The nurse, a Palestinian man who works with Paris-based Doctors Without Borders, saw no choice. He assessed his charges and picked up the strongest one — the baby he thought likeliest to bear a temporary cut to his oxygen supply. He left the other four on their breathing machines, reluctantly, and with his wife, their children and the one baby, headed south.

“I felt like I was leaving my own children behind,” said the nurse, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy. “If we had the ability to take them, we would have, [but] if we took them off the oxygen they would have died.”

Two weeks later, the pause in hostilities allowed a Gazan journalist to venture into the hospital. In the neonatal intensive care unit, Mohammed Balousha made the awful discovery.

The decomposing bodies of the four babies. Eaten by worms. Blackened by mold. Mauled, Balousha said, by stray dogs.

“A terrible and horrific scene,” he told The Post. He took video.

The grim discovery was a reminder of the harrowing civilian toll of Israel’s war to eradicate Hamas, a campaign that has spared neither hospitals nor children. Thousands have been killed.

The current hostilities erupted on Oct. 7, when Hamas and allied fighters streamed out of Gaza to attack Israeli communities near the enclave, killed around 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 more. Israel responded with a full siege, airstrikes and ground operations that have killed more than 15,200 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry, including thousands of children.

Israel has long accused Hamas of hiding command-and-control centers in hospitals; the Biden administration has backed the claim. Hamas and Gaza medical staff deny it.

Still, Israeli commanders have made the territory’s health care infrastructure a focus of the military campaign. A month into the war, that included al-Nasr.

It was Nov. 10 when Israeli forces told al-Nasr’s staff they had to leave, according to Qaoud, the hospital director. “They sent us a map for a safe route,” he told The Post in a WhatsApp message. “They gave us half an hour to go out. Otherwise, they will bombard the hospital.”

An official at the adjacent al-Rantisi pediatric cancer center seemed to receive an assurance that ambulances would retrieve patients from both al-Rantisi and al-Nasr. In a telephone conversation with the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories [COGAT], an arm of Israel’s defense ministry, the al-Rantisi official requested ambulances. In a recording of that call released by the Israel Defense Forces, a senior COGAT officer responds in Arabic: “No problem.”

The senior COGAT officer tells the al-Rantisi official that he will “arrange coordination” for ambulances. He gives the precise route that medical staff should take out of the complex.

The al-Rantisi official reminds COGAT that staff will also be evacuating al-Nasr. The COGAT officer acknowledges the reminder.

Qaoud, too, said there was “coordination with the Red Cross and Israeli army that we will go out and then these cases will be later evacuated to another hospital that was safe.”

COGAT spokeswoman Shani Sasson told The Post that Israeli forces neither directed al-Nasr’s staff to evacuate nor operated inside the facility. She declined to answer whether COGAT or the Israeli military had been told about the babies or taken any action to care for them.

Sarah Davies, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Jerusalem, said the agency made no guarantees and could not safely reach the hospital.

The evacuation was painful. There was no way to reach the babies’ families, the nurse said. He had no contact information, and communications in much of Gaza were down. Their parents had been “displaced people,” he surmised, “who knew their children were in the hospital and didn’t think the hospital would be hit or raided by the occupation.

“They thought they left them in safety.”

It was time to leave. The nurse gathered up the strongest baby, made sure the others’ respirators were working, and, still wearing his scrubs, walked with his family out of the hospital to begin the 18-mile journey, much of it on foot, south to Khan Younis.

On the road, the nurse found an ambulance to take the baby in his arms to al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest. Israeli forces would raid that facility days later. The World Health Organization eventually evacuated 31 premature babies from al-Shifa. By then, several others had died.

On Nov. 24, after nearly seven weeks of fighting, Israel and Hamas began a week-long pause to exchange captives and allow more aid into Gaza.

Balousha, a journalist with the Dubai-based Al-Mashhad channel, took advantage of the relative calm to venture into Gaza City and report on corpses left out. On Nabil Tammos Street, he found two bodies, a man and a woman. Someone had covered them in a blanket.

“People [were] telling me that the strongest story is found in al-Nasr Hospital,” Balousha said. “They told me that premature babies were left in intensive care and that they were supposed to be rescued,” but with the fighting, “no one took them out.”

During the pause, Israeli forces remained near the hospital, cutting off civilian access. Balousha, undeterred, “jumped from wall to wall” through broken buildings to reach the medical complex.

As he approached the neonatal intensive care unit, he said, he “started to smell a foul odor.” He turned his camera on.

