His lifeless body lies on the cold metal tray, bloodied stumps covered in hastily wrapped bandages mark where his legs once were.
Doctors at Shifa Hospital had worked hard to save Ibrahim Suliman, but in the end the injuries he sustained in the Israeli attack on the United Nations girls' school in Jabalia early on Wednesday proved too great.
Four days before his death, Suliman had made the agonising decision to separate his extended family of 30, dividing them between the four local schools sheltering Palestinians.
"Let's not die together," he told his wife and children when the shelling from the Israeli tanks around their home in Beit Lahiya became too much to bear and they were forced to flee. The 42-year-old strawberry farmer died alongside two of his cousins but the rest of his family survived. Thirteen others also died and a further 100 were injured.
Standing in the small foyer of the morgue at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Yassin Suliman speaks with a quiet, eloquent fury about the death of his cousin.
"If this had happened in Europe, the world would not be silent," he says, as the young men of the family carefully lift Ibrahim's body onto a stretcher and carry him out of the morgue.
"We buried his legs this morning and we will bury his body this afternoon," Yassin says.
To get to the morgue at Shifa, you must first walk past the chaos of the hospital entrance, where, after a large-scale attack, the arrival of speeding ambulances and beaten-up private cars brings with it a now familiar horror.
Fathers arrive clutching limp, bloodied children and rush them through the crowd of onlookers as security men clear a pathway to emergency. I fear I will see those children in the morgue later that day.
Further crowding out Gaza's main hospital are the dozens of families who shelter along the small walkways between the hospital buildings. Told to leave their homes via phone calls, text messages and leaflets dropped by the Israel Defence Forces, they make up the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the military assault against Gaza.
A young girl sits alone on a mattress on the ground, trying to read a book in the dim light, while parents hang makeshift curtains to shield their families from the constant traffic of hospital staff, grieving families and those who spend their days at Shifa because they say it is the only safe place to go.
They know they are the lucky ones.
"They pulled 150 bodies out of the rubble of our homes," one man says, "many of them ended up in there," he laments, gesturing to the morgue.
The morgue's main room has two tables. In the momentary midday lull after the furious morning hours where 15 dead passed through, most from the UN school attack, just one green body bag lies on each.
In one is the body of eight-year-old Mohamed Assaf, who staff say was killed in a mortar attack on the Jabalia market that morning.
His father sits weeping in the tiny room next door until the morgue nurse is free to hand over his body.
The bag is unzipped to reveal Mohamed's sweet face, his short-sleeved shirt and blue checked shorts and the deep head wound and multiple shrapnel injuries that killed him.
Mohamed Assaf's father scoops up the body bag into his arms, holding it tight against his chest and walks wordlessly down the small staircase to the car waiting outside.
Hamdi Kahlout is the director of Shifa Morgue. He is a jovial, open man whose demeanour stands in stark contrast to the death and destruction that surrounds him.
The forensic pathologist has run the facility for 13 years and says health services across Gaza are operating at "zero capacity" at the moment.
"We have more than 7000 injured, half of them are disabled now, our hospitals have been shelled, ambulances attacked, doctors are running on empty - everyone is exhausted and drained."
Trained in Croatia, 50-year-old Kahlout has worked in conflict zones in Bosnia and Iraq and lived through two Gaza wars - Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 and Operation Pillar of Defence in 2012- but these past three weeks have worn him down.
"It is the first time I have felt that we cannot bear much more of this," he says. "I am still trying to get the images of the children who died in the strike on Shati Camp out of my mind - one of them was just one month old."
There is no time for a full autopsy in a morgue that can see up to 90 bodies a day, all processed by a small team of exhausted workers.
An external examination is performed, X-rays, tissue, blood and toxicology samples are taken, and the injuries are meticulously photographed by morgue staff to both help determine cause of death and the types of weapons Israeli soldiers are using.
As a family leaves with the body of final-year geography student Mohamed al-Masry, three more bodies arrive - one so badly burnt and mutilated that it defies description.
It is still there when I leave four hours later, the only body the morgue has been unable to identify that day.
There are seven large, silver cold storage units in which the bodies are kept at Shifa Morgue.
Some days - like Wednesday when a UN school housing 3300 displaced people is hit by Israeli-fired artillery - the bodies, particularly if they are children, are piled two or three to a tray.
The families come in waves to find them, sometimes pushing their way through the morgue's front door and rushing to the fridges, opening one door after another until they find something about a body that is recognisable - a necklace, a T-shirt, the curls of their hair.
For Kahlout, the morgue's director, there is no question of taking the heaviness of his work home to his wife and five precious children.
"I will never tell them what I see every day," he says. "In 20 years on the job I've never spoken about it.''
Outside another crowd is building and they are not just grieving, they are angry.
Banging on the metal door, members of the Bakr family were there to collect another of their dead.
They had already buried Mohammed Bakr, 9; Ahed Bakr, 10; Zakaria Bakr, 10; and Mohammed Bakr, 11, all killed on July 16 when Israeli gunboats fired on the beach as the four boys tried to run for safety.
This time they are here for Ahmed Bakr, 20, who was badly injured nine days ago.
"They are not coping," Kahlout says. "They have lost so much and they are so upset, it is difficult to know what to do."
There were at least five bodies waiting to be collected in the late afternoon before the Israeli attack on the outskirts of Shujaiya in which 17 people died and 160 were wounded.
At Shifa, surgeons were operating two-to-a-room on patients, while others were performing surgery on patients lying on the floor in corridors. Storage rooms - mostly empty of much-needed medicines and equipment - have been commandeered as operating theatres to cope with the demand.
Families say many of the injured are dying because there are simply not enough medical staff, or the capacity in hospitals, to treat people in time.
Already the toll in this 25-day war has surpassed Cast Lead, in which 1400 people were killed in Gaza, according to human rights groups. In Pillar of Defence, 133 Palestinians were killed.
More than 1430 Palestinians were killed and 8400 wounded since Israel began its operations on July 8. It is estimated that 80 per cent of those are civilians, including at least 343 children and 186 women, the Gaza-based al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights says.
Despite the high civilian toll and the international condemnation, Israel shows no signs of easing its operations, in which 56 of its own soldiers have died.
Three Israeli civilians have also been killed, with more than 2800 rockets fired into Israel the last three weeks, most either falling in empty fields or being intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system.
After Thursday's cabinet meeting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the IDF was continuing to act with full force across the Gaza Strip.
"As of now, we have neutralised dozens of terrorist tunnels and we are determined to complete this mission, with or without a ceasefire."
And in the meantime, the trauma that hangs over Gaza like a thick cloud is only worsening.
For Hamdi Kahlout, the speed with which his children have adapted to a life under war is alarming.
His youngest child, Mohamed, is just 2½ years old, and along with "mamma" and "papa" he uses the very grown up word "qasef", which means air strike.
"No child should ever know that word," Kahlout says, as he scrolls though the elaborately decorated photographs of his children that he keeps on his phone.
