GAZA CITY, Gaza — Om Hamza Mesleh, 45, was searching desperately for her son when she saw a young man carrying a body draped in bloodied white plastic.
“This is Hamza!” she shouted.
Panting, Om Hamza, a common honorific in Arabic for matriarchs that translates to “mother of Hamza,” rushed to see whether it was, indeed, her lost son.
She couldn’t hold back her tears when she saw his face.
“My children were playing in front of me inside the house. Suddenly, the floors above my head collapsed, and I could not find my children. I do not know how I got out. I looked for my children but did not find them,” Mesleh said.
After Hamas’ terrorist attack Saturday, Israeli airstrikes have reduced entire neighborhoods in Gaza, including hospitals, to soot. The remaining clinics and emergency units have been operating without power and supplies.
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“Our hospitals are flooded with patients and injured people, and we have to deal with casualties that are arriving on a daily basis at our emergency department,” Marwan Abu Seeds, the deputy director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, said as ambulances brought in one casualty after another.
On Saturday, Hamas — a militant organization that is one of the two major political groups in the Palestinian territories and has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S., the European Union and other countries — launched a terrorist attack via land, air and sea that killed at least 1,200 people in Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the terrorists raped women and butchered people.
Israel has responded by bombarding the enclave, and on Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “full siege” of Gaza, blocking food, gas and power into the area. Officials say at least 1,100 people have died in Gaza in bombings since the attack. Now, as Israel’s forces prepare for a possible ground invasion, doctors and aid workers say the health care system in Gaza is about to collapse.
“The situation is really catastrophic,” said Sarah Chateau, a Paris-based desk manager for Doctors Without Borders, which has 300 staff members in Gaza. “We barely can operate in Gaza. The bombing is almost nonstop.”
Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah had been in Gaza City for less than 48 hours when he operated on “Unknown Child No. 6.”
“Half his face is missing,” Abu-Sittah told NBC News just moments after he finished the three-hour operation. “The whole time you’re thinking this is someone’s baby boy. We don’t know his name. You don’t know what happened to the rest of his family. We lost count of people now. We don’t know who’s who.”
When he heard about Hamas’ terrorist attack, Abu-Sittah, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon based in London, packed his bags and made his way to Gaza, where he has family.
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