Gaza hospital is gripped by pain and loss as crisis deepens

● Family tragedy lays bare the horror that ordinary people are enduring

It took me a while to realise the teenager in both images was the same person. I was looking at a video of 16-yearold Rafiq Doughmosh pumping iron in a gym in Gaza City before the war.

He was a regular down the gym last year, building strength for the football pitch. As with teenagers the world over, a friend was filming the session for Rafiq’s socials, because Rafiq looked great. The weightlifting was effortless, as was the hairstyle. He was happy, healthy and totally absorbed in what he was doing.

The second video I watched was also Rafiq but a different version of the teenager. He’s lying in a bed in Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza City.

One of the legs that used to anchor him to the gym floor was missing. Tears ran down protruding cheek bones. Stickthin arms lay limp against his rib cage. He had lost half of his body weight. The twinkle in the eyes had been snuffed out, replaced by the shadow of hunger, pain and loss.

In the next bed over, his younger sister Rafif (13), who has also lost a limb, listened to him talk about their mother Raghdah. She had been killed along with 10 other family members when their home in Gaza City was hit by an Israeli missile back in November. “My mother was more than just a mother, she was a sister, a friend, she was everything,” he said.

Rafiq’s father, Zaki, was not in the house at the time. He had gone to Cairo, Egypt, for medical treatment just before the war started and got stuck there. I spoke to him over the phone. He said that on November 29 at 6.30am a missile strike had flattened their home.

I was in Israel at the time and knew this was during last year’s temporary ceasefire. We’ve asked the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) about this but so far haven’t heard anything back.

After the strike Rafiq and Rafif were brought to the Al-Shifa Hospital for surgery. Zaki sent me his son’s medical report, including photos. “Right leg amputated from knee down, and knee surgery done on same leg. Shoulder needs surgery from being crushed.”

Over the last two weeks the giant Al-Shifa Hospital complex has become the scene of some of the most intense fighting of this war, for the second time. The IDF first moved into the hospital in force back in November because it said it was a Hamas command centre.

At the time, they broadcast images of tunnels under the facility and caches of weapons they said belonged to Hamas.

Over the last few months the IDF has withdrawn the bulk of its forces from the north of the strip. Then, on March 18, the IDF announced “precise operational activities against terrorists” in Al-Shifa for the second time.

According to the IDF, Hamas and the smaller Palestinian Islamic Jihad faction had moved back into the hospital complex. The Israelis say they have killed almost 200 militants in and around the hospital complex over the last two weeks and detained around 500 others.

In other words, Al-Shifa has been an active war zone for a fortnight and somewhere in the mix two siblings, Rafiq and Rafif, have been stranded.

I have been trying to understand what’s happening at Al-Shifa last week from Rafiq and Rafif ’s perspective. I talk to their father most days; he’s in contact with them through a relative still in Gaza.

I periodically get though to medical staff on the ground in the area, patchy networks permitting. So here’s what we know about Rafiq and Rafif ’s situation now.

There are around 100 patients left in Al-Shifa. Rafiq and Rafif are two of nine children still inside. Almost all the patients have been moved to a large tent that the IDF has set up in the hospital grounds.

The clinical buildings are not functioning as a healthcare facility anymore.

The outpatients block is being used as a detention and interrogation centre. Charities like Medical Aid for Palestinians have been working hard to try to get the children evacuated from the hospital complex and brought to (already overcrowded) hospitals further south.

So far, the IDF has not allowed an evacuation to take place.

It’s unclear whether this is because of security, lack of capacity elsewhere or for some other reason. Very limited supplies of food and medicine are getting to Rafiq and Rafif.

Zaki told me on Wednesday that they have been given a tin of beans and a tin of pineapple.

He recounted to me the last agonising conversation he had with his son over the phone from inside the hospital.

“He still thinks, I can help him in some way,” says Zaki.

“He says he’s hungry and in pain. He says: ‘Dad, give me some food to eat. If you can’t come to me, send me some food, I want to eat. I haven’t slept for days. I can’t sleep from the pain.’

“He says: ‘Please, come Dad.’ But what can I do? What can I do as a father?”

With that Zaki breaks down and I just hear sobbing on the other end of the line.

Paraic O’Brien is a foreign affairs correspondent for Channel 4 News

I haven’t slept for days. I can’t sleep from the pain