GoKawiilGauze saves lives, but Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City must ration what little it has, months into a supposed ceasefire.
Both gauze and its English name are widely thought to derive from Gaza and the Arabic word for blended silk, khazz. While perhaps apocryphal, the presumed connection testifies to the bounty that the small strip of land at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, rich in weaving traditions, has provided humanity. As a wound dressing, gauze is an everyday miracle. Its loose weave ironically strengthens its durability, making it able to absorb blood, discharge, pus, and drainage without becoming oversaturated and thereby returning such material to a wound site.
Gauze’s value becomes evident during its absence. Bacteria like to sit in pools of bodily fluid. An undressed wound beset by bacteria will become infected. Then “the problem explodes,” says Nahreen Ahmed, a pulmonary specialist from Philadelphia who lived and worked at Al-Shifa, the largest hospital complex in the Gaza Strip, from November 25 to December 11, 2025.
The near-absence of gauze in the land of its apparent birth means that health care providers have no choice but to send patients home without it. Those patients do not typically return to a sterile home. More than two years after Israel responded to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, massacre with a military ferocity that the International Association of Genocide Scholars found to “meet the legal definition of genocide,” the patients’ homes are tents. The winter flooded many tents with filthy water. Infections that begin at the wound site will spread to the bone and require a preventable amputation. A similar shortage of antibiotics compounds the problem. “It started with gauze,” Ahmed reflects.
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Although hospitals are supposed to be protected under international law, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) included them in a campaign of devastation that familiarized the world with the neologism “domicide,” or the destruction of residences. According to the World Health Organization, only 14 of the strip’s 36 hospitals are functioning. By last summer, the Israeli military had killed more than 1,700 health care workers; it still holds 220 in detention. When the Israeli government announced in October that its forces would abide by a US-brokered ceasefire, Palestinians in Gaza who had survived two years of unrelenting devastation hoped for a return to normalcy. So did a network of foreign health workers, many of whom had previously entered Gaza at extreme physical risk.
Those foreign doctors knew their Palestinian colleagues faced an enormous task. A genuine ceasefire would be challenging enough for Gaza’s decimated health care infrastructure. For two years, it only had space to address emergencies caused by military attacks. An actual end to the slaughter would overwhelm the remaining doctors with patients seeking care for everything not immediately life-threatening, from chronic conditions to mundane illness, all of which the devastation of Gaza exacerbates.
Gauze was supposed to be abundant. But seven foreign doctors and aid workers who volunteered in Gaza, including four who were there after the ceasefire was meant to have taken effect, described a perverse situation in which Israel permits doctors into Gaza but not medical equipment, prompting several to smuggle vital implements of care into their personal belongings. And the reality since October is that Gaza’s remaining doctors must deal with both an influx of patients needing routine treatment and a continuing, if reduced, pace of casualties from the IDF, and do it all without crucial supplies. Doctors told WIRED the public-health crisis they witnessed looked to them more like a new phase of the genocide than its aftermath. During this phase, the Israelis no longer need to open fire to kill Palestinians, though they still do that, too. (In a statement to WIRED, the Israeli occupation authority, known as the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, said it “continues to facilitate the entry of medical equipment and medicines in line with requests from international organizations.”)