It was two weeks into Israel’s Gaza war last January when Orel was hit. After days in a shelter his mother took him out in the car. As they drove around Beersheba, a siren blared, warning of an incoming rocket. She pushed Orel to the ground, lying protectively on him. When she heard the explosion in the distance, she rose in relief. A second rocket exploded and she saw her son’s head bleeding profusely.

A surgical nurse, she flagged down a passing motorist who drove them to the hospital where she works.

Image Marya, a Palestinian, and Orel, an Israeli, are 8-year-old neighbors at Jerusalem’s Alyn Hospital. Credit... Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

“I saw his brain coming out, everything around me was burning, and I was not even scratched,” she recalled. “When I got to the emergency room, I said to the doctor: ‘You can’t kid me. I know he has no chance of survival.’ The doctor looked away. But after six operations, he is actually making some progress. God took my son from me, but he has given me another one. A year ago, he was the best in his class in sports, the best in math. Now he is learning to walk and talk.”

Her husband, Avrel, who works with children, spends much of the week at home with their 18-month-old daughter but comes often. The couple, originally from Azerbaijan, had been childless for years, and Orel’s birth, coaxed along by infertility treatments in Israel, seemed a miracle.

Their hospital neighbor, Mr. Aman, is a 32-year-old construction worker from Gaza who not only cares for his own two children but helps with Orel. He is regarded as a luminescent presence, an inspiration to staff, volunteers and fellow parents.

This is partly because the pain in his own story is hard to fathom.

More than three years ago, Mr. Aman and his uncle had split the cost of a car and, having paid for it two hours earlier, took it on the road. With them were Mr. Aman’s wife, their three children and his mother.