On Thursday, December 25, 2025, during Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians, 168 students graduated from medical school, in Gaza. Wearing their white coats, they stood in front of the ruined façade of what was formerly Gaza’s largest hospital, the al-Shifa Medical Complex. As a backdrop, the destroyed building realistically conveys perils the graduates faced while earning their medical degrees. Throughout the last two years of their studies, they risked assassination, injury, arrest, imprisonment, and torture, as well as attacks on their own family members.

Israel has waged a systematic campaign to destroy Gaza’s healthcare delivery and to kill or imprison healthcare professionals. From October of 2023 to October of 2025, The World Health Organization documented 687 Israeli attacks on Gazan healthcare facilities and 211 attacks on ambulances. These attacks killed 985 people. In the same time period, Israel detained over 306 healthcare workers.

Health Care Workers Watch—Palestine, a nongovernmental organization, reports that 95 Palestinian healthcare workers are still in prison, 80 of whom are from Gaza. Prisoners who have been released from detention report that doctors are singled out for particularly brutal treatment.

Among the 80 Gazan healthcare workers who are still detained is the former director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. On December 27, 2025, Dr. Abu Safiya began his second year of imprisonment.

In a better world, in a better future, we can hope that Palestinians graduating from medical school could assemble for an address delivered by Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.

For over a year, prior to his incarceration, the Israeli military had subjected the Kamal Adwan hospital to repeated sieges and attacks. Dr. Abu Safiya and his staff, refusing to desert their patients, managed to increase the number of available beds in the hospital as theirs became one of the few hospitals still operating in northern Gaza.

On October 25, 2024, Israel raided the hospital, bombing its buildings, detaining many patients, and arresting all hospital staff, including Dr. Abu Safiya who was interrogated and released. On that same day, an Israeli drone attacked one of the hospital buildings and killed Dr. Abu Safiya’s 20-year-old son, Ibrahim. Dr. Abu Safiya buried his son on the hospital grounds and still refused to abandon the patients.

“The Israeli army does not know what it wants,” Dr. Abu Safiya told a reporter with the Electronic Intifada. “They detained me for a few hours and........

© Common Dreams