As Israeli bombs fell, wounded children overwhelmed this Gaza hospital.
Dozens died
[March 22, 2025]
By SAMY MAGDY and LEE KEATH
CAIRO (AP) — When the first explosions in Gaza this week started around
1:30 a.m., 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. A Palestinian surgeon next to him gasped, “Oh
no. Oh no.”
After two months of ceasefire, the horror of Israeli bombardment was
back. The veteran surgeon told the visiting doctor, Sakib Rokafiya,
they’d 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,” 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. Israel shattered the ceasefire in place since
mid-January with a surprise barrage that began early Tuesday and was
meant 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 March 2, when
the first, six-week phase of the ceasefire technically expired, Israel
blocked entry of medicine, food and other supplies to Gaza.
Triage
Nasser Hospital's emergency ward filled with wounded, in a scene
described to The Associated Press by Rokafiya and Tanya Haj-Hassan, an
American pediatrician — 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 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.
“I was overwhelmed, running from corner to corner, trying to find out
who to prioritize, who to send to the operating room, who to declare a
case that’s not salvageable,” said Haj-Hassan.
“It’s a very difficult decision, and we had to make it multiple times,”
she said in a voice message.
Wounds could be easy to miss. One little girl seemed OK – it just hurt a
bit when she breathed, she told Haj-Hassan -- 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, 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 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.”
He told the girl’s father she was going to die. Sidhwa went on to do
some 15 operations, one after another.
[to top of second column]
|
An explosion erupts in the northern Gaza Strip, as seen from
southern Israel, on Tuesday, March 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Khaled Alserr, a Palestinian surgeon, and an Irish volunteer surgeon
were doing the same. There was a 29-year-old woman whose pelvis was
smashed, the webbing of veins around the bones was bleeding heavily.
They did what they could in surgery, but she died 10 hours later in
the intensive care unit.
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.
“They died because the ICU simply does not have the capacity to care
for them,” Sidhwa said.
Ahmed al-Farra, head of the pediatric and obstetrics department,
said that was in part because the ICU lacks strong antibiotics.
Sidhwa recalled how he was at Boston Medical Center when the 2013
Boston Marathon bombing happened, killing three people and sending
some 260 wounded to area hospitals.
Boston Medical “couldn’t handle this influx of cases” seen at Nasser
Hospital, he said.
The staff
Rokafiya marveled at how the hospital staff took care of each other
under duress. Workers circulated with water to give sips to doctors
and nurses. Cleaners whisked away the bloody clothes, blankets,
tissues and medical debris accumulating on the floors.
At the same time, some staff had their own family members killed in
the strikes.
Alserr, the Palestinian surgeon, had to go to the morgue to identify
the bodies of his wife’s father and brother.
“The only thing I saw was like a packet of meat and bones, melted
and fractured,” he said in a voice message, without giving details
on the circumstances their deaths.
Another staffer lost his wife and kids. An anesthesiologist -- whose
mother and 21 other relatives were killed earlier in the war --
later learned his father, his brother and a cousin were killed, Haj-Hassan
said.
Aftermath
Around 85 people died at Nasser Hospital on Tuesday, including
around 40 children from ages 1 to 17, al-Farra said.
Strikes continued throughout the week, killing several dozen more
people. At least six prominent Hamas figures were among those killed
Tuesday.
Israel says it will keep targeting Hamas, demanding it release more
hostages, even though Israel has ignored ceasefire requirements for
it to first negotiate a long-term end to the war. Israel says it
does not target civilians and blames Hamas for their deaths because
it operates among the population.
With Tuesday’s bombardment, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also
secured the return to his government of a right-wing party that had
demanded a resumption of the war, solidifying his coalition ahead of
a crucial budget vote that could have brought him down.
Haj-Hassan keeps checking in on children in Nasser's ICU. 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.
“I cannot process or comprehend the scale of mass killing and
massacre of families in their sleep that we are seeing here,” Haj-Hassan
said. “This can’t be the world we’re living in.”
___
AP correspondents Julia Frankel in Jerusalem, Fatma Khaled in Cairo,
and Sarah El Deeb in Beirut contributed to this report.
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
