Never has there been a war where more doctors have been on the frontlines or more doctors arrested, tortured, targeted and killed than those in Gaza between October 2023 and January 2025.
At the end of November 2024, local authorities in Gaza reported that over 1,000 doctors and nurses had been killed by Israeli forces since 7 October 2023, in what it called the systematic targeting of hospitals to destroy Gaza’s health infrastructure.
This figure includes Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, the head of orthopaedic surgery at the Al Shifa Medical Complex in North Gaza, who was arrested and tortured to death in May of last year by Israeli forces in Israel’s Ofer Prison.
A report issued by an independent UN Commission of Inquiry in October 2024 found enough evidence of the Israeli army’s deliberate killing, wounding, torturing, arresting and mistreatment of medical workers, concluding that this constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.
None of us will forget the viral image of Dr Husam Abu Safiya, the director of North Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, walking through the rubble of the destroyed hospital towards an Israeli tank, refusing to abandon his staff or patients until the very end. His fate remains undetermined.
Dr Husam Abu Safiya symbolises the humanity, sacrifice and sheer determination of Gaza’s doctors, who took their role in treating Gaza’s injured, maimed and sick so seriously.
Doctors have remarked that the famous Hippocratic oath doctors take upon qualifying to uphold ethical standards and compassion while treating patients should be replaced with a Gaza oath.
One of Gaza’s doctors who stayed until the very end is football player and doctor Khalid Abu-Habel, who was displaced several times throughout the last 15 months, but continued working in the Emergency Department at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir El Balah, central Gaza. He also volunteered at a field hospital in a school.
Khalid tells The New Arab that he decided to keep going until the very end because he considers his role as a doctor as his national and religious duty. He went to and from work on foot, while airstrikes took place around him and there were many times when he was unable to contact his family and would carry on working at the hospital not knowing whether they were dead or alive.
“There were days when I worked all day standing on my feet without any rest, and we worked day by day so that we could control the huge amount of cases that were arriving throughout the day,” he shares.
“Continuing my job was a great challenge: I was far away from my family, the road to and from the hospital was dangerous, and there were threats and bombings of hospitals and medical staff — all of which represented difficult obstacles on my path to continuing my job,” Khalid reveals.
“We have gone through situations that, by God, were heartbreaking and unimaginable to the human mind. As doctors, the people need all of us, and my love for them was what always motivated me to continue. I was determined to continue my work, whether medically or by conveying people’s suffering and making their voices heard.”
Thirty-one-year-old Tarneem Mahmoud was working as an obstetrician at the Al Shifa hospital before 7 October 2023. She initially carried on working there after Israel’s war on Gaza broke out, despite her family evacuating to Khan Younis in the south.
After the Israeli army invaded the Al Shifa complex in November 2023, she was forced to flee but continued volunteering at the private hospital, Al-Hilu, in Gaza City.
However, neither she nor the pregnant patients she treated were safe there from the Israeli army.
on 9 November 2023 [Getty]
“A tank shell was on the fifth floor of the hospital intending to intimidate the doctors and patients. We rushed to evacuate the hospital, but we remained inside as there was no place for us to go,” she shares.
“We did not want to leave the north without any doctors or medical professionals. But in December 2023, Israeli occupation tanks surrounded the hospital and cut off water and food. We were forced to surrender, raise white flags, and flee the south towards Khan Younis with our patients,” Tarneem tells The New Arab.
Another former doctor at Al Shifa is 32-year-old internal medicine specialist Mahitab Ahmed. She was immediately displaced along with her daughter on 8 October 2023 to the south, while her husband decided to stay with his family. Her house was near Al Shifa Complex and was destroyed as part of Israel’s direct targeting of the area surrounding the medical complex.
In Rafah, Mahitab joined Doctors Without Borders and worked at the Al Nasser Hospital, where she treated patients until the ceasefire.
“The number of patients was very large compared to the existing medical staff, due to Rafah’s overcrowding with displaced people,” she explains.
“I witnessed severe types of injuries, including amputations and bleeding. There were not enough beds, medicine, food, or clean water, just death everywhere. I also witnessed the bombing and burning of tents of the displaced in the vicinity of the hospital,” Mahitab adds.
“It was the most difficult situation I have ever experienced. Civilians were being subjected to death for no reason, their only fault is that they are Palestinians and from Gaza.”
Gaza’s doctors were not immune from losing their own families and loved ones, and often while they were at work. None of us will forget the moment ER doctor Mohammed Abu Mousa was forced to identify the body of his six-year-old son Yousef, while on shift shortly after the genocide started in October 2023.
It was not uncommon for doctors to discover that corpses being brought into the hospital belonged to family members or dear friends. Tarneem was shocked to find that the body of a woman who was hit directly by an Israeli tank shell, killing her instantly, belonged to her classmate from high school.
In October 2023, 25-year-old Islam Al-Jourani from Jabalia Camp in North Gaza had just graduated from medical school, working as a general practitioner. In November 2023, her three brothers, two sisters, and two of her sister’s children were killed during an Israeli incursion on her family’s house.
She had to search for her brothers’ body parts at more than one hospital in the north of Gaza. She is now the guardian of her dead sister’s children. Despite all this, Islam still managed to finish her internship year at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza. And despite everyone and everything she lost, she is still optimistic about the future.
“I have hopes to travel abroad and continue with my life. Yes, most doctors want to emigrate,” she says.
“This is a bitter reality that media cameras do not shed light on, because doctors were not provided with any international protection during the period of Israeli aggression and were subjected to captivity, torture, direct targeting and martyrdom.”
Haya Ahmed is a doctor and freelance writer from Gaza
