There is little Gaza’s doctors can do to alleviate the pain that three-year-old Suhaib Khuzaiq still feels from a shrapnel injury that caused his leg to be amputated above the knee in December.

“He is in pain and in need of painkillers and a prosthetic limb that is only available outside Gaza”, his father Ali Khuzaiq, 31, told AFP from Gaza City’s Al-Ahli hospital where Suhaib receives treatment.

On December 6, an Israeli air strike on their neighbourhood of Tal Al-Hawa, southwest of Gaza City, injured Suhaib and destroyed their home, displacing the family who are now staying with relatives, Khuzaiq said.

The offensive and Israel’s blockade have caused a shortage of medicines and destroyed much of Gaza’s medical capacity.

As a result, amputations have become a key way of handling injuries that in other circumstances might have been treated differently, causing their number to soar further.

Citing data from Unicef, the chief of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Wednesday that in Gaza “every day 10 children… are losing one leg or two legs on average,” adding that it meant “around 2,000 children” had lost legs since the start of the offensive.

Unicef’s spokesman Jonathan Crickx later told AFP that difficulties in gathering data in a conflict zone meant the figures were only “estimates” that would take time to verify, but that the agency “has met many children who have lost limbs”.