When Al-Mashhad aired the report, it blurred the remains. The channel gave an unaltered copy of the video to The Post, which verified that it was recorded inside al-Nasr’s neonatal intensive care unit by comparing it with images of the facility from before the war.

The remains, still hooked up to respirators, bear little resemblance to bodies. They appear as piles of rotting flesh, bones protruding, body parts difficult to make out. Soiled-looking diapers remain wrapped around their middles.

Balousha described the scene on camera and hurried out of the unit.

The nurse, who reviewed the video, said the corpses were found where he had left the babies. No one had come for them.

Qaoud, the al-Nasr director, said the Israeli military “was informed there were cases” left inside the hospital, but “was determined to evacuate.”

Davies, the Red Cross spokeswoman, said the organization “received several requests to evacuate hospitals in the north of Gaza, but due to this security situation, we were not involved in any operations of evacuations, nor did teams commit to doing so.”

No one has emerged to claim the bodies. There has been no indication, the nurse said, that the parents know their children are dead.

He remains haunted by the event. He believes he needs psychiatric treatment.

Of what, he asks, were the babies guilty?

“Were they fighters?” he asked. “Were they holding weapons? Were they firing rockets?

“Why does the army hit the oxygen and electricity? Why did the army target them?”

Heba Farouk Mahfouz contributed to this report from Cairo.

The victims’ parents identified them in a statement as Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), a civil rights advocacy group, said it believed the students were targeted because they are Palestinians. Police said two are U.S. citizens and one is a legal U.S. resident.

“As parents, we are devastated by the horrific news that our children were targeted and shot in Burlington, ” the parents said in a statement. “We call on law enforcement to conduct a thorough investigation, including treating this as a hate crime. … No family should ever have to endure this pain and agony. Our children are dedicated students who deserve to be able to focus on their studies and building their futures.”

Palestinian Americans face fear, violence amid Israel’s war in Gaza

The ADC said the three men are students at Brown University, Haverford College and Trinity College, respectively, and had gathered in Burlington to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with Awartani’s grandmother.

The ADC also said the students were wearing kaffiyehs, the traditional Arab scarf associated with Palestinians, when they were attacked.

“We have reason to believe that the shooting was motivated by the three victims being Arab,” the ADC statement said.

The Burlington police did not respond to a request to confirm the ADC’s description of the students’ dress and conversation at the time of the attack.

However, Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad said in a statement Sunday that police are investigating the possibility that the attack was “hate motivated.”

“In this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it may have been a hate-motivated crime. And I have already been in touch with federal investigatory and prosecutorial partners to prepare for that if it’s proven,” Murad said.

Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger said in a statement that the possibility of a hate crime “is being prioritized in the BPD’s investigation.”

Federal authorities say they have been responding to a rise in threats against Arab, Jewish and Muslim communities as anger over the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict has spilled into protests, street confrontations and targeted attacks thousands of miles from the war zone.

On Oct. 14, an Illinois man fatally stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy and wounded his mother in an apartment they were renting from him, authorities said. The Justice Department is investigating the killing as a hate crime.

Israel has mounted a massive assault on the densely populated Gaza Strip, killing more than 13,300 Palestinians — including thousands of children — since Oct. 7, when the Hamas militant group launched a brutal cross-border assault on Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking about 240 people into Gaza as hostages.

The Biden administration and U.S. lawmakers from both parties have largely supported Israel in its war, and some lawmakers have echoed Israeli revenge rhetoric that has likened Palestinians to animals or cast doubt on whether Palestinian civilians are truly uninvolved civilians.

Basil Awartani, who identified himself on social media as Awartani’s cousin, suggested Sunday that the shooting in Vermont was a consequence of “dangerous and dehumanizing rhetoric regurgitated by US politicians and right wing pundits.”

Abed Ayoub, the ADC’s national executive director, told The Washington Post on Sunday night that his organization has been in touch with the students’ parents, some of whom were en route to Vermont. Awartani, the Brown University student whose grandmother lives in Burlington, was the most critically injured, Ayoub said.

“Hisham has a bullet lodged in his spine. We don’t know the total damage of that yet. We don’t know how severe, or what that will lead to,” Ayoub said. Another of the men suffered damage to a lung, and the third, who was less critically injured, was expected to be released from the hospital on Sunday, he added, declining to say which.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s biggest Muslim advocacy group, issued a statement Sunday offering a $10,000 reward for information about the shooting in Vermont.

A Palestinian high school in the West Bank, Ramallah Friends, said all three of the men had attended school there before enrolling in U.S. universities.

Allam reported from Cairo.