As Israeli bombs fell, wounded children overwhelmed this Gaza hospital. Dozens died

After two months of ceasefire, the horror of Israeli bombardment was back. 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,” Rokadiya (visiting doctor) said. “The vast, vast majority were women, children, the elderly.”

The aerial attacks killed 409 people across Gaza, including 173 children and 88 women.

Nasser Hospital’s emergency ward filled with wounded 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 young man with most of his arm gone sat nearby, shivering. A barefoot boy carried in his younger brother, around 4 years old, whose foot had been blown off. Blood was everywhere on the floor, with bits of bone and tissue.

Wounds could be easy to miss. One little girl seemed OK – it just hurt a bit when she breathed, she told Haj-Hassan (American paediatrician) — but when they undressed her they determined she was bleeding into her lungs. Looking through the curly hair of another girl, Haj-Hassan discovered she had shrapnel in her brain.

Two or three wounded at a time were squeezed onto gurneys and sped off to surgery, Rokadiya 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 kids were brought in by strangers, their parents dead, wounded or lost in the mayhem. So he often wrote, “UNKNOWN.”

In the operating room

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American 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.

But the very first little girl he saw — 3 or 4 years old — was too far gone. Her face was mangled by shrapnel. “She was technically still alive,” Sidhwa said, but with so many other casualties “there was nothing we could do.”

There was a 6-year-old boy with two holes in his heart, two in his colon and three more in his stomach, Sidhwa said. They repaired the holes and restarted his heart after he went into cardiac arrest.

He, too, died hours later.

Aftermath

Around 85 people died at Nasser Hospital on Tuesday, including around 40 children from ages 1 to 17, al-Farra (head of the pediatric and obstetrics department) said.

The girl with shrapnel in her brain still can’t move her right side. Her mother came to see her, limping from her own wounds, and told Haj-Hassan that the little girl’s sisters had been killed.