On Tuesday, June 17, the staff at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, experienced a mass casualty event that began at around 9:00 am in the morning and didn’t stop until nearly 6 in the afternoon. It wasn’t one incident. It was a continuous flood of broken, bleeding, dying human beings.

By the end of the day, we had seen over 400 patients. Around 250 were critically injured. Ninety died in the resuscitation room, many on the floor.

I’m a doctor and I was in Gaza as a volunteer with an organization called Rahma Worldwide. Before Gaza, I had never worked a true mass casualty. The only ones I’d ever experienced were at Nasser itself in the days leading up to this one, trauma surges that already felt unbearable. But this was different. This was so much more. This wasn’t a surge. This was a human tide.

To put it into perspective, on the television show The Pitt, the fictional “never-ending” mass casualty scene featured 112 patients. We saw nearly four times that number in a single afternoon. And every one of them was real. Every injury was real. Every death was real.

It wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of war. It was the logical outcome of a system that has decided some lives are worth less than others.

Moreover, these weren’t random wartime injuries. This was the result of deliberate, targeted violence. People were shot while waiting for food at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution points. Tanks opened fire on crowds. Families just trying to survive were torn apart by weapons never meant for civilians. Some of the bodies came to us in pieces. Many had no names.

Inside Nasser’s emergency department, the conditions were beyond description. Patients were laid on top of each other, not because of neglect or lack of care, but because there was simply no space left. The floor became our only option. Blood from multiple patients pooled across the tile, thick and dark, mixing with dust and sand and bits of shrapnel. I remember crouching over one patient while reaching to clamp another’s bleeding artery. There was nowhere to move without stepping in blood.

At one point, I swung around quickly trying not to slip, and my elbow struck one of the nurses directly in the face. She took two........

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