He lost a son and subsequently described life in a hospital in Gaza, where he sought shelter

For weeks, Mustafa Abutaha wandered the halls of one of Gaza's few functioning hospitals, filling his days volunteering to do whatever was necessary: ​​sweeping floors, baking bread, dressing injured patients, feeding dates or tomato sandwiches to those who couldn't feed themselves . . Anything to avoid thinking about his son Mohammed.

When the Israeli army attacked the southern town of Khan Younis in early December and fighting with Hamas intensified, his family's home was hit while he was visiting a neighbor, Mr. Abutaha said. His brother was murdered. Three of his five children were injured. And Mohammed, 18, was found motionless in a stairwell.

“If someone sends me their picture, I just shout at them and say, 'Please don't remind me of my son. He's already dead. Please, I don't want to reminisce,” Mr Abutaha said. “Forgetfulness, forgetfulness is a blessing from God.”

Shortly after the strike, he said, he and his family fled to the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, at the time one of the last facilities in the Gaza Strip still providing medical care and shelter to the displaced. Now his activities are in jeopardy.

This week, Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of the thousands of civilians hiding in Nasser, and on Thursday they launched an attack on what they said were Hamas activities at the hospital. Hundreds of patients, staff and displaced Palestinians had already fled, including Mr Abutaha, although many remained behind.

In early December, Mr. Abutaha, an English professor, sent dozens of voice and video messages to The New York Times, providing unusually direct insight into the struggle for survival at a controversial hospital in Gaza.

“Our situation is unbearable,” he said in one of the messages. “We can't hold on anymore.”

The war in Gaza has gradually dismantled Mr. Abutaha's life, as it has for so many others in the territory of some 2.2 million Palestinians.

His university was closed by the fighting and it is unclear whether it will ever reopen. His wife managed to take his surviving children to Egypt for medical treatment, but it is not clear whether they will make a full recovery, he said. (His fifth and eldest child left the country before the war). He doesn't know when he will see them again. He has tried to rejoin them, he says, but Israel and Egypt have made it extremely difficult to leave.

With nowhere to go after the attack on his home, 47-year-old Abutaha volunteered at the hospital, where he used the relatively reliable internet — a rarity in Gaza — to communicate with The Times. He connected reporters with hospital staff and patients, sharing videos, voice memos and texts showing the grim conditions.

Doctors are struggling with scarce supplies. Displaced people sleep in corridors. Hunger gnawed as food became scarce. Victims pour into hospital wards.

The war began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, which Israeli officials said killed about 1,200 people. Israel responded with heavy bombing of Gaza and a ground invasion that devastated the small coastal enclave, killing an estimated 28,000 people, displacing most of the population and causing a humanitarian catastrophe.

Israel has accused Hamas, which took control of Gaza in 2007, of using hospitals for its military operations, turning them, the Israelis claim, into legitimate military targets. The Israelis have ordered evacuations of a number of hospitals, and Israeli soldiers have raided some of them.

Hamas and hospital administrators have previously denied the Israeli claims. Classified Israeli intelligence, reviewed by The Times, suggests that Hamas operated under a major hospital, Al-Shifa, but it does not prove Israel's early claim that there was a command center there.

In his many messages from Nasser Hospital, Mr. Abutaha condemned Israel for its attack on Gaza.

But in conversations with The Times in recent months, he also criticized Hamas, sentiments rarely expressed publicly during the Gaza war, partly out of fear of retaliation by the militant group. During the 2014 Gaza war, Mr. Abutaha wrote a handful of online posts that portrayed Hamas in a positive light, but now suggested that the Oct. 7 attack had unnecessarily endangered Palestinians. And he said he was against violence, including that attack.

“Many people curse Hamas, curse its leaders,” he said in a voice message, speaking English. “Hamas started the war,” but we are “the victims of this war.”

Mr. Abutaha's video messages showed more people each day taking shelter in the hospital, hanging laundry in the windows, sleeping in the hallways and hanging up sheets for a bit of privacy. In the orthopedic ward, displaced Gazans struggled to find space in a complex that was never intended to house so many people.

Because he did not have enough to eat, one day Mr. Abutaha noticed that he could see his collarbones for the first time in years.

“Do you see the bones?” he said in one video.

When he couldn't find coffee, he poured hot water over burnt toast or crushed date stones just to drink some black liquid.

As aid convoys reached the area, people lined up for whatever they could grab, said Haneen Abu Tiba, 27, one of the people sheltering in the hospital whom The Times contacted through Mr Abutaha.

At times, chaos broke out and people pushed and shoved, she said, while Hamas security forces did little to maintain order. She said she had fled airstrikes in her neighborhood with her mother and sisters.

In January, Mr Abutaha and his cousin received an aid package and shared a video of the contents of the box: two kilos of dates, ten cans of beans, two kilos of sugar and five kilos of rice.

It seemed like a reward at a time when hunger is so widespread.

Mr Abutaha told how he had saved for years to build his four-storey house in Khan Younis and how he had hosted Westerners who had come to Gaza on humanitarian missions.

Now the house is a shell of rubble and twisted metal, he said.

On the day that changed the family's lives forever, Mr. Abutaha's wife, Reem, had left to run an errand just before their home was hit, she said in an interview. In the chaos it was not clear where Mohammed's body had been taken.

Mrs. Abutaha barely made it to the cemetery in time when she saw neighbors burying him, she said.

At the hospital, a close friend of Mr. Abutaha, Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, who headed Nasser's pediatric ward, treated those injured during the strike.

“This was the worst day of my life,” said Dr. al-Farra in an interview. “The ER was full of blood and injured children and injured patients, and there weren't enough doctors to help them.”

Mr. Abutaha's daughter, Leyan, 14, had a brain injury that left her in a coma for a month and a half, her mother said. Another son, Abdul Aziz, 16, suffered a fractured skull, broken jaw and crushed foot. Yamen, 6, had a thigh wound and burns.

Every time Mr. Abutaha speaks to his wife in Egypt, she begs him to come and help her care for their children in the unknown land. He tells her he's trying.

Last month, Abutaha, fearing for his safety as the Israeli army approached the hospital, fled with a handful of doctors. He now lives in a tent in al-Mawasi, an area with little infrastructure that has become overpopulated by displaced Gazans.

He said he developed a bad cough, and since he had little water or soap to bathe, he went swimming in the sea and rubbed his body with sand to get clean.

Mr. Abutaha still tries to stay busy, he said, but there isn't much to do, so the memories keep coming back.

“I can't forget it,” he said.

He deleted the photos of his dead son from his phone.

Video production by Axel Boada.