A US vascular surgeon who left Gaza after a stint as a volunteer said nothing had prepared him for the scale of injuries he had faced there, Reuters reports.

Dozens of patients a day. Most of them young. Most facing complicated injuries caused by shrapnel. Most ending up with amputations.

“Vascular surgery is really a disease for older patients and I would say I had never operated on anybody less than 16, and that was the majority of patients that we did this time around,” Shariq Sayeed, from Atlanta, Georgia, told Reuters in Cairo.

“Most were patients 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 years of age. Mostly shrapnel wounds, and that was something I have never dealt with, that was something new.” In his stint at the European Hospital in Gaza, Sayeed said his team would deal with 40-60 patients a day. The vast majority were amputation cases.

“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,” he said.

Around 70 per cent of the surgeries he performed were on injuries caused by shrapnel, the rest mostly from blast injuries and collapsing buildings. according to Reuters.