Israel’s genocide has frozen a generation of Gaza’s young doctors
A doctor checks a drip at the dialysis unit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on 1 February 2026
Shoug Mukhaimar reports in Middle East Eye on 2 August 2026:
In July 2025, when Israeli forces suddenly ordered Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah to evacuate under threat of imminent bombardment, my friend Ahmed Shabat, a junior doctor, found himself facing a choice that defined the thin line between life and death.
Around him, the hospital was descending into panic as staff and patients scrambled to flee. Amid the blinding chaos, Dr Ahmed spotted a young man who had been brought into the emergency department, entirely overlooked as everyone rushed to escape.
He was bleeding heavily from a deep shrapnel wound to his thigh; a major artery had been severed and his life was running out in seconds. Repairing a ruptured artery is the high-stakes work of a specialised vascular surgeon, but the specialists had already been forced to leave. Left with a decision to make in a rapidly emptying room, Dr Ahmed refused to walk away. “I looked at him and thought, what if this was a member of my own family?” he recalled later.
Armed with nothing but a phone and a strong sense of duty, he called a senior surgeon who had just evacuated, and followed urgent, step-by-step instructions through the static of a failing mobile network.
Instead of entering a structured residency programme to master a chosen specialty, Dr Ahmed’s days are consumed by 12-hour volunteer shifts
With his hands shaking but determined, he managed to clamp the artery, stopping the haemorrhage and stabilising the man.
By then, Dr Ahmed was two years out of medical school and should have been well into his residency training. But instead of entering a structured residency programme to master a chosen specialty, his days are consumed by 12-hour volunteer shifts, managing a relentless influx of casualties with no clear horizon ahead.
Today, his life remains suspended in that same emergency department. He belongs to Gaza’s “frozen generation” of young medical professionals – brilliant minds halted at the precise moment they were meant to grow.
The destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system cannot be measured in demolished hospitals alone. Its quietest form is the stagnation of the next generation of doctors – the very people meant to rebuild it.
A vanished path
Even before Israel’s genocide in Gaza, medical training in the territory faced constraints due to limited resources, equipment shortages and the restricted availability of advanced specialist training programmes.