Teenager volunteers at hospital as the war rages

GAZA STRIP (Reuters): Twelve-year old-Palestinian Zakaria Sarsak walks determinedly through a sea of people at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza. But he’s not there for treatment, he’s working as a volunteer, helping the medics by filling syringes and moving stretchers.

He decided he wanted to help those wounded in the Israeli bombardment that displaced him and his family from their home, and now spends much of his time at the hospital.

“I help bring injured people to Al-Aqsa Hospital. We also bring martyrs to the morgue. I go with the ambulance to bring casualties,” Sarsak said.

He makes his way through the corridors, wearing a blue fleece and a pair of protective gloves, and takes on tasks such as moving patients and helping with taking blood pressure readings.

“When we go to get injured people after attacks, I feel sad for children. We bring all injured people to Al-Aqsa Hospital,”

he said.

The hospital is one of the few still tending to patients who have survived the Israeli airstrikes six months after Hamas attacked Israel.

With Gaza in ruins, most of the 2.3 million population have been forced from their homes and now depend on aid for survival, a bitter humiliation during Ramadan.

“We had some hopes before Ramadan, but that hope vanished the night before the fasting month began,” said 33-year-old Um Nasser Dahman, now living with her family of five in a tent camp in the southern city of Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population is now sheltering.

“We used to be well enough off before the war, but we’ve become dependent on what limited aid there is and our relatives,” she said via messaging.

Even before the attack on the convoy, Israel had been isolated diplomatically, with the UN General Assembly calling repeatedly for humanitarian ceasefires, and under heavy pressure to step up aid deliveries in Gaza, where aid groups say famine is imminent.