Gaza’s Last Functioning Children’s Hospital“My child should be in a safe, clean place, getting proper treatment. But here I am, on the floor, with no place to sit.”We have a commitment to ensuring that our journalism is not locked behind a paywall. But the only way we can sustain this is through the voluntary support of our community of readers. If you are a free subscriber and you support our work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or gifting one to a friend or family member. You can also make a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible donation to support our work. If you do not have the means to support our work financially, you can do your part by sharing our work on social media and by forwarding this email to your network of contacts.  Inside Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City on August 26, 2025. (Screenshot of video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)GAZA CITY—Umm Issa Abu Daf sat on the floor of Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City holding her feverish infant son, Adham. All around her, mothers sat on chairs or on thin mattresses in the hallways, trying to tend to their sick children, many of whom were visibly malnourished or suffering from skin conditions covering their faces and bodies. “The circumstances are difficult, but I have no choice. There's nowhere else but this hospital to get him his treatment,” Umm Issa told Drop Site. Al-Rantisi is the only pediatric hospital in Gaza still functioning as other medical facilities have come under attack by the Israeli military and forced to shut down. Yet children and babies are unable to get proper treatment at Al-Rantisi due to massive overcrowding, severe shortages of medical supplies, and a widening famine as a result of the Israeli blockade.
“We’re also worried about the germs and microbes here as kids are very sensitive. They easily get fevers and get sick. But all praise be to God, what else can we do? I’m supposed to be on a hospital bed, and my child should be in a safe, clean place, getting proper treatment. But here I am, on the floor, with no place to sit,” Umm Issa said. “The children are deprived of everything. No diapers, no formula, no proper treatment. Even food, if I want to feed them anything, there’s nothing. I can barely manage.” Children are particularly vulnerable to Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza, which reached a tipping point this summer with Palestinians dying of hunger every day. A total of 361 Palestinians have died of hunger since the start of the war, 130 of them children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. At least 185 of those starvation deaths have come in August alone. Some 43,000 children under five are now suffering from malnutrition, according to the health ministry, as Israel has severely restricted the amount of food and aid allowed into the enclave. “This is the only hospital still providing pediatric medical care, after several other hospitals—like Al-Durra Hospital, Al-Nasr Hospital, Kamal Adwan Hospital, the Indonesian Hospital, and Beit Hanoun Hospital—have all been put out of service,” Dr. Mohammad Madi, the head of the Pediatrics Department at Al-Rantisi, told Drop Site. “Now only Rantisi Children’s Hospital remains. It is the only hospital providing medical care for children.”  Scenes from inside Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City on August 26, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.) “This has caused a massive overflow and overcrowding of children in our hospital and its departments. The bed capacity in the unit I’m working in at Rantisi Hospital is 30 beds. Unfortunately, we currently have 90 cases in this unit. This means we are operating at 300% capacity, which greatly reduces the quality of care that each child can receive because of the congestion. We know that overcrowding leads to the spread of diseases—so imagine what it means for sick children and the level of overcrowding we have here,” he added. Like other hospitals still functioning in Gaza, Al-Rantisi is suffering from a shortage of supplies and medicine. “For example, in dermatological conditions, we have no ointments or specific medications available at all. It’s very difficult for us,” Dr. Madi said. “A lot of medications are needed for chronic diseases as well. Chronic diseases such as kidney diseases or those needing biological treatments—like the drug MabThera [used to treat certain autoimmune diseases]—are not available to us. We’re forced to use alternatives, and these alternatives simply don’t suffice.” The overcrowding has also led to “severe exhaustion and fatigue” among the medical staff, Dr. Madi said. Nurses, who should be overseeing 6 to 10 patients, find themselves responsible for 25 children in a single ward. “This results in physical exhaustion and psychological stress for the healthcare workers here in Gaza City,” Dr. Madi added. “The medical teams are exhausted. The children are not receiving the level of care they need.” The lack of available medical staff is plainly visible inside Al-Rantisi. Inside one overcrowded room, Doaa Al-Ladawi held her five-month-old son in her arms as her older daughter worked to attach a nebulizer to an oxygen tank herself.
