LONDON – At first, health workers thought Majd Alshaghnobi had been killed.

He was waiting to collect flour, like so many children in northern Gaza, when Israeli shrapnel tore through his face at the Kuwait Roundabout in February 2024, inflicting a blast injury on his jaw and lower mouth.

“Someone had dragged me and took me to safety,” the 15-year-old boy told CNN on Monday. “I was put in the morgue refrigerator, because they thought I was dead. But then I moved my hand and alerted them to the fact that I was alive.”

Palestinian doctors whisked him away before sewing up his wounds in a kitchen because there were not enough operating rooms at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, Gaza City – in a fraught scene of impossible triage and medical improvisation replicated across the strip. Eventually, Majd trekked alone through razed neighborhoods and military checkpoints, before reuniting with his mother in the southern city of Khan Younis.

“It was difficult,” Majd recalled. “I was very scared because the Israelis were there.”

In July, he became the third child from Gaza to enter the United Kingdom in a private medical evacuation facilitated by the NGO Project Pure Hope, with support from the non-profit Gaza Kinder Relief. Five months prior, Majd had left the enclave through Egypt with his mother, Islam Felfel, his younger brother, Nader, 10, and his sister, Rahaf, 7, during a ceasefire. The UK government did not fund his evacuation, nor his treatment.

On Tuesday, Majd underwent facial reconstruction surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital, London, days after the British government announced a new scheme to facilitate the safe arrival of severely ill Gazan children in the country – with the first group entering the UK in mid-September.

But relief and medical workers say it is not enough – warning that Majd’s ordeal offers a rare insight into the horrors of the Israeli campaign for children in Gaza. More than 50,000 children have been killed or injured, according to the UN’s children’s agency. Gaza is home to the highest number of child amputees per capita worldwide, the head of the UN’s agency for Palestine refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, said on Wednesday.

Nearly two years of bombing and border restrictions following the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, have eviscerated the health system and throttled patients’ access to care. More than 700 people have died waiting for medical evacuation from Gaza, including nearly 140 children, the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) said on September 10.

Now, as more Western powers move to recognize Palestinian statehood, and international condemnation grows over the Israeli offensive – rights advocates are demanding allies act to withdraw military support from Israel and address the crippling humanitarian siege, including through medical evacuations from Gaza.

Between October 2023 and July this year, 7,642 patients, including 5,303 children, were evacuated from the enclave, according to the medical NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF). The UK received just 0.03% of those patients, MSF said.

“There’s no shortage of the kind of challenges that we’re seeing in Gaza. So many children have lost limbs, have lost the ability to eat,” Omar Din, the co-founder of Project Pure Hope, told CNN on Monday.

“With all the will in the world, we should do more,” said Din. “There’s recognition that these are people who have an inalienable right to being treated like any other human being, to receiving health care.”

After more than 700 days of war in Gaza, parents, doctors and UN agencies say Palestinian children face worsening hunger, terror, bloodshed and heavy bombardment. Some “wish to die to join their parents in heaven,” according to MSF.

Even though Majd is receiving expert graft and reconstruction surgery that will give him better use of his mouth, his care represents a “drop in the ocean” compared to the scale of need, according to Dr. Owase Jeelani, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

“Hopefully, if and when we can give him the kind of result that we’re hoping for, this will pave the way for more children to come,” Jeelani told CNN.

Israel has targeted 38 hospitals in Gaza since October 7, 2023, according to Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, the director general of the Ministry of Health in the enclave. At least 1,723 health workers have been killed, he said on Tuesday. Israel has for years claimed that Hamas fighters are sheltering in hospitals and other civilian places to avoid Israeli attacks. Hamas has repeatedly rejected the allegations.

An independent UN inquiry concluded last week that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza through a multi-pronged campaign – including by targeting children and the health care system. Israel has firmly denied accusations of genocide.

Hospitals in Gaza symbolize “life itself in the face of siege and war,” Eyad Amawi, a Palestinian relief worker displaced in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza, told CNN on Thursday.

“Destroying these beacons of hope is intended first and foremost to break the will of society, to push people into despair, and to rob them of their ability to endure,” he added.

Footage filmed by a CNN team at Great Ormond Street Hospital ahead of the surgery shows Majd laying inside a small ward wearing cream pyjamas with the logo of the video game “Minecraft.” His brown eyes dart from one side of the room to another, a faint smile peeking out from behind a blue surgical mask.

“My wish is for Gaza to return to what it once was, for everybody to get back together,” he told CNN. “I would hope to be like all other children.”

The murmur of medical machines in London is a far cry from the grinding buzz of Israeli drones in northern Gaza – where his two younger brothers, Muhammad, 14, and Yusuf, 12, are displaced.

‘If I had known the war would resume, I would not have left them behind,” Felfel, their mother, told CNN on Monday. “When I talk to them, they say, ‘You left us here. You took the boy that you love and left us, and we could die at any moment.’”

The current Israeli military offensive in Gaza City – which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says is targeting what he calls Hamas’ “remaining strongholds” – has put three hospitals out of service, Dr. Al-Bursh said on X on Tuesday. CNN has contacted the Israel Defense Forces for comment. More than 320,000 people have been forced to move southwards from the city, Gaza’s largest, since mid-August, according to the UN.

But Felfel told CNN her two sons, who are with their father, cannot afford the $3,000 fee to move from north to south. “Their home is gone. Their safe places are gone. They are now on the street,” she said. “Being away from them is tearing my heart apart.” – CNN