Amid the tidal wave of human misery swamping Gaza City’s central hospital a horrified Norwegian volunteer doctor found a minute to type a text message on his mobile phone to friends back home.

“We are wading in death, blood, and amputees. Many children. A pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything so terrible. Now we hear tanks. Pass it on, send it around, shout it out. Anything. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We are living in a history book now, all of us.” It was signed Mads Gilbert, one of two Norwegian doctors toiling relentlessly alongside exhausted Palestinian medics.

So far, despite a flurry of diplomatic activity, no one has done anything. As Israel and Hamas fought a bloody battle to the death on Gaza’s tightly packed streets and alleys, there was no slowing of the flow of broken bodies in al-Shifa hospital. To make matters worse, the United Nations said that Gaza was about to run out of food, water and basic medicines in a matter of days.

Israel has said that it is making surgical strikes to cut Hamas out of the Gaza society. It is a brutal surgery, though, with blunt instruments and without anaesthetic. Entire families vanish beneath the rubble of broken homes. With Hamas’s die-hard fighters taking cover among a terrified civilian population, there is nowhere to run.

Bassim Naim, the Hamas Health Minister, ordered Hamas fighters yesterday not to use ambulances to move around after his nephew, Arafat Abed el-Daim, a paramedic, was killed when an Israeli tank shell hit his ambulance. As mourners gathered at a traditional tent to pay their respects to the young man’s family, another Israeli shell struck the area, killing three people and wounding 40, medics said.

“We were sitting in the mourning tent when suddenly they bombed us. We ran to rush the casualties to hospital but they bombed again,” Jabr al-Daim, an uncle, said.

In the al-Shifa mortuary — which is quickly becoming as overpopulated as the tiny territory that it serves — the father of the Samoudi family wept, speechless, over the corpses of his three children, the youngest a baby, the eldest just a few years old.

“They are still digging his wife and his other kids out of the rubble,” a medic said. The family was obliterated in Zaytoun, where fighting has been particularly heavy.

Saber Abu Aisha, whose brother was killed with his two wives and four children when an F16 rocket struck the basement directly beneath his apartment, vented his anger in the mortuary, where grieving relatives kissed their loved ones goodbye on the floors and in freezers. “The Israelis claim they are not killing civilians but that is all they are killing. They are barbarians, and the whole world should do something,” he said.

“We are a family, we have nothing to do with the resistance or this fighting,” his brother, Amr, said. “It is random killing to break the will of the Palestinian people.”

But the killing went on, as Israeli bombers blew up the houses of Hamas military leaders, often destroying nearby buildings.

Later in the day ambulance drivers brought in the body of a pregnant mother and her four children, killed in the Shurjaiyah area. Palestinian medics say that since Israel launched its ground offensive on Saturday night, 28 children and 13 women have been killed. More than 100 children have died since Israel began Operation Cast Lead ten days ago. One bereaved father who had lost 13 relatives in an explosion east of Gaza City pleaded with his dead son to answer him. “Get up, boy, get up. Please get up. I am your dad and I need you.”

Thousands of Gazans have fled their homes to escape the immediate onslaught of the Israeli tanks battling Hamas fighters who refuse to halt the rocket fire that has provoked this campaign. The UN refugee agency has quickly converted its schools into shelters but thousands more are leaving their homes to be nearer to the shops that are still open or to the ever-decreasing number of areas that have a few hours of electricity a day. Travelling across town is a potentially lethal undertaking.

The refugee agency has all but run out of wheat to supply Gaza’s bakeries, while the World Food Programme has stocks but cannot reach the warehouses because of the shelling. People wait in queues for hours to buy a loaf of bread. “I’ve been here for three hours and I will have to wait longer. Maybe a missile will bomb us so we can be rid of such a miserable life,” said Abu Othman, a father of seven, as he queued for bread. He said that his anger at Hamas’s rocket fire had been supplanted by a new rage. “I used to criticise the rockets. Maybe I still do but not like before. Now I want to see buses blown up in Israel,” he said.

Israel and its banks have cut off supplies of cash to Gaza, meaning that people increasingly have no money to buy the meagre supplies available. Maxwell Gaylard, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator, said that a quarter of a million people were without running water. “There is an overall atmosphere of fear,” he said.

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