At Shifa Hospital in Gaza, the war is not over yet

Gauze saves lives, But Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City must ration what little it has, months after the supposed ceasefire.

It is widely believed that muslin and its English name are derived from the word Gaza and the Arabic word meaning blended silk. Khaz. Although this supposed association may be apocryphal, it attests to the blessing given to humanity by a small strip of land on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, rich in textile traditions. Gauze serves as a bandage for wounds, an everyday miracle. Paradoxically, its loose weave enhances its durability, making it able to absorb blood, exudate, pus, and drainage without becoming supersaturated, thus returning these materials to the wound site.

The value of gauze becomes clear during its absence. Bacteria love to sit in pools of bodily fluids. A wound that is not covered with bacteria will become infected. Then “the problem explodes,” says Nahreen Ahmed, a pulmonologist from Philadelphia who lived and worked at Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital complex in the Gaza Strip, from November 25 to December 11, 2025.

The almost complete absence of gauze in the land of its birth apparently means that healthcare providers have no choice but to send patients home without it. These patients do not usually return to a sterile home. More than two years after Israel responded to the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, with military brutality that the International Society of Genocide Scholars found “meets the legal definition of genocide,” patients’ homes are now tents. Winter flooded many tents with dirty water. An infection that begins at the wound site will spread to the bone and require preventable amputation. A similar shortage of antibiotics exacerbates the problem. “It started with gauze,” Ahmed says.

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Although hospitals are supposed to be protected under international law, the Israel Defense Forces included them in the campaign of destruction that introduced the world to the new term “home killing,” or destruction of housing. According to the World Health Organization, only 14 out of 36 hospitals in the Strip are operational. By last summer, the Israeli army had killed more than 1,700 health care workers; It still holds 220 people in detention. When the Israeli government announced in October that its forces would adhere to a US-brokered ceasefire, Palestinians in Gaza, who had survived two years of relentless destruction, were hoping to return to their normal lives. So did a network of foreign health workers, many of whom had previously entered Gaza at great physical risk.

These foreign doctors knew that their Palestinian colleagues faced an enormous task. A real ceasefire would be challenging enough for Gaza’s devastated healthcare infrastructure. For two years, it only had space to handle emergencies caused by military attacks. An actual end to the carnage would overwhelm the remaining doctors with patients seeking care for everything that is not immediately life-threatening, from chronic conditions to secular ailments, all of which exacerbate the devastation in Gaza.

Gauze was supposed to be plentiful. But seven foreign doctors and aid workers who volunteered in Gaza, including four who were there after the ceasefire took effect, described a dire situation in which Israel allows doctors into Gaza but not medical equipment, prompting many to smuggle vital care items into their personal belongings. The reality since October is that the remaining doctors in Gaza have to deal with an influx of patients requiring routine treatment. and A sustained, albeit low, pace of casualties among the IDF, and all of this without vital supplies. Doctors told WIRED that the public health crisis they witnessed looked to them more like a new phase of the genocide than its consequences. During this phase, Israelis no longer needed to shoot to kill Palestinians, although they still did so as well. (In a statement to WIRED, the Israeli occupation authority, known as Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, said it “continues to facilitate the entry of medical equipment and medicines in line with requests from international organizations.”)

“The war is not over yet,” says an international doctor who spoke to WIRED from Shifa and who requested anonymity for fear of Israeli retaliation. “The casualties are not what they used to be. They are isolated incidents, but they still happen.” This occurs most acutely when Israeli soldiers see Palestinians crossing the poorly demarcated “yellow line” into Gaza territory occupied by the IDF. “All the people who get infected, the people who die, it’s all within this arbitrary yellow line.”

Between the announcement of the ceasefire and mid-February, Israel killed more than 600 people, bringing the official death toll from the Palestinian Ministry of Health to more than 72,000 people, which is likely an undercount. While Israel partially reopened the Rafah crossing earlier that month, within two weeks Israel allowed the departure of only 260 people out of more than 18,500 people in urgent need of medical care that was no longer available in Gaza, according to the United Nations. Ominously, during that period, Al Jazeera reported that Israel allowed only 269 people to return to Gaza, raising fears that those who leave will never be allowed to return home.

Palestine is known to provide Israel and its allies with a laboratory for its future weapons, from AI targeting to drones stable enough to fire. Meanwhile, Gaza’s remaining hospitals have descended into a “civil war.” [era] “To help, foreign doctors are smuggling 9-volt batteries, cochlear implants, and Tylenol, putting themselves at risk of being banned from Gaza,” Ahmed said. “Perhaps most importantly, they are smuggling gauze.”

Illustration: Joan Wong; Original photos of Nahrin Ahmed

International medical workers Travel to Gaza began shortly after Israel’s blockade. In order to enter Gaza, doctors, nurses and other aid workers flew to Cairo and traveled across the Sinai Peninsula to the Rafah crossing. The Egyptians allowed Israel to search the trucks, ostensibly to prevent weapons smuggling, a process that greatly slowed the progress of aid. Mark Perlmutter, a North Carolina-based hand surgeon who visited Gaza for the first time in the spring of 2024, recalls seeing lines of 18-wheelers “30 miles long, bumper to bumper,” filled with food — “dead chicken, rotting vegetables” — that were out of work, in keeping with former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s pledge that “no electricity, no food, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza.