Atlanta, May 1 (RHC)-- U.S. doctors who had worked at Gaza hospitals say they were shocked and speechless at the unprecedented scale of injuries and destruction they saw in the besieged Palestinian territory.

Vascular surgeon Shariq Sayeed, from Atlanta, Georgia, left Gaza for Cairo after he finished a stint of volunteer work at the European Hospital in Gaza.  He said on Wednesday that his team treated 40 to 60 patients a day, most of them young people with shrapnel injuries he had never seen before.

“Most were patients 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 years of age,” he said. “Mostly shrapnel wounds, and that was something I have never dealt with, that was something new."  "And unfortunately there is a very high incidence of infection as well so once you have an amputation that doesn't heal, you end of getting a higher amputation.”

Imail Mehr, an anesthesiologist from New York, who led the Gaza mission, said the volunteer medics were "speechless at what we saw" when they arrived in April in southern Gaza.

Mehr, chairman of IMANA Medical Relief, who has been to Gaza several times in the past said he could not imagine what he saw this time.  "Truly everywhere I saw was destruction in Khan Younis, not a single building standing."

He said health facilities lacked medical supplies, equipment, staff, and power supplies, almost seven months into Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion in the besieged territory.

Mehr said his biggest fear now is an assault into the southern city of Rafah, where half of Gaza's 2.3 million people have sought shelter.  “I hope and I pray that Rafah is not attacked.”

"The health system will not be able to take care of that.  It will be a complete catastrophe."

Israel had designated Rafah a “safe zone,” but in recent months it has been threatening a full-scale military aggression, leaving the people sheltering there terrified with nowhere to go.

The head of the regime Benjamin Netanyah, who is under domestic and international pressure to end the war in Gaza, said Tuesday that the military will  launch a ground offensive in Rafah, “with or without a deal [with Hamas], in order to achieve total victory.”

The bloody military campaign launched by the regime on October 7th has so far killed more than 34,500 Palestinians across Gaza, one of the most densely-populated territories on Earth.