In overcrowded hospitals, patients lie on cold, blood-stained floors. While some cry out in agony, others lie motionless and lifeless, too frail to even make an audible sound.
Since Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas resumed hostilities, hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip have become chaotic.
The medics are worn out after eight weeks of fighting, broken only by a single seven-day break that concluded on Friday.
Fuel reserves have almost run dry because Israel blockaded the territory, so doctors are forced to choose when and where across their hospitals to run generators.
According to the United Nations, not a single hospital in the territory’s north can currently operate on patients.
Every day, convoys coordinated by the International Committee of the Red Cross transport the most critically injured southward. However, even those 12 hospitals are only “partially functional,” according to the UN.
Huda, age nine, and her father, Abdelkarim Abu Warda, have just arrived at Deir al-Balah Hospital by an ICRC convoy.
Their home in the sizable Jabalia refugee camp in the north was struck by an Israeli strike on Friday, following the collapse of the truce.
Huda was wounded in the head. “She had a brain haemorrhage she was placed on a ventilator,” her father told AFP.
Since then, “she hasn’t responded to anything”, he says, lifting up the little girl’s arms.
“She doesn’t answer me any more,” he repeats, sobbing.
