The scenes of destruction from the hospital were horrific even by the standards of the past 12 days, which have confronted the world with relentless images, first of Israelis slaughtered in their homes and then of Palestinian families buried under rubble from Israel’s retaliatory strikes.

“People came running into the surgery department screaming, ‘Help us, help us, there are people killed and wounded inside the hospital!’” said Dr Fadel Naim, Head of the hospital’s Orthopedic Surgery Department.

“The hospital was full of dead and wounded, dismembered bodies, and dead,” he told Reuters. “We tried to save whoever can be saved but the number was too big for the hospital team to be able to save… We saw them alive but we couldn’t help them and they were martyred.”

“This place created a safe haven for women and children, those who escaped the Israeli bombing,” another doctor at the hospital, Ibrahim Al-Naqa, told Reuters. “We don’t know what the shell is called but we saw the results of it when it targeted children and ripped their bodies into pieces.”