The haunting faces of those children will stay with me forever

By Dan Rivers: ITV News Correspondent

What I witnessed today in the Emergency department of the Kamal Odwan hospital was the most harrowing thing I have ever seen.

• Warning: This report contains distressing images

We’d gone to the hospital at about 3pm to see how that small medical centre had been coping over the past few days.

Shortly after we arrived suddenly activity started to get frenetic in the car park.

We were told there had been a "massacre” after a school was shelled.

It didn't take long for the sickening wail of ambulance sirens to punctuate the still air.

For more than 30 minutes they kept coming. And many were children. Soon the main ER ward was shoulder to shoulder with doctors, hysterical parents and so many casualties I couldn't count them.

Read: ITV News witnesses aftermath of UN school attack in Gaza

Some of the injured children were barely old enough to walk. Some had the most horrendous injuries. I saw doctors peel back the shattered knee-cap of a young girl who can’t have been older than nine - she barely flinched.

There was so much that I couldn't bear to watch. At times I was surrounded on all sides by wailing and the most gruesome scenes imaginable.

Read: Children 'lying in pools of blood' after school attack

This is the true cost of this Gaza conflict. The innocent caught between Hamas fighters who Israel accuses of using civilians as human shields, and the Israeli Defence Force, which is remorseless in its prosecution of this war.

The arguments will rage about whether Hamas was using this UN compound to launch missiles and whether the IDF’s warning to civilians to leave was adequate.

But for now, please set aside the politics and think of those poor children, whose haunting faces will stay with me forever.

Read: Israel neither admits or denies responsibility for attack