The Race To Save Children At One Of Gaza's Last Hospitals

Seema Jilani is a paediatrician who has been forced to leave al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza after fighting intensified. She talks to Tom Bennett about working inside a war zone

- Tom Bennett

An 11-year-old girl with deep-tissue burns so extensive that her extremities have stiffened, screaming from her hospital bed through lungs choked by smoke. A one-year-old infant who endured a traumatic amputation of his leg, still wearing his bloodstained nappy. A stray bullet ricochets into the intensive care unit, as airstrikes pound the streets just metres away.

These are the scenes inside Gaza’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, as described by Dr Seema Jilani, who has been working on its wards and in its operating theatres as part of a delegation of medical staff from the humanitarian aid group the International Rescue Committee.

Al-Aqsa Hospital – situated in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza – is “the most important hospital remaining in Gaza’s Middle Area”, according to World Health Organisation chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. It has been at the centre of spiralling violence in recent weeks, as fighting between the Israeli military and Hamas has intensified in the surrounding area.

When Jilani, a paediatrician, first arrived at the hospital in late December, she described seeing black smoke spiralling from bombed-out buildings around 600 metres away from the hospital. Days later, the destruction was just 400 metres away. Each day she was there, the windows would reverberate a little more as the Israeli forces closed in.

“Every day, going up and down the staircase, you would notice the palpable tension rise as people began to get more and more concerned about what it meant, that the hospital was becoming increasingly busy,” says Jilani.