Photograph Source: The Anti-Zionist – X.com

On December 25, something remarkable happened in Gaza. Against the backdrop of the rubble that is the almost entirely destroyed Al-Shifa Hospital, 230 Palestinian medical students celebrated graduation. Like other graduates around the world, they smiled and waved and threw their mortar boards joyfully into the air.

Except that not one of them was like any other graduate anywhere else in the world. For more than two years they had studied under bombardment, displacement, starvation, a drastic lack of supplies and constant electricity cuts.

They had treated not only strangers but members of their own families and even each other. And yet, it was the largest medical graduation ceremony held in Gaza during the genocide.

They had also buried their own teachers. Several prominent doctors working at Al-Shifa were killed while the students struggled to study, either by Israeli strikes or in the Israeli prisons to which they had been abducted. Among some of the most notable were Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the head of orthopedics, Dr Hamman Alloh, a prominent nephrologist, and Dr Ziad Eldalou, an internal medicine specialist. Bursh and Eldalou both died in Israel prisons, where horrific reports of torture and abuse continue to emerge.

More than 1,700 medical personnel have been killed by Israel since October 2023, a loss conveyed most powerfully in the 2025 documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which the BBC first commissioned and then shamefully refused to air. It has since been seen widely on other outlets.

Almost all of Gaza’s medical facilities are destroyed. The World Health Organization estimates it will cost at least £5 billion to rebuild Gaza’s health system alone, never mind all the other essential infrastructure that also lies in ruins. But who will run it?

“Young doctors are going to be the foundation of Gaza’s healthcare system,” said Ezz Lulu, one of the students who graduated at Al-Shifa. “The responsibility falls now on this generation, the young doctors and students who kept working throughout this........

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