Zakaria is 11 years old and lives in Gaza. It is believed that he saw thousands of bodies since the war began.

But in an era in which children are usually found in the semester, Zakaria volunteers in one of the few Gaza Hospitals – Al -Aqsa.

As a succession of ambulances that transport the victims of the war between Israel and Hamas, they are heading outside the facility in the central city of Deir Pala, Zakaria cleansing a road through the crowd to recover the newly arrived patients and pushed them inside for treatment.

Moments later, he runs through the hospital corridors with a stretcher and later carries a small child inside to the emergency room.

Many of his friends have been killed in school since the conflict and comment on the hospital began means Zakaria witnesses colliding with the viewer. He says that once, after an Israeli strike, he saw a boy in front of him burning to death in the fire.

“I must see at least 5,000 bodies. I saw them with my eyes,” he says to our photographer.

Zakaria is one of the children and youth we spent nine months in following our BBC documentary: How do we survive from the War region.

It is a movie in which I and my colleagues have participated in London, because Israel has not allowed international journalists to enter the Gaza Strip independently since the beginning of the war 16 months ago.

To collect footage and interviews, we used two photographers living in Gaza – Al -Fayumi and Ibrahim Abu Esiba – communicating with them regularly using messaging applications, internet calls and mobile phone networks.

I wanted and Youssef to make this documentary to show what daily life is for Gazan people who are trying to survive in the horrors of this conflict as it reveals. We finished filming a few weeks ago, on the day the current ceasefire began.

We focused on three children and a young woman with newborns because they are innocent in this war, which came to a fragile stopping on January 19 when a The launch deals between Hamas and Israel are valid.

More than 4,200 people were killed in Gaza during the Israeli attack, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health. Military action followed the attacks on southern Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken.

To a large extent, we photographed us in an area of ​​south and central Gaza, which was allocated by the Israeli army as a “humanitarian area”, where the Palestinians were asked to go for their safety. Despite its appointment, the same area was hit nearly 100 times between May 2024 and January this year, According to the analysis by the BBC verification. The Israeli Defense Forces said they were targeting Hamas fighters who were working there.

We wanted to know how children found food, decided to sleep and how they occupied themselves while trying to survive.

Abdullah, 13, tells the movie. He speaks excellent English after joining the British School in Gaza before the war and does everything in his power to continue his education.

Renad, 10 -year -old, is a cooking on Tiktok with the help of her older sister. They make many types of dishes, although the war means that they cannot get the right ingredients, and they have more than a million followers.

We also followed Rana, 24, who gave birth to a premature girl. He has been displaced three times and lives near the hospital with her two sons and parents.

Some film is also looking at how the paramedics fought to keep people alive in Al -Aqsa Hospital, which was Described in January 2024 by British doctors As the only hospital works in central Gaza.

This is where we found Zakaria.

Every person working in the hospital knows the boy. Of course, he is still a child and not a qualified doctor, but he always wanders, waiting for an opportunity to help someone, hoping that he will receive some food or money in return.

Sometimes, it helps in carrying equipment for local journalists, and sometimes clicks with people injury or die.

When there is a quiet moment, it helps clean blood and dirt from ambulances.

There is no school to go to and is the only person in his family to make any money. He says, he does not stay with them because they have a little food or water, and instead he lives alone in the hospital and sleeps where he can. One night, you are in the CT CTte, or another in the tent of journalists or an ambulance appeared.

There was a lot of nights that he had hungry.

As they are trying, hospital employees cannot remove it from the chaos of caring for losses.

Zakaria cross the paramedics and wants to be considered part of the team. One of them, he said, takes it under his wing. Whenever Zakaria was treated as a child, he says, the boy is upset.

Other employees see the care and attention that Zakaria pays to them and the patients in the hospital and teach him to give someone the fourth drip.

In appreciation of his efforts, they even make him a mini set of blue scrubs – which he is proud of.

The aforementioned tries to ensure that the boy is still getting like a childhood and in the movie we follow them on a journey to the beach.

Zakaria, who was sitting under the fronds of the tree branch, sits at the lunch that bought. He says, shawarma is perfect. Al -Nakat said it’s the only time that the boy has “closed.”

But he said that concerns have witnessed a lot of death and destruction to the point that it may not fit with children again.

Zakaria is himself looking beyond childhood.

“I want to be a paramedic,” he says. “But first, I need to get out here.”

He also told George Sanman

Watch – GAZA: How to survive in Warzone on BBC II and iPlayer at 21:00 on February 17 (UK only)