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 (image courtesy of snugglemuffin)

Saul Singer:

By taking on Hamas, Israelis deserve the gratitude of decent people everywhere.

I’ll pass on that gratitude thing:

Inside Shifa Hospital on Monday, its doctors struggled to cope. Imad Majdalawi had handled 20 operations in 24 hours. In virtually every case, he had to fix broken bones, treat burns and cuts, and stop bleeding. "The worse thing I saw was the burns," he said.

In one case, he wanted to send a patient who lost one of his eyes in an Israeli bombing to an eye hospital. But his request was turned down: the generator for the surgical theater in the hospital was needed to fuel the emergency room.

On Monday, he was treating Ghadeer, a 14-year-old girl whose hands were covered in gauze. Blood seeped through it. She was crying and shaking. Her mother and four brothers had been killed an airstrike. She didn’t know this.

"I am cold. I can’t move," Ghadeer moaned.

Majdalawi soothed her. "Don’t worry Ghadeer. Everything will be fine."

But there was no anesthesia or even the appropriate scissors and thread to help Ghadeer. "We are leaving patients in pain," Majdalawi said.

A neurosurgeon, Rami al-Sousi, was engaged in a delicate operation to pull shrapnel from 5-year-old Salim al-Ar’s head. The boy would survive. Sousi has two small children but he hasn’t seen much of them in the past three days. Ninety percent of the patients he treated were civilians, he said.

The eternal game of ‘nobody wins’ staggers onward.