“For the medical staff present, it's only natural that they can't handle this number of patients. From experience, we’ve learned how to handle some of the basics ourselves, because we always find ourselves coming back to this hospital with our children. And, of course, may God give the medical staff strength,” Al-Ladawi told Drop Site. “Here’s a simple example: the nebulizer. Each child should have their own device, since these are contagious viral diseases. But at the hospital, they use the same nebulizer for multiple children. An entire department might only have three nebulizer devices. This increases the spread of disease. There’s no medical equipment, no medicine, and diseases are spreading rapidly.” Humanitarian organizations have warned of a growing epidemic of highly contagious skin infections in Gaza as a result of lack of clean water, poor sanitation and medical care, with children being the worst affected by bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites, including outbreaks of scabies, lice, and Bullous Impetigo. Born in the middle of the genocide, Al-Ladawi’s son has suffered health problems since birth. “He was born weighing 1.5 kilograms”—3.3 pounds, she said. “He stayed in the intensive care unit for 20 days. He had severe pneumonia and fluid in his lungs, caused by the war we are going through. He also suffers from severe malnutrition. Right now, he’s five months old, but he only weighs 4.5 kilograms [9.9 pounds] —the weight of a one-month-old baby. He also has valve enlargement and bladder problems. All of this is because of the war.” According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), one in five babies in Gaza is born prematurely or underweight and one in seven newborns is in need of emergency neonatal care because of severe complications. UNFPA called the famine in Gaza “a possible death sentence” for pregnant and breastfeeding women and their newborns. “For mothers in Gaza, [famine] means being forced to give birth while malnourished, exhausted and at heightened risk of death. It means their babies are born too small, too weak or too early to survive. It means mothers unable to breastfeed because they, too, are starving,” UNFPA said in a statement. “The children who survive will be marked by lasting scars: stunting, developmental delays, weakened immunity, and increased risk of chronic disease in adulthood.” Lara Al-Batran stood next to her ailing daughter, one of the few able to have a hospital bed. Suffering respiratory complications, a plastic breathing tube protruded from her throat. “We rushed her to the hospital as she was in critical condition—a one-way trip, with no return home. They inserted a chest tube for breathing. She stayed in that condition for 50 days, and her situation kept deteriorating, alongside malnutrition,” Al-Batran told Drop Site. “The hospital does whatever it can. But honestly, there are delays, they take a long time with us because of the number of cases they’re dealing with. We’re the ones doing things for our daughter ourselves because of the cases they are dealing with.”
According to the World Health Organization, hospitals in Gaza City are operating at nearly 300% over capacity, struggling to cope with a constant influx of starvation cases and of trauma injuries from Israel’s relentless aerial and ground assault. The death toll since the beginning of the war has now topped 63,600 Palestinians, including over 18,000 children, according to the Gaza health ministry’s official tally, which is widely seen as a vast undercount. Nearly 161,000 have been injured. The 11 hospitals still functioning in Gaza City represent approximately 50% of all in-patient and ICU beds in the Gaza Strip. As Israel moves ahead with its plans to invade, seize control of, and ethnically cleanse Gaza City, the enclave stands to lose half of its hospital bed capacity, according to the WHO, creating even more catastrophic conditions for Palestinians in need of medical care, including the children at Al-Rantisi.
“My daughter is three and a half months old. Since the day she was born, I’ve been running from one hospital to another with her. She has an immune deficiency—her immunity is at zero,” Iman Al-Kafarna told Drop Site as she sat attending to her baby daughter. “There’s nothing available. I came to the hospital just yesterday, and if the doctor hadn’t quickly intervened, I would have lost her. Right now, she’s on oxygen, and she can’t be taken off it at all. Her feeding is very weak. She barely feeds, just a tiny amount…There’s nothing—no nebulizer, no proper treatment, nothing. We’ve left it in the hands of God.” Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.
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