In the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza is trauma nurse Elidalis Burgos with the lifeless body of a year old Khaled.
While doctors almost to treat her next victim, she asks who takes the baby boy to the mortuary. “Nobody,” she is told. Doctors have called him Khaled because he has no known family.
Mrs. Burgos, a 44-year-old US nurse who worked in Gaza in the summer, remembers the “surrealistic, out-of-body” experience to bring Khaled about 800 meters to the mortuary. There she placed him in a freezer full of other bodies.
“I noticed that I was knocking on his little back as if you would try to put a baby to sleep,” she says The independent. “I kept reminding myself, you don't put him asleep – he doesn't live. It was terrible.”
Trauma nurse Elidalis Burgos in Gaza in the summer (Elidalis Burgos)
Khaled is another victim of Israel's ruthless military offensive in the strip, which recently expanded to Gaza City. Hospitals that already have difficulty dealing with an increase in the victims of war are themselves the target of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Doctors, journalists and care providers have all been killed.
Israel has ordered mass evacuations from Gaza City, accompanied by the orders with a heavy bombing of high-rise towers whose host Hamas infrastructure claims. As the bombing in the city intensify, the IDF tries to push Palestinians to the southern area of Al-Mawasi, who has repeatedly bombed it despite the designation of it as a safe zone.
Médecins Sans Frontières said on Thursday that the growing offensive had left the health system “on the edge”, with the continuous escalation in Gaza City that threatened the closure of 11 of the 18 partially functioning hospitals in the Strip.
A wounded Palestinian boy is waiting for the treatment at the Kuwaitse Hospital after Israeli strikes in Rafah in the Southern Gaza Strip (AFP/Getty)
Already destroyed by illness and famine, children are increasingly coming to these hospitals with horrible injuries and serious diseases, but no family or loved ones to support them, medical staff said The independent.
“Often these children come – and I am talking about children from the age of two and older – without an adult,” said Dr. Saira Hussein, an Australian Medic that spoke shortly after her return home after a month in Gaza.
“So there would literally only be a child on an improvised trolley, with horrible injuries, waiting to enter the theater for an operation.”
A displaced Palestinian girl walks next to an impact crater, left after an Israeli strike, in a camp for internal displaced people in Deir El-Balah in the Central Gaza Strip (AFP/Getty)
In May, the United Nations said that more than 50,000 children had been killed or injured since Israel started his military campaign in Gaza in October 2023, which was caused by the killing of more than 1,200 Israelis by Hamas on October 7.
Acute malnutrition also has a serious impact on younger populations. In July, nearly 12,000 children under the age of five had acute malnutrition, including more than 2500 with serious malnutrition, according to the UN. The World Health Organization says that this is probably an underestimation.
In April, a report from the Palestinian Statistics Agency stated that more than 39,000 children in Gaza had lost one or both parents since the Israel campaign began. The agency concluded that Gaza “suffered from the greatest orphan crisis in modern history”.
Speaking by telephone, Dr. says Hussein that children are driven to the operating theater for critical and life -saving operations; Their parents and family lost, injured or death.
A Palestinian girl in the wreck after a nocturnal attack on the Sheikh Radwan Health Center in northern Gaza City (AFP/Getty)
One night in July Dr. Hussein himself that a 12-year-old girl entered the hospital with urgent repair to her esophagus.
“She had tubes that came out of her both lungs, leaking relaxation, with a torn belly. There was no one with her. She was just pushed and left a bit in the corridor. So you can imagine the fear and pain in which this child is.”
Another child, about three years old, had sustained serious burns. About several visits to his bed to change his dressings, Dr. Hussein not ever an adult or family member with him.
“He would lie there, unable to move, just nagging for his father. That's all he would do. And I think I saw that child about three times, and every time he was alone and said the same thing. There was never anyone with him.”
The head of pediatrics in the Nasser Hospital, Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, said The independent That children often die alone in the hospital.
Up to 40,000 children have lost one or both parents, says Palestinian Statistics Agency (AFP/Getty)
Mrs. Burgos, the trauma nurse, said that the treatment of children who are alone “became commonplace because the bombing are so massive”.
“Whole families are wiped away at the same time,” she added.
In the Nasser Hospital, where many displaced persons live to escape from the Israeli bombing, the corridors with the sound of dozens of children who can't go anywhere else.
“In every corridor, children run towards you to ask food and water,” said Mrs. Burgos. “I don't know if they are there with their families or alone. But they are everywhere.”
