At the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, trauma nurse Elidalis Burgos is sitting with the lifeless body of one-year-old Khaled.
As medics around her rush to treat their next victim, she asks who will take the baby boy to the morgue. “No one,” she is told. Doctors have named him Khaled as he has no known family.
Ms Burgos, a 44-year-old nurse from the US who was working in Gaza over summer, recalls the “surreal, out-of-body” experience of taking Khaled to the morgue roughly 800 metres away. There, she placed him in a freezer filled with other bodies.
“I found myself patting his little back like you would trying to put a baby to sleep,” she tells The Independent. “I kept having to remind myself, you’re not putting him to sleep. He’s not alive. It was horrific.”
Khaled is another casualty of Israel’s relentless military offensive in the Strip, which recently expanded into Gaza City. Hospitals already struggling to treat a surge in war victims have themselves been targeted by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). Doctors, journalists and aid workers have all been killed.
Israel has ordered mass evacuations from Gaza City, accompanying the orders with heavy bombardment of high-rise towers which it claims host Hamas infrastructure. As bombing intensifies in the city, the IDF is attempting to push Palestinians towards the southern area of al-Mawasi, which it has repeatedly bombed despite designating as a safe zone.
Medicins Sans Frontiers said on Thursday that the expanding offensive has left the health system “on the brink”, with the ongoing escalation in Gaza City threatening the closure of 11 out of 18 partially functioning hospitals in the Strip.
Already ravaged by disease and famine, children are increasingly arriving at these hospitals with gruesome injuries and severe illnesses but no family or loved ones to support them, medics tell the Independent.
“Often these children – and I’m talking about kids from the age of two and up – arrive without an adult,” says Australian medic Dr Saira Hussein, speaking shortly after her return home after a month working in Gaza.
“So there would literally just be a child on a makeshift trolley on its own, with horrific injuries, waiting to come into the theatre for an operation.”
In May, the UN said that more than 50,000 children have been killed or injured since Israel began its military campaign in Gaza in October 2023, which was triggered by the killing of more than 1,200 Israelis by Hamas on 7 October.
Acute malnutrition is also severely impacting younger populations, with nearly 12,000 children under the age of five found to have acute malnutrition in July, including more than 2,500 with severe malnutrition, according to the UN. The World Health Organisation says this is likely an underestimation.
A report from the Palestinian statistics agency in April stated that more than 39,000 children in Gaza had lost either one or both parents since Israel’s campaign began. The agency concluded that Gaza is “suffering from the largest orphan crisis in modern history”.
Speaking over the phone, Dr Hussein recounts children being wheeled into the operating theatre for critical and life-saving operations; their parents and family either lost, injured, or dead.
One night in July, Dr Hussein recalls, a 12-year-old girl came into the hospital in need of urgent oesophagus repair.
“She had tubes coming out of both of her lungs, leaking faeces, with a ruptured abdomen. There was nobody with her. She was just pushed and sort of left in the corridor. So you can imagine the fear and the pain that this child is in.”
Another child, around three years old, had suffered severe burn wounds. During multiple visits to his bed to change his dressings, Dr Hussein didn’t once see an adult or relative with him.
“He’d be lying there unable to move, just whining for his father. That’s all he would do,” she says. “And I think I saw that kid about three times, and every time he was on his own and saying the same thing. There was never anybody with him.”
The head of paediatrics at Nasser Hospital, Dr Ahmed al-Farra, tells The Independent that children often die in the hospital alone.
Ms Burgos says that the treatment of children who are alone is becoming “commonplace because the bombardments are so massive”.
“Whole families are being wiped out at a time,” she adds.
At the Nasser hospital, where many displaced people are living to escape the Israeli bombardment, the corridors ring with the sound of dozens of children who have nowhere else to go.
“In every hallway, children run up to you to ask for food and water,” says Ms Burgos. “I don’t know if they’re there with their families or by themselves. But they are everywhere.”
