GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — After being declared dead earlier this summer, 9-year-old Louay is fortunate to be back home with his father and older brother, Odai, 13. But with their friends back in school this month, both boys are confined to the small, dark apartment where they live in al-Zaitun, a suburb of Gaza City, dealing with permanent disabilities from their recent injuries.

This summer’s 51 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas took a heavy toll on Gaza’s children, killing 501, according to U.N. figures. It injured an additional 3,374, and though the bombs have stopped, hundreds of those children, just like Louay and Odai, face an uncertain future as disabled.

Their story is one of two young lives changed in an instant. On July 21, Louay and Odai were at their aunt’s house preparing for iftar, the evening meal for breaking the fast during the holy month of Ramadan. Rockets suddenly hit the house, killing their mother, grandmother and aunt, who was pregnant, as well as her six daughters.

“The first rocket knocked me out, but when a second hit, I woke up, and when the third hit, I was running downstairs,” said Odai. “I saw that my little brother, Louay, was alive. I took him, and we ran together, but a canister of gas exploded and burned him.”

Their father, Zakarya Siyam, said he was preparing to go to the house when he heard on the radio that the home of his brother-in-law had been hit.

“I rushed to the house but didn’t find anyone. At the hospital I found them in pieces. Six children in small pieces of meat — also my wife and mother,” Siyam said with a blank expression in his eyes. The doctors were preparing to remove Odai’s leg because of shrapnel stuck in his knee and thigh.

“My father yelled at the doctors, ‘Don’t cut off my son’s leg,’” Odai recalled.

Although Siyam said Louay had been declared dead, he insisted he could feel a pulse. He put Louay in cold water and resuscitated him. After a week in intensive care, Louay opened his eyes. He sustained severe burns on most of his body and — more serious — pieces of shrapnel in his stomach and near his heart that doctors were unable to remove. Doctors have warned Louay against running or playing because of the risk of the shrapnel cutting his heart.

Odai, meanwhile, is in constant pain. Shrapnel crushed several bones in his leg, and he may never walk again.

Doctors told Siyam that both his sons need surgery abroad. But because Israel and Egypt have sealed all exits from Gaza, his only hope is that international organizations will facilitate and sponsor the needed treatment.

“They have already lost the most precious thing they had, their mother. I want to give them anything they ask for, but in Gaza there are no opportunities for treatment for my children. I’m an ordinary and poor man. In Gaza such people are neglected,” he said with exasperation.