they declared how being disabled was a badge of courage, a near miss on the road to martyrdom and a boost to them and their comrades in their battle against Israel. As we exited the interview back into the darkness we heard Israeli drones circling a few hundred feet above us and I never thought a sound like that - vaguely like a lawn mower, could be so menacing.
Israeli UAVs regularly fire missiles at targets in Gaza, as we had discovered when we talked to the family of two boys who were out playing in the street when they were blasted by a missile. One of the boys, Ibrahim, lost his hands in the attack and would have faced a life of hardship in disability had he not died while we were at the parents' home.
I found the pictures of the aftermath of the air strike that mortally wounded Ibrahim difficult to watch - but the worst thing for me personally was to see a boy of nine, my own son's age, crying because he had lost his arm to cancer and had had to spend 18 months of his short life living in a hospital.
Yusuf Abu Nahal wept as his father said that the boy wanted a prosthetic arm so that he could live a normal child's life - but because of shortages he had been waiting for the nine months for a limb to be supplied at the only centre in Gaza where such equipment is manufactured. In such a place it seems understandable that even able-bodied people sometimes appear to give up hope. That made it all the more extraordinary for me to witness this handful of disabled athletes focusing their energies on redeeming their hard lives through sport.
I remember the blind discus thrower Hatem told me, 'Few people try to achieve anything when they're disabled. I encourage them to do things that make them feel more valued.'
