I stayed until the end, Dr Abu Nujaila. We will remember and rebuild
A man sits in the destroyed building of Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza, on 19 January 2025
Hend Salama Abo Helow writes in Al Jazeera on 16 February 2025:
“Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could – remember us.”
These were the words Dr Mahmoud Abu Nujaila wrote on October 20, 2023, at al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia refugee camp. He scribbled them in blue ink on a whiteboard used for surgery schedules. They were a testament to resilience, a final message of defiance.
A month later, Dr Abu Nujaila redefined the moral dimensions of the medical oath not with words, but with his own blood. An Israeli air strike on the hospital killed him and two of his colleagues, Dr Ahmad Al Sahar and Dr Ziad Al-Tatari.
Dr Abu Nujaila’s words stayed with me for 15 months, as I watched in horror how the medical system in Gaza I had hoped to work in was bombed to rubble, the doctors I had hoped to learn from – killed, tortured, forcibly disappeared.
Every aspect of life was stained by death. Every warm memory was invaded by horror. Every certainty was replaced by an abyss of the unknown.
Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where I had volunteered in the emergency department just a month before the genocide started, was raided, ransacked and burned. It was Gaza’s biggest hospital, which provided critical care that could not be received elsewhere and which had assembled a staff of highly skilled doctors. It was not only a place of healing but also a shelter for the displaced. Ultimately, it was turned into a graveyard.
The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, where I had joined a university project on breast cancer awareness, was bombed, then besieged and shut down, its patients left to die slowly, helplessly. The fate of the only cancer hospital in Gaza was sealed by its location – lying within the “axis of death” – what the Israeli military calls the Netzarim Corridor, which it had established and occupied to divide Gaza into north and south.