"I did not shed tears for my own home being damaged, but for the destruction of the hospital, and for all the medical staff and the wounded people in Gaza,” he added.
I share his feelings of loss and devastation and I know many other healthcare workers do too.
Israel had long threatened al-Shifa, but so many of us didn’t believe, didn’t imagine destruction on the scale we eventually witnessed could happen.
I cannot begin to describe the shock of seeing al-Shifa, the heart of Gaza’s healthcare system, in flames.
Israel knew that attacks on al-Shifa would violate international law and the Geneva Convention, so it lied and said there was a military "operations base” under it.
After spending weeks ransacking the complex, the Israeli military failed to provide any evidence to support this claim.
But it did not matter – al-Shifa was destroyed, and another aspect of this ongoing genocide was justified.
The purpose of Israel’s attack on al-Shifa was not to achieve a military advantage against its enemy, but to worsen the suffering of the Palestinian people. The attack took away from the people of Gaza their main refuge at a time when they are facing multiple threats.
It displaced once again thousands of refugees taking shelter there. It left people maimed by bombs and snipers, children pulled from under the rubble, hungry infants and fragile elders without access to healthcare.
The attack transformed a place of healing and safety into a site of massacres and mass graves. It made a mockery of international law and exposed Israel’s cruelty.
When Israel destroyed our homes, it was a horrific loss. But the destruction of al-Shifa was an even bigger tragedy for many of us. It was not only a personal loss, but also a collective one.
With al-Shifa gone, we are left with an incurable wound. What will we do now, what can we do, and how can we rebuild after the very heart of our society has been ripped out?
Israel destroyed all of Gaza’s universities and ensured that the majority of its hospitals were nonfunctional. It turned al-Shifa into a pile of rubble. It killed countless medics, nurses, doctors and academic clinicians.
So many others had to evacuate to stay alive.
Most recently, we received the tragic news of the killing of Dr Adnan al-Bursh, director of the orthopaedic department at al-Shifa, following his kidnapping and interrogation by Israeli soldiers.
Those of us still in Gaza can do nothing other than sit and wait to see who will be killed next, or which vital building will be targeted. This is no life.
As we hope for Israel’s war on Gaza to come to an end, and a ceasefire agreement to be reached, we also fear what will happen next – what will life in Gaza look like after this genocide, what will it look like without al-Shifa, and can we rebuild our health sector after all the losses we experienced? We know that we cannot replace al-Shifa, at least in the short term.
But we can keep alive what it represented: our hopes for a better future, and the strength and resilience of our community.