El Arish, Egypt:
On a French warship off the Egyptian coast, wounded Palestinians receive health care that has become largely inaccessible in the besieged Gaza Strip after months of war.
Sitting in a wheelchair, Abdulrahman Iyad wrings his hands in his lap and rests them gently next to the pins protruding from his thighs.
He scrolls through his phone and looks at photos of his family, all killed in the explosion that ripped apart his own face.
“I flew through the air and hit the wall of our neighbor's house, my leg was trapped under the collapsed ceiling,” Iyad told AFP on the French helicopter carrier Dixmude, which is used as a hospital to treat injured Palestinians. citizens.
“When I woke up in the hospital, my uncles told me they had visited me, but I couldn't remember anything.”
Iyad's house, like much of the Palestinian territory where Israel has been waging war against Hamas militants since early October, has been reduced to rubble.
The fighting began on October 7, when the Palestinian armed group Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip.
The attack resulted in the deaths of about 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
Israel responded with a military offensive that has killed at least 25,105 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.
Search and rescue missions have become virtually impossible in the area, meaning thousands of people are trapped and presumed dead under the rubble, doctors say.
The healthcare system has almost completely collapsed, with hospitals overwhelmed and doctors having to treat a growing number of victims with dwindling resources.
'Shocked' by injured civilians
The French warship began treating patients in November off the coast of El-Arish port, 50 kilometers west of Egypt's border with Gaza.
In the hull of the ship, a handful of patients and their families gathered around a table and listlessly played a card game.
Among them was Nesma Abu Gayad, a bright-eyed Palestinian who was seriously injured when her house was shelled.
“I was treated in a few hospitals in Gaza before arriving in Egypt,” she told AFP, the stump of her right foot hovering above the ground from her wheelchair.
“The next step will be a prosthesis, but I have to get a referral and travel to get it abroad.”
The French Navy doctor, who serves aboard the Dixmude and gave only her first name, said the warship has received 120 patients so far, all serious cases requiring long periods of hospitalization.
That is just a small minority of the more than 62,000 people injured in Gaza, according to the territory's health ministry.
Another French doctor at Dixmude, Salle, said she was shocked by the injuries she encountered.
“I'm in the army, so I treat the war wounds of our French and Allied soldiers,” she said.
“But what shocked me was that I found them on civilians.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)