Two days ago, a child was brought into Gaza’s largest hospital with burns covering most of his body.

His name is Mohammed.

He is not yet two years old.

Before the war, this sentence would have already been terrible enough. But in Gaza today it is only the beginning of the story.

His mother had been heating water over a small fire inside the family’s tent. This is how nearly every family now lives. There are no kitchens, no electricity, no safe corners where a child can wander without danger. Only fabric walls, dust, smoke, and the daily improvisations required for survival.

She wanted to bathe him.

For a moment, no longer than a heartbeat, she looked away.

Children of that age move with a strange and fearless curiosity. Mohammed came too close to the pot. Perhaps he tried to steady himself on its edge, perhaps he simply reached toward the steam.

The pot tipped.

Boiling water poured over his body.

When he arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital, the doctors recorded what they always record in such moments: third-degree burns over nearly sixty percent of the body.

The skin on the chest and abdomen had peeled away. Parts of the arms and legs had turned white and leathery, the unmistakable sign that the deepest layers of tissue had been destroyed.

The child cried until exhaustion silenced him.

The doctors began treatment.

In ordinary hospitals, burns like these require a constant supply of sterile gauze, burn dressings, pain medication, antibiotics, and careful monitoring for infection. Every hour matters.

But Gaza is no longer an ordinary place.

Later that day, the boy’s father came to our clinic.

He was not asking for money.
He was not asking for food.

He was asking for gauze and dressings.

At first I thought he needed them for home care, or perhaps for another injured family member. But something in his voice suggested otherwise, so I called a colleague working in the burns and plastic surgery department at the hospital.

What he told me was difficult to comprehend, even here.

Every time the medical staff needs dressings for a patient, they must submit a formal request to the central medical warehouse.

Not because this is standard procedure.

Because the supplies are almost gone.

The shortage is so severe that even the most basic medications, simple painkillers such as paracetamol, are not given freely. They are distributed only after written approval, as though each tablet were a rare and precious object.

This is the reality inside Gaza’s hospitals now.

There is another fact that explains how such a situation became possible.

Since the beginning of this year, the Israeli army has not allowed Médecins Sans Frontières to bring medical supplies into their clinics in Gaza.

And so tonight, somewhere inside the hospital wards, lies a child whose body is wrapped in burns.

And somewhere in the city walks a father.

He walks not toward home, not toward sleep, not toward prayer.

He walks through a wounded city searching for bandages so that doctors can treat his son.

In many places, war is counted in numbers: casualties, statistics, reports.

In Gaza it is sometimes measured in something much smaller.

A pot of boiling water.
A burned child.
And a hospital that no longer has bandages.