Another doctor died in Gaza

Five months ago, when I was on a medical mission in northern Gaza, a Palestinian cardiologist named Marwan Sultan showed me what was left of the Indonesian hospital, a hundred beds that had been bombed and searched by Israeli forces. The building was riddled with shell scars; Its corridors were dark and congested with debris, and a cold wind was blowing through broken windows. Sultan, who directed the installation, wore a long white coat, a tie and rectangular glasses. He highlighted the twisted remains of hospital generators. The operating rooms were being repaired, he said, but had no anesthesia.

The Sultan was welcoming, but, after more than fifteen months of Israeli military operations in Gaza, he seemed deeply exhausted. I filmed with my smartphone by emphasizing a row of dialysis machines whose screens had been broken. Upstairs in the USI, he showed me many other equipment that had been destroyed with bullets. He shook his head, speechless, the palms arose. When I described the damage to the Israeli soldiers, or FDI, for a story published in April, a spokesman said: “says the FDI deliberately targets medical equipment is unequivocal.”

A few months later, I gave a conference on what I witnessed in Gaza. I did not understand how the destruction of medical devices could advance any military objective. A dialysis machine is not a weapon, I said. A man in the public raised his hand and asked, “How long can someone who needs dialysis live without that?” Days for weeks, I told him. “I think It is How you transform a dialysis machine into a weapon, “he said.

In the afternoon of July 2, the Sultan was killed by an Israeli missile with his wife, a girl, a sister, a niece and a son-in-law. At the time, they were moved from their home, remaining with other families in a several floors building near the Mediterranean. A surviving girl, Lubna, said that “the missile had been dropped on her room, on him, precisely”. The rest of the apartment was intact, she said. In photographs of the damage, a gaping hole is visible on the strike site.

When I questioned the Israeli army about the murder of the Sultan, the FDI said in a statement, without providing evidence, which it had “targeted a terrorist agent from Hamas”. He refused to say if the sultan was the target. “The FDI regrets any damage to the uninvited civilians and takes all the precautions achievable to minimize the damage to uninvited civilians,” the press release said. The sultan’s family said he had no association with any political group. “My father was just a doctor, just a human who takes care of the patients,” his seventeen-year-old son, Ahmad, told a new NBC team.

Sultan, who worked as a professor of medicine at the Islamic University of Gaza, would have been one of the only two heart specialists in northern Gaza. Colleagues have described his murder as catastrophic for the medical community, especially for medical trainees, who have kept the remaining hospitals in the territory. “This is a huge loss for us,” said Muneer Al-Boursh, who heads the Gaza Ministry of Health. The ministry is part of the government managed by Hamas in Gaza but is made up of health professionals. “I still cannot understand that he has gone,” said Boursh.

During my stay with the Sultan, in February, there were reasons of hope. Gaza was protected by a ceasefire and aid was circulating; Tables stacked with fresh fruits and vegetables limited the streets. Hospitals were able to reconstruct their supplies of antibiotics, sterile gauze, pain relievers and surgical equipment. I saw children playing hobs and swinging outshed electric lines. I visited several Gaza City warehouses where food bundles were calmly and effectively distributed. “We hope this is the end of the war so that we can rebuild our hospital,” said Sultan.

A month later, the Israeli authorities blocked the continuation of help by entering Gaza. On March 18, Israel ended the ceasefire and resumed military attacks. In April, one of the sultan’s colleagues, an Egyptian surgeon, twenty-seven, named Mahmoud Abu Amsha, who volunteered in Gaza, was killed in an air strike. The Sultan sent me a text to say that he was not sleeping because of the night explosions. “We miss [a] Very courageous colleague, “he wrote.” The medical staff suffered a lot. “”

A few weeks after that, the World Health Organization reported that Indonesian hospital was “out of service due to the continuous military presence”. A staff member was killed, said who said, and almost all the patients of the establishment had to be evacuated. The generators who had been repaired were again destroyed. In his declaration, the FDI accused Hamas “of using hospital infrastructure and staff for terrorist activities”. He declared that he “operates from military necessity and in accordance with international law”. Boursh told me that he begged the Sultan, “like a child to begged their parents” to leave. The sultan refused, said Boursh because he wanted to stay with his patients.

Boursh allegedly alleged that the Sultan had been murdered because of his position in the Gaza health system. He said that the Sultan’s salary came from the Palestinian authority, in the West Bank and not from Hamas; One of the sultan’s colleagues at the Indonesian hospital. The colleague described the sultan as honorable – “a dustless man on him”, using an Arab idiom. “They targeted him because he is a human, he is a nice person, and everyone in Gaza knew him,” said a twenty-year-old medicine student, whom I met during my trip there, told me in a vocal note. The FDI told me that it “does not target medical staff or health workers”.

According to Watch health workers, a Palestinian non -governmental organization that was cited in medical journals and international media reports, the Sultan was the tenth and health workers killed in the Gaza Strip in the last fifty days. The organization called its murder as “part of a wider scheme”. Israeli forces have killed or detained at least one director of each hospital in northern Gaza, he said. In total, more than fifty-seven thousand Palestinians have lost their lives in Gaza since October 7, 2023, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Brerse said that this figure includes more than fifteen hundred health workers: two hundred doctors, including seventy specialists in their fields; One hundred and ninety pharmacists; Two hundred and twenty paramedical paramedics; And many others.

This month, while Israel and Hamas organized a renewal of ceasefire negotiations in Qatar, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, flew to Washington to meet President Donald Trump. Netanyahu surprised Trump of the news he had officially appointed the president of the Nobel Peace Prize – an honor that Trump has wanted for years. It doesn’t matter if Trump deserves the price, he is in a dominant position, regarding peace. The United States is the most powerful ally of Israel and the supplier of most of its weapons. He has the power to stop destruction in Gaza.

When the sultan led me through his shipwrecked hospital, the sounds of the hammers resounded in the corridors. The workers hurried to make repairs. The sultan was delighted to tell me that the day before my arrival, the urgency had been fully reopened. However, he was in shock from everything that had been lost. He listed the name after the names of his deceased doctors’ colleagues. “You miss your colleagues,” he told me. “Some are killed; Some have been arrested. And for what? For doing their job. ” ♦