A U.S. vascular surgeon who left Gaza after a stint as a volunteer said on Wednesday nothing had prepared him for the scale of injuries he had faced there.

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, said in Cairo.