PALESTINIANS are dying every day in Gaza’s overwhelmed remaining hospitals which can’t deal with the tens of thousands people hurt in Israeli’s military offensive, a United Nations health emergency expert said on Wednesday.

This came as a doctor with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) described the situation in Gaza’s hospitals as the most extreme she had ever seen.

The two health professionals, who recently left Gaza after weeks working in hospitals there, described overwhelmed doctors trying to save the lives of thousands of wounded people amid collapsing hospitals that have turned into impromptu refugee camps.

The World Health Organisation’s Sean Casey, who left Gaza recently, told a UN news conference that he saw “a really horrifying situation in the hospitals” as the health system collapsed day by day.

Al-Shifa Hospital, once Gaza’s leading hospital with 700 beds, has been reduced to treating only emergency trauma victims, and is filled with thousands of people who have fled their homes and are now living in operating rooms, corridors and stairs, he said.

Mr Casey said: “Literally five or six doctors or nurses” are seeing hundreds of patients a day, most with life-threatening injuries.

He said that there were “so many patients on the floor you could barely move without stepping on somebody’s hands or feet.”

The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza estimates that 60,000 people have been wounded, with hundreds more wounded per day and at least 24,620 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli bombardment. 

Since Israel declared war against Hamas following its surprise attack on October 7, which left some 1,200 dead, it has repeatedly accused the group, without verifiable evidence of using Gaza’s hospitals as cover for military activities. 

Dr Seema Jilani, a paediatrician and the IRC’s senior technical adviser for emergency health, said that the scenes she witnessed in Gaza were “harrowing scenes out of nightmares.”

Dr Jilani, who previously worked in hotspots including Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, said: “In my experience of working in conflict zones around the world, this is the most extreme situation I have seen in terms of scale, severity of injuries, number of children that have suffered that have nothing to do with any of this.”

On her first day at al-Aksa hospital in Deir al-Balah she said, she tried to save a one-year-old boy whose right arm and right leg had been blown off, without any of the necessary medication. 

Next to him was a dying man with “flies already feasting on him,” she said.