Skip to main content
The Morning Star Shop
Doctors will rebuild Gaza hospital

Funds are being raised to bring the bombed al-Shifa hospital back from the ashes, reports Linda Pentz Gunter

The main buildings of Shifa Hospital lie in ruins after Israeli air and ground offensives, with the hospital administration estimating that 70% of the facility has been destroyed, in Gaza City, July 4, 2025

HISTORICALLY, doctors have been among the most trusted by society at large. They routinely poll at our near the top of the rankings of those viewed by the public as the most honest and ethical.

Doctors take an oath to do no harm. They are our bellwethers of morality. They are not supposed to be our Cassandras, warning of doom but never to be believed. But that is how many now feel. And if we have arrived at a place where doctors are not believed, what kind of society have we become?

How many times can you recount the horror in Gaza before our governments act to stop it? “More than 25,000 children exterminated, hospitals and schools flattened, doctors executed, patients burned alive in their ICUs, aid turned into bait, starvation used as a weapons, cities erased,” intoned Dr Nidal Jboor at the start of one of the weekly webinars hosted by Doctors Against Genocide (DAG), during which his colleagues in Gaza report in live from their besieged hospitals.

Those doctors are no longer warning of the horror to come, they are living it, a hell that all of us can see in plain sight every day.

“We are risking our lives when we come to work daily,” said Dr Abdul Kareem, an orthopaedic surgeon at al-Nasser, the only functioning hospital in south Gaza that has already been attacked multiple times. That day, there were Israeli tanks just 250 metres away. No-one was going in or out.

“We manage 30 surgeries a day,” Kareem said. Sometimes that is by torchlight, to conserve the scarce power the Israelis allow them, so they can still run life-saving essentials like incubators. “This is our normal.”

Those surgeries invariably include people coming in from the “death trap” outside — the aid distribution centres run by the ill-named Israel-US Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Instead, the delivery of life-saving sustenance has turned into a shooting gallery for the IDF. As a result, Dr Kareem says, they see “30 to 50 mass casualties a day,” including dozens killed and even more seriously injured.

As the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack revealed, a film banned by the BBC but aired by Channel 4 in the UK and via Medhi Hasan’s Zeteo media platform worldwide, those killed and injured include medical personnel. The film details how doctors, nurses and their entire families are deliberately targeted even though Israeli forces continue to deny this. But there is simply too