Starving and orphaned: the children alone in hospitals

40,000 in Gaza are believed to have lost at least one parent as the Israel Defense Forces continues its brutal offensive

- ALEX CROFT

At the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, trauma nurse Elidalis Burgos is sitting with the lifeless body of one-year-old Khaled.

As medics around her rush to treat their next victim, she asks who will take the baby boy to the morgue. “No one,” she is told. Doctors have named him Khaled as he has no known family.

Ms Burgos, a 44-year-old nurse from the US who was working in Gaza over the summer, recalls the “surreal, out-of-body” experience of taking Khaled to the morgue roughly 800 metres away. There, she placed him in a freezer filled with other bodies.

“I found myself patting his little back like you would trying to put a baby to sleep,” she tells The Independent. “I kept having to remind myself, you’re not putting him to sleep - he’s not alive. It was horrific.”

Khaled is another casualty of Israel's relentless military offensive in the Strip, which recently expanded into Gaza City. Hospitals already struggling to treat a surge in war victims have themselves been targeted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Doctors, journalists and aid workers have all been killed.