Dying children and grieving parents are a fact of her work says Canadian paediatric intensive care doctor Tanya Haj-Hassan. “But Gaza is that continuously,” she adds, wiping away a tear. Haj-Hassan is one of several doctors who are interviewed in Daniele Rugo’s documentary about their medical missions to Gaza since October 2023. Doctors tend to be careful with their words and don’t instinctively reach for overstatement or exaggeration. But their measured accounts of hell on earth, along with clips from their video diaries, make this quietly devastating film almost unbearable to watch.

Israel does not allow foreign reporters into Gaza unless under military escort, so medics are valuable independent witnesses. Nick Maynard is a gastrointestinal surgeon who has been visiting since 2010. He has always seen destruction in Gaza, he says, but after October 2023, it was on different scale. On his first night, ER doctor James Smith tried to count the number of explosions; he lost track after several hundred. Reconstructive surgeon Victoria Rose arrived with 23 suitcases after putting a call to UK plastic surgeons for supplies. On a later visit she was permitted to cross the border with just one.

All the doctors pay tribute to the extraordinary heroism of their Palestinian colleagues, who work marathon shifts often while grieving over personal losses. Maynard describes a Palestinian surgeon taking sitting-down breaks during an operation to avoid blacking out from hunger. Another Palestinian doctor brings her teenage children to work, reasoning that, if they die, they will die together.

Israel accuses Hamas of using hospitals as command centres and to hide weapons – a charge it denies. The doctors here talk about the targeting of medical infrastructure – Gaza’s only cancer hospital destroyed; an IVF clinic gone, with all its embryos. This film is hard to watch but impossible to look away from.

• Life Support is in UK cinemas from 10 July.