By Press TV Staff Writer
Israel’s aerial blitz on the besieged Gaza Strip since October 7 has primarily targeted civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and universities, with the death toll surpassing 12,300.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 26 of the 36 hospitals in the coastal territory have already been rendered non-functional after suffering extensive damage in the Israeli bombings.
The regime’s indiscriminate shelling has claimed the lives of hundreds of medical workers, such as Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old nephrologist at the Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical facility in Gaza.
Dr. Alloh was killed after an Israeli warplane pounded his home in northern Gaza on November 11. His family members, including his father, father-in-law, and brother-in-law, were also killed.
Two weeks before his killing, the young Palestinian doctor appeared on Democracy Now, speaking about the unutterable horror unleashed on Gazans by the occupying regime since October 7.
“The few trucks that were allowed in with aid to Gazan people is almost nothing compared to what we need,” Dr. Alloh said at the time after a few trucks were allowed into Gaza through Rafah crossing.
“Water, gloves and gauze, this is not what we are looking for. We are looking for devices, medications… for providing real healthcare for people in need.”
Like many other Palestinian medics, Dr. Alloh also refused to leave Gaza, staying back to help others.
“If I go, who treats my patients? We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper health care. So we can’t just leave,” the father of two was quoted as saying.
“You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so I think only about my life and not my patients?… This is not the reason why I became a doctor.”
Dr. Alloh’s decision to stay, which eventually cost him his life, has inspired many young doctors.
Noor Z, a medical student, in a post on X, formerly Twitter, vowed to “become a physician like him.”
“A deeply principled physician whose commitment is to the moral cause of serving your patients till your last breath. A true fulfillment of what it means to be a healer of people,” she wrote.
His colleagues recalled him as a “committed physician, wonderful father” and “beacon of light.”
“He spent a decade learning how to serve his people,” Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan with Doctors Without Borders, was quoted as saying by Democracy Now.
“He wanted his children to be able to see a day when they had a free, just, durable, free life in Palestine, without occupation,” said Dr. Ben Thomson, a fellow nephrologist who worked with him.
More than 12,000 people, mostly children and women, have been killed since October 7 by the Israeli regime. Hospitals have also been bombarded, forcing critical patients to lie down on the streets.
Al-Shifa Hospital, where Dr. Alloh worked, has become a symbol of Palestinian suffering, with the Israeli regime forces repeatedly raiding it and forcing inmates to leave the hospital premises.
The hospital is no longer operational and has been turned into what the United Nations humanitarian assessment team has described as a “death zone.”
