Gaza Hospitals Overwhelmed as Children Die in Strikes

A boy recovers after being caught in an attack in Al Zaytoon neighbourhood of the Gaza City.

UN aid teams on Friday highlighted the disturbing situation in Gaza’s makeshift hospitals, where premature babies cry for scant oxygen and medics struggle to save child survivors targeted by airstrikes in their tents, while quadcopter victims are reportedly shot while fetching bread.

Speaking from the war-shattered enclave amid the ongoing Israeli military push to take full control of Gaza City, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder described one short visit to a hospital where youngsters were either suffering or dying everywhere he looked.

One victim at Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza, was six-year-old Aya, injured in an airstrike. “I'm really noticing not just the wound, but the attention given to the bobs in her hair – the care of a parent before the airstrike,” he said. “As we're talking to the surgeon there, she dies on the bed in front of us. That's 30 minutes in a hospital.”

At the same hospital, Mr Elder reported seeing three children “all shot by quadcopters” – small attack drones with four propellers. “It's a war zone, children bleeding out on the floor,” he said, describing others wounded by bullets, shrapnel or burns.

The UNICEF spokesperson underscored reports that 1,000 infants have been killed in Gaza in the last two years since Hamas-led terror attacks in Israel triggered the war. “We have no idea how many more have died from preventable illnesses,” he continued.

With only around 14 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals still open and partially functional after almost two years of war, they are often “absolutely packed” with people needing urgent help, Mr Elder stressed.

He described a young girl, Sham, rescued from the rubble, covered in dust and smoke, her terrified expression betraying the trauma. “Now Sham didn’t have broken bones or internal injuries, but she wasn’t told that her mother and sister were both killed in that attack,” he said.

In Gaza City, thousands remain trapped amid Israeli evacuation orders and continued bombardment. Children are seen “shuddering” and gazing skywards “to track the fire” from helicopters and quadcopters. “Shoeless children push grandparents around the rubble, amputee children struggle through the dust, mothers carry exhausted children – literally their skin bleeding from severe rashes,” Mr Elder added.

On Thursday, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) confirmed the death of its fourteenth medical worker in Gaza, occupational therapist Omar Hayek, in an attack that also injured four colleagues in Deir Al-Balah. Until 13 September, he had worked at an MSF clinic in Gaza City before finally evacuating amid “relentless attacks and forced displacement by Israeli forces,” the NGO said.

Dr Rik Peeperkorn, UN World Health Organization (WHO) Representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, admitted: “People are scared and rightly so. If you ask me now, can we do our work? I say no, of course we cannot do our work in the north.”

Christian Cardon from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) stressed that even hospitals offer no protection. “We had several occasions where people were being treated, but were wounded again because of stray bullets coming into the hospital,” he said, noting another such incident on Thursday.