24 continuous hours

If someone had described to me something like what I lived through today, and told me it was real, I would never have believed them.

In the last hours of my 24-hour shift in the ER, as I sat writing down the patients' stories I witnessed today, on what is nearly the thousandth day of this endless genocide, the crimes continued. I heard the sound of an Apache firing a missile at a house. The local news reported screams in the area, and urgent calls for ambulances. And now, the Apache is back in the sky. My heart races, while I sit here in extreme exhaustion, waiting for the wounded. Another home has just been struck

As the world speaks of peace, an old woman, displaced all the way from the north to the center, lay dying in our ICU. A simple hernia had turned into

obstruction, then sepsis. In her final moments, she vomited feces. We cleaned her up, and then faced her family with the words no one ever wants to hear: that she was gone

I never imagined I would witness something like that, not even in my darkest thoughts.

Beside her, another old woman struggled for breath as fluids filled her lungs from a failing heart. We did all we could to stabilize her, but she needed urgent transfer to a cardiac department. Yet what weighed most heavily on her mind wasn't her failing body; it was that she had no money to survive there

A number of casualties arrived at the hospital :

A mother, an asthma patient, suffocated from the smoke, her lungs almost completely obstructed .

A five- month- old baby girl, with burns across the front of her head and a deep wound in her leg.

A father, bleeding heavily from his lungs and abdomen, in haemorrhagic shock, restless, agitated, clutching my stomach and hand as if desperately begging for rescue.

A kind elderly woman with a gaping wound on her face, praying for my safety as I stitched her wound.

As I held the baby girl 's tiny leg, the one her father had pulled from under the rubble of their room, torn by a horrifying, wound; I suddenly heard a terrifying sound: another Apache missile. And as I tried to dress her wound, the same sound came again.

In that moment, I wasn't afraid for the whole world. It felt like the end of the world. But my entire being was fixed on that small, innocent child.

The woman who had nearly lost her breath to the smoke, as she walked away feeling a little better, turned to me and said, "May God bless you. " Then she left: I don't know where to.

And now, I lie here carrying the weight of all humanity’s pain, listening to the cries of a small child, the distant recitation of Qur' an, the call to prayer, the buzzing of drones, and the roar of warplanes overhead

Today, for 24 continuous hours, We received hundreds of patients in the emergency room. We were only three doctors and one female doctor.

Among the cases that arrived were some of the most severe and difficult injuries, brought from Al-Shifa Hospital, where they had been wounded, and their families fled with them to us

One of them was a young man in a coma, who had suffered severe bleeding in the brain. His eyes were filled with blood, his chest and neck badly burned, and he was vomiting repeatedly

Another case was a young man screaming from unbearable abdominal pain. He had been at Al-Shifa for two days, but no one had been able to scan his abdomen, and his family had no idea he was suffering from internal bleeding. He had lost his brother in the attack , and he himself was pulled from under the rubble. His body riddled with shrapnel. When I asked him what had happened, he cried out that tanks had surrounded the hospital area, and as they tried to escape, he saw four people killed by sniper fire

Another case was a young man with a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed in half of his body. He, too, had come from Al-Shifa, fleeing death; I don't even know how.

Many more cases came from Gaza City: children and women with multiple fractures , and many elderly patients collapsing from exhaustion and extreme fatigue

As for me, at the start of the day my stomach was sick, and throughout the day my body was worn out. But my mind kept running endlessly between people 's pains. And now, my body feels like it is dying, and my heart is weeping.

I heard my colleagues telling each other that these days are the hardest of all. But I had never imagined they would be this hard, this cruel. This pain is unbearable