Gaza City’s main hospital, Al Shifa, is at full capacity.
The hallways and courtyards are filled with hundreds of bodies, as the morgue’s refrigerators cannot hold them all. More bodies still lie outside.
Inside, hundreds of seriously injured people fill the hallways as staff work under immense pressure, knowing that all services might soon grind to a halt if its back-up generators stop working. Women and children are among the wounded.
This could lead to a serious catastrophe.
At the hospital, we see a young girl who has been brought in screaming from intense pain and shock. She calls out to doctors to treat her and to get rid of her pain.
Her home was unexpectedly shelled by Israeli forces, and a number of her relatives were killed.
But doctors are racing against time, and focus on giving priority to those who have been most seriously injured.
For others it is too late.
One woman sits next to the bodies of some of her relatives, who also died in a fierce Israeli bombardment which targeted a densely populated neighbourhood of Gaza. Surviving family members are arriving one by one.
“We were sleeping and they bombarded our house like everyone else,” she says. “They hit our house while we were sleeping. We didn’t have any fighters [in our building]. The building is full of civilians – 120 people live there.”
Another woman on a stretcher tell us: “They postponed my operation, they said other people were more of a priority… you can wait a bit. What can I do? [There are] so many people injured here.”
The head of the hospital, Dr Muhammad Abu Salmia, tells the BBC of the consequences if al-Shifa is forced to stop operating: “The hospital cannot function without electricity.
“More than 120 people are intubated in the ICU, neonatal and other wards; [if this happens,] all departments and services across the hospital will collapse, and we will no longer be able to treat patients.”
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- History behind the story: The Israel-Palestinian conflict
As we report from the hospital, we discover that dozens of our own neighbours, relatives and friends are among those injured and killed.
We have to stop working as we process the shock of the story coming so close to us.
Cameraman Mahmoud al-Ajrami is overwhelmed and tears run down his face when he discovers a friend has been brought to the hospital after surviving serious injuries, and that most of the man’s relatives have been killed.
The Palestinian ministry of health says it is working under immense pressure, conscious of the risk that hospitals in Gaza will soon be unable to function because of the power shutdown.
