DOCTORS HAVE DESCRIBED their efforts to save the many children affected by Israeli strikes on Gaza this week, which shattered what was left of an already precarious ceasefire agreement. 

A visiting British doctor went to the balcony of a hospital in Khan Younis and watched the streaks of missiles light up the night before pounding the city.

After two months of ceasefire, the horror of Israeli bombardment was back.

The veteran surgeon told the visiting doctor, Sakib Rokafiya, they had better head to the emergency ward.

Torn bodies soon streamed in, carried by ambulances, donkey carts or in the arms of terrified relatives.

What stunned doctors was the number of children.

“Just child after child, young patient after young patient,” Dr Rokafiya said.

The vast, vast majority were women, children, the elderly.

This was the start of a chaotic 24 hours at Nasser Hospital, the largest hospital in southern Gaza.

A woman holds a child in Gaza after receiving leaflets ordering them to leave and go to the safest areas west of Gaza city. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Israel shattered the ceasefire in place since mid-January with a surprise barrage that began early Tuesday that it said was to pressure Hamas into releasing more hostages and accepting changes in the truce’s terms.

It turned into one of the deadliest days in the 17-month war.

The aerial attacks killed 409 people across Gaza, including 173 children and 88 women, and hundreds more were wounded, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, whose count does not differentiate between militants and civilians.

More than 300 casualties flooded into Nasser Hospital. Like other medical facilities around Gaza, it had been damaged by Israeli raids and strikes throughout the war, leaving it without key equipment.

It was also running short on antibiotics and other essentials.

On 2 March, when the first, six-week phase of the ceasefire technically expired, Israel blocked entry of medicine, food and other supplies to Gaza.

Nasser Hospital’s emergency ward filled with wounded, in a scene described by Dr Rokafiya and Tanya Haj-Hassan, an American paediatrician – both volunteers with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Wounded came from a tent camp sheltering displaced that missiles set ablaze and from homes struck in Khan Younis and Rafah, further south.

One nurse was trying to resuscitate a boy sprawled on the floor with shrapnel in his heart.

A man holds the body of a child killed in Israeli strikes on northern Gaza at the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

A young man with most of his arm gone sat nearby, shivering.

A barefoot boy carried in his younger brother, around four years old, whose foot had been blown off.

Blood was everywhere on the floor, with bits of bone and tissue.

“I was overwhelmed, running from corner to corner, trying to find out who to prioritise, who to send to the operating room, who to declare a case that’s not salvageable,” said Dr Haj-Hassan.

It’s a very difficult decision, and we had to make it multiple times.

Wounds could be easy to miss. One little girl seemed OK, it just hurt a bit when she breathed, she told Dr Haj-Hassan, but when they undressed her they determined she was bleeding into her lungs.

Related Reads

Month-old girl pulled from rubble in Gaza after parents killed in Israeli air strike

People flee from northern Gaza after displacement orders as Israeli bombardment continues

'Bodies and limbs on the ground' after Israeli strikes kill more than 400 people in Gaza

Looking through the curly hair of another girl, Dr Haj-Hassan discovered she had shrapnel in her brain.

Two or three wounded at a time were squeezed onto trolleys and sped off to surgery, Dr Rokafiya said.

He scrawled notes on slips of paper or directly on the patient’s skin – this one to surgery, this one for a scan.

He wrote names when he could, but many children were brought in by strangers, their parents dead, wounded or lost in the mayhem.

So he often wrote, “Unknown”.

Dr Feroze Sidhwa, a US trauma surgeon from California with the medical charity MedGlobal, rushed immediately to the area where the hospital put the worst-off patients still deemed possible to save.

Dr Haj-Hassan keeps checking in on children in Nasser’s ICU.

“I cannot process or comprehend the scale of mass killing and massacre of families in their sleep that we are seeing here,” Dr Haj-Hassan said.

“This can’t be the world we’re living in.”

Need more information on what is happening in Israel and Palestine? Check out our FactCheck Knowledge Bank for essential reads and guides to navigating the news online.