More than 34,000 Palestinians have died in Israel's onslaught on Gaza since October. But there's another grim figure that tells the story of the Gaza conflict: 77,000.

That's the number of people who have suffered horrific burns, blast injuries, lacerations and crushed bones. A small number have managed to leave the under-siege strip for medical treatment.

The UAE is one of a small number of countries taking patients in and treating them at its hospitals for free. To date, it has operated 16 flights on commercial airliners refitted with hospital beds and medical equipment. About 1,000 injured Gazans, plus another 1,000 cancer patients, have been flown to the Emirati capital.

This week on Beyond the Headlines, Nada AlTaher, who was on board a recent medical flight, speaks to the people behind this extraordinary humanitarian effort - and hears from the Gazan patients who want to return home to war-torn strip - despite the dangers.

What a normal life is like for the rest of the world does not apply in Gaza, and it almost never has.

Even before October 7, electricity only came on for an average of four to six hours a day and nearly 98 per cent of water was undrinkable. Transportation options were always limited and housing was a challenge in one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

Now, after more than six months of war, around 50 to 70 percent of housing has been destroyed. The cost of damage between October and January alone is estimated by the World Bank at $18.5 billion.

In this week’s Beyond The Headlines, host Nada AlTaher explores whether life in Gaza can ever go back to any kind of normality, looking at the path to rebuilding the strip and the mammoth task at hand. She speaks to Rami Al Azzeh, economist with the Assistance to the Palestinian People Unit at UNCTAD, and Amira Aker, a postdoctoral fellow at Canada’s Universite Laval who specialises in epidemiology and environmental health.

Air-raid alerts going off in Israel, many airports in the Middle East closed, flights delayed, the airspace over Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon shut down. That was Saturday night in the region as Iran launched its first major attack on Israel with around 300 drones and missiles. Most of the projectiles - launched in response to the April 1 strike on Iran’s embassy in Damascus that killed two general from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - were shot down before they even reached their targets. But Israel’s top general said immediately after the attack that the country will respond. In this week’s Beyond The Headlines, host Nada AlTaher breaks down the current stand-off between Israel and Iran with senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, Hussein Ibish, and looks at the prospects for Israel’s retaliation.