Rafah, Gaza CNN –
20-month-old Amir Taha lies silently on the bed – his fluffy hair sticking up, his baby-soft skin bruised by a rough, jagged wound on his forehead. Violet spots swell around one of his large brown eyes.
Now an orphan, his aunt says, his parents and two of his siblings were killed in an Israeli attack – an attack in the devastating war against Hamas in Gaza that Israel began after murderous cross-border raids by militants Attack on Israeli civilians on October 7th.
According to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry, Amir's loss adds to the overwhelming toll in the tiny area of Gaza, where more than 18,000 people have been killed.
But he doesn't know that yet, his aunt Nehaia Al-Qadra told CNN. He's too young to understand.
“They found Amir lying on the street in his mother’s arms,” Al-Qadra said. “His sister died, his brother died, his uncle and his other sister are injured in the hospital… Here we are, he doesn't have a mother or a father or an older sister or an older brother. Now it’s just the two of us and God.”
Amir wants his father. “Yesterday he saw a nurse who looked like his father and he kept screaming 'Dad!' Father! Dad!'” Al-Qadra said. When she has to calm him down, she shows the toddler a video of his father.
Amir will recover from his physical wounds through the treatment he is now receiving at a field hospital set up by the UAE government in Rafah, southern Gaza.
With local hospitals overwhelmed with the sick and injured seeking help from damaged or destroyed facilities, surgery in the UAE is a rare functioning, well-equipped and well-staffed place that can provide assistance in the most serious cases.
CNN was able to see their work during a brief visit this week, making it the first Western media outlet to gain access to the southern Gaza Strip for independent reporting. Israel and Egypt have previously made it nearly impossible for international journalists to witness first-hand the toll on the civilian population. The Israeli military has taken American media, including CNN, on short escorted trips to the northern Gaza Strip.
In the streets littered with trash and debris from destroyed buildings, we see the horror of modern warfare. Despite the heavy bombardment, people outside are walking around like zombies – perhaps trying to figure out their lives, perhaps with nothing else to do.
Most shops are closed, But there is a long line in front of a bakery. Recent rain has left standing water and the December cold is setting in.
In another room of the field hospital, eight-year-old Jinan Sahar Mughari is immobilized in a full-body cast. “They bombed the house in front of us and then our home,” she told CNN. “I was sitting next to my grandfather, and my grandfather was holding me, and my uncle was fine, so he was the one who got us out.”
Jinan's skull and leg were fractured in the bombing, said her mother, Hiba Mohammed Mughari, who was not at home at the time of the attack.
“I went to the hospital to look for her… I came here and found her here.” She encourages her child to talk while she falls silent herself. Tears stream down her face as she cries quietly.
According to doctors at the UAE Field Hospital, they find it particularly difficult to see and treat the innocent, child victims of war, but they are too busy to pay attention to them.
“It's something that changes the heart,” said Dr. Ahmed Almazrouei on seeing injured children.
His colleague, the hospital's medical director, Dr. Abdallah Al-Naqbi, added: “These are obviously civilians. You don't deserve to lose [a] Limbs while sitting with family,” he said.
The hospital was quickly built in a football stadium, but its staff and state-of-the-art equipment make its 150 beds highly desirable. “People from here are asking us to limit our service to the seriously injured because they are the ones in need. And they can’t wait,” Al-Naqbi said.
The volunteer paramedics are on call around the clock and work long hours. “Yesterday we started (at) three in the morning. Four injuries. No amputations, but burns. Burns are worse than amputations,” Al-Naqbi said. “And we stayed up until late afternoon.”
Dealing with trauma victims is the focus of the medics' work on the mission called “Operation Gallant Knight 3.” But they also see the consequences of the collapse of local health systems and poor, overcrowded conditions that are allowing infectious diseases and other problems to run rampant in communities.
“Someone came out with a head injury and worms from the wound,” Al-Naqbi said. “We cannot explain what environment they were exposed to [to], and medically I can't explain how messy this situation was. Even our surgeon was shocked.”
There is almost peace inside the hospital, the organized staff efficiently care for their patients, in the wards, in the intensive care unit and in the operating rooms. But war is omnipresent.
Within 15 minutes of CNN's arrival, the loud bang of an airstrike sounds nearby. The doctors don't even bat an eyelid. “This is real life,” Al-Naqbi said, adding that they heard at least 20 strikes a day. “I think we’ve gotten used to it.”
In their refuge, they don't know what was hit – a Hamas target or a civilian home or business. But they soon learn that there are victims they have to treat.
“They just called us, they are going to send us two amputee young men from the bombing,” Al-Naqbi said, rushing to the “red area” where they are accepting new trauma patients.
“The most of us [are] “Experienced emergency doctors, intensive care consultants,” he later said of the team’s experience at home. “We have seen trauma, but it will come through our EMS (emergency medicine) service, … clean, organized, with a proper medical record.”
The notes handed by the paramedics who rolled a man and a 13-year-old boy with missing limbs are smeared with blood.
Both patients are critically injured and teams are working quickly to replace the bandages that serve as improvised tourniquets. “Not a single patient came to me with a proper tourniquet,” Al-Naqbi said, explaining that proper hemostasis is crucial to saving lives.
Because the patients come from the devastated Gaza Strip, which we saw on our 4.5 kilometer drive from the Egyptian border to the hospital and back.
According to the Israeli military, it has hit more than 22,000 targets in Gaza – an enclave just about 25 miles long and 11 miles wide – since October 7, surpassing anything seen in modern warfare in terms of intensity and violence sees, by far.
Nearly all of Gaza's more than two million residents have been forced from their homes, according to the World Health Organization, as Israel targets first the north and then the south of the territory in its operations to destroy Hamas and capture more than 100 still-suspected hostages took hold of militants.
As more nations called for a ceasefire, a young patient in the Emirati field hospital wondered bitterly whether anyone was really worried enough.
Before the war, 20-year-old Lama Ali Hassan Alloush was studying engineering at university and preparing for her sister's wedding. Her family followed Israeli military orders to leave their home in the north and fled south. But the house where they sought shelter was hit by a strike. Now she is in the hospital and her right leg has been amputated.
“The world doesn’t listen to us,” she said. “No one cares about us, we have been dying as a result of the bombing for over 60 days and no one has done anything.”