A Doctor’s Resistance in Gaza: Academic Action

Abdulwhhab Abu Alamrain and Bilal Irfan

In January 2024, I (AA) received the headless body of my cousin, Islam Abo Riala, while I was on duty at Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hosopital. He was a volunteer ambulance officer with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. His ambulance had been torn apart in a direct strike. Neither he nor the injured patients he was transporting survived. Just a week earlier, he had confided in me his fear after his ambulance was shot at in Al-Maghazi Camp. He told me he was considering resigning. Islam was only one of hundreds of healthcare workers killed during this war in Gaza.

I am a young medical doctor and for over a year I have volunteered on the front lines of one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a health worker, the Gaza Strip. Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital, where I serve, has been bombed at least eight times while I have been on duty. I have shown visiting international physicians around the hospital while the stench of burnt flesh still lingered near the emergency room from previous mass casualty events.

On October 24, 2023, I shared a simple falafel meal with Dr. Moath Al-Nabahin. It was his last. In February 2024, we lost Khaled Abo Oweimer, a bright and funny medical student I had come to know through our medical fieldwork at the hospital. Dr. Rami Berak, an anesthesiologist, once told me how he acquired his pillow from a war-injured patient who arrived in the operating theater with his pillow. When he died, his body left the hospital, and the pillow remained. I inherited that same pillow in March 2024 after Rami was killed by a quadcopter while trying to save his neighbors. These are not isolated tragedies. The targeting of Gaza’s health system and healthcare workers is a theme of the genocide that has killed over 1400 HCWs as of June 2025.

Amid this collapse of Gaza, I have chosen to resist in a different way—through academic action. In March 2024, I began reviewing published research on Gaza’s healthcare crisis. I reached out to colleagues, formed a team of local doctors and medical students, and developed a comprehensive research plan. Second author Bilal Irfan, a volunteer who came to Palestine and wrote about the healthcare crisis, joined us.

Our collaboration marked a turning point. Together, we began documenting what was happening with urgency and rigor. We published on the collapse of medical documentation during wartime. We wrote for The Lancet Group about the deterioration of health, longevity, and life expectancy in Gaza. We presented two abstracts on sleep health. Despite the ongoing war and extreme struggles, we are continuing to work on several collaborative research projects grounded in field-level data and situational awareness. This work has channeled grief into evidence. It has allowed us to turn horror into testimony. Through research and publication, we aim to ensure that what is happening to Gaza’s population, its health system, and its workers is not erased, normalized, or forgotten.

We know all too well that our words and data will not stop this genocide, but we can at least ensure that a century from now, maybe in some classroom in Gaza or in the halls of Harvard University, someone will read and learn about the granular details of the orthopedic and facial injuries, the maternal and neonatal health issues, the data collection difficulties, and whatever else we are able to document. Maybe they will even do a PhD thesis mapping the health and health research struggles in Gaza, who knows?

The destruction of health systems is not an unintended consequence of war. In Gaza, it is a weapon. But through our work, we resist that erasure. We document. We honor the dead. And we fight for the living. Health care should never be a target. Ambulances should never be graves.

Abdulwhhab Abu Alamrain is a volunteer medical doctor and researcher at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital, Deir Al-Balah, Gaza, Palestine.

Bilal Irfan is a global health justice advocate and scholar at Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States.