The Israel-Hamas war has exposed the people of the Gaza Strip to a scale of violence and horror unlike anything they had seen before, a doctor has warned.
Health officials say more than 23,400 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in the conflict, which reaches the 100-day mark on January 14.
Dr Suhaib Alhamss described the event as “a disaster that’s bigger than all of us”.
His hospital, donated and funded by Kuwait’s government, is one of two in the city of Rafah.
With just four intensive care beds before the war, it now receives some 1,500 wounded patients each day and at least 50 people dead on arrival.
To make room for the daily rush of war-wounded, Dr Alhamss, 35, has crammed a few dozen extra beds into the intensive care unit.
He cleared out the pharmacy, which was largely empty anyway since Israel’s siege has deprived the hospital of IV lines and most medicines. Still, patients sprawl on the floors.
“The situation is completely out of control,” he said.
A urologist by training and a father of three, Dr Alhamss has watched as his city and hospital have transformed over the course of the war.
With its low-rise concrete buildings and rubbish-strewn alleys teeming with unemployed men, Rafah, the strip’s southern-most city, long has been a squalid place straddling the Egyptian frontier.
Notorious as a smuggling capital during the Israeli-Egyptian blockade, it contains Gaza’s only border crossing that does not lead into Israel.
It is now the flashpoint in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Israel’s evacuation orders and expanding offensive have swelled Rafah’s population from 280,000 to 1.4 million, leaving hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians jammed into flimsy tents smothering the streets.
Most people spend hours each day in search of food, waiting in motionless lines outside aid distribution centres and sometimes plodding miles on foot to carry back canned beans and rice.
Dr Alhamss said: “You can see the exhaustion, the nervousness, the hunger on everyone’s faces. It’s a strange place now. It’s not the city I know.”
Aid trucks have trickled through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, but it is nowhere near enough to meet the besieged enclave’s surging needs, humanitarian officials say.
“Each day I have people who die before my eyes because I don’t have medicine or burn ointment or supplies to help them,” Dr Alhamss said.
His thoughts turn to his own children — 12-year-old Jenna, eight-year-old Hala and seven-year-old Hudhayfa — sheltering at their grandmother’s Rafah flat.
He sees them once a week, on Thursdays, when they come to the hospital to give him a hug.
“I am terrified for them,” he said.
