There was a 6-year-old boy with two holes in his heart, two in his colon and three more in his stomach, Sidhwa said. They repaired the holes and restarted his heart after he went into cardiac arrest.

He, too, died hours later.

“They died because the ICU simply does not have the capacity to care for them,” Sidhwa said.

Ahmed al-Farra, head of the pediatric and obstetrics department, said that was in part because the ICU lacks strong antibiotics.

Sidhwa recalled how he was at Boston Medical Center when the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing happened, killing three people and sending some 260 wounded to area hospitals.

Boston Medical “couldn’t handle this influx of cases” seen at Nasser Hospital, he said.

The staff

Rokafiya marveled at how the hospital staff took care of each other under duress. Workers circulated with water to give sips to doctors and nurses. Cleaners whisked away the bloody clothes, blankets, tissues and medical debris accumulating on the floors.

At the same time, some staff had their own family members killed in the strikes.

Alserr, the Palestinian surgeon, had to go to the morgue to identify the bodies of his wife’s father and brother.

“The only thing I saw was like a packet of meat and bones, melted and fractured,” he said in a voice message, without giving details on the circumstances their deaths.

Another staffer lost his wife and kids. An anesthesiologist -- whose mother and 21 other relatives were killed earlier in the war -- later learned his father, his brother and a cousin were killed, Haj-Hassan said.

Aftermath

Around 85 people died at Nasser Hospital on Tuesday, including around 40 children from ages 1 to 17, al-Farra said.

Strikes continued throughout the week, killing several dozen more people. At least six prominent Hamas figures were among those killed Tuesday.

Israel says it will keep targeting Hamas, demanding it release more hostages, even though Israel has ignored ceasefire requirements for it to first negotiate a long-term end to the war. Israel says it does not target civilians and blames Hamas for their deaths because it operates among the population.

With Tuesday’s bombardment, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also secured the return to his government of a right-wing party that had demanded a resumption of the war, solidifying his coalition ahead of a crucial budget vote that could have brought him down.

Haj-Hassan keeps checking in on children in Nasser’s ICU. The girl with shrapnel in her brain still can’t move her right side. Her mother came to see her, limping from her own wounds, and told Haj-Hassan that the little girl’s sisters had been killed.

“I cannot process or comprehend the scale of mass killing and massacre of families in their sleep that we are seeing here,” Haj-Hassan said. “This can’t be the world we’re living in.”

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