For a few hours every day or night, Dr. Suhaib Alhamss tries to sleep on a thin mattress in an operating room. He swings in and out of half-consciousness, both too tired to open his eyes and too tense to let go. Thunderous shellfire often rattles the windows of the hospital he directs in the southern Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n
But the worst sounds, Alhamss said, come from inside Kuwaiti Hospital: the cries of tiny children with no parents and enormous wounds. The panicked screams of patients jolted awake to the realization that they\u2019d lost a limb. The Israel-Hamas war, which started 100 days ago Sunday, has exposed him, his staff and the people of Gaza to a scale of violence and horror unlike anything they had seen before. It has rendered his hometown unrecognizable.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a disaster that\u2019s bigger than all of us,\u201d Alhamss, 35, said by phone between surgeries. His hospital, donated and funded by Kuwait\u2019s 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 \u2013 adults and children with shrapnel-shattered limbs and pulped bodies, bone-exposing wounds and tattered flesh.<\/p>\n
Over 23,400 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in the war, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. The count does not distinguish between civilians and militants. Israel, which mounted its blistering air and ground campaign in response to Hamas\u2019 Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that saw 1,200 people killed and 250 others abducted, holds the group responsible for civilian deaths by embedding militants in buildings used by non-combatants.<\/p>\n
To make room for the daily rush of war-wounded, Alhamss has crammed a few dozen extra beds into the intensive care unit. He cleared out the pharmacy, which was largely empty anyway since Israel\u2019s siege has deprived the hospital of IV lines and most medicines. Still, patients sprawl on the floors. \u201cThe situation is completely out of control,\u201d he said. A urologist by training and a father of three, Alhamss has watched aghast as his city and hospital have transformed over the course of the war.<\/p>\n
With its low-rise concrete buildings and trash-strewn alleys teeming with unemployed men, Rafah, the strip\u2019s southernmost city, long has been a squalid place straddling the Egyptian frontier. Notorious as a smuggling capital during the Israeli-Egyptian blockade, it contains Gaza\u2019s only border crossing that doesn\u2019t lead into Israel. Now it\u2019s the flashpoint in one of the world\u2019s worst humanitarian crises. Apartment towers have been blasted into flat, smoldering ruins.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s evacuation orders and expanding offensive have swelled Rafah\u2019s 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 centers and sometimes plodding kilometers (miles) on foot to carry back canned beans and rice.<\/p>\n
The faces he sees around the city have changed, too, as Israel presses on with its goal of destroying Hamas. Fear and strain crease the features of his colleagues, Alhamss says. Blood and dust smear the faces of the incoming wounded, while waxy gray skin and eyes circled by darkening rings are marks of the dying.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can see the exhaustion, the nervousness, the hunger on everyone\u2019s faces,\u201d Alhamss said. \u201cIt\u2019s a strange place now. It\u2019s not the city I know.\u201d Aid trucks have trickled through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. But it\u2019s nowhere near enough to meet the besieged enclave\u2019s surging needs, humanitarian officials say. In the absence of vital equipment, medical staff have applied their ingenuity to new ends. Alhamss dresses patients\u2019 wounds with burial shrouds.<\/p>\n
\u201cEach day I have people who die before my eyes because I don\u2019t have medicine or burn ointment or supplies to help them,\u201d he said. He is too overwhelmed to dwell on all that he\u2019s seen, but some images spring up unbidden: the vacuous stare of a young boy who survived a strike that killed his entire family, a newborn rescued from his dead mother\u2019s womb.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think, how will they go on? They have no one left in this world,\u201d Alhamss said. His thoughts turn to his own children \u2013 12-year-old Jenna, 8-year-old Hala and 7-year-old Hudhayfa \u2013 sheltering at their grandmother\u2019s Rafah apartment. He sees them once a week, on Thursdays, when they come to the hospital to give him a hug. \u201cI am terrified for them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Alhamss knows fellow doctors and nurses who were killed in their homes or on the way to work by artillery, missiles, exploding drones \u2013 so many kinds of incoming fire. He has lost dozens of his medical students at the Islamic University of Gaza where he teaches, ambitious men and women \u201cwith so much life left to live,\u201d he said. But grief is a luxury he cannot afford. When asked how he felt, he answered with a simple \u201cIt\u2019s God\u2019s will.\u201d \u201cWe all will die in the end, why be afraid of it?\u201d Alhamss asked. \u201cWe have no choice but to try to live in dignity, to help those we can.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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