Beirut, Lebanon – They wait, smiling mischievously, their eyes bright at the sight of two wrapped Spider-Man notebooks.

Ali, the bolder of the two despite being only three years old, tears his open at once.

Six-year-old Omar fumbles, one-handed, with the plastic, his cheeks reddening with embarrassment. Without hesitation, Ali reaches across, peels it open and sets the notebook back in Omar’s lap.

Soon Omar will have a prosthetic arm like Ali, and the small rituals of childhood, like opening a present, will be possible again.

The boys are not brothers, although they live as if they were.

In Hamra, a bustling district of Beirut where traffic clogs the streets and the Mediterranean glimmers beyond the hotels, they share the same apartment block and the same wounds.

Both were pulled fr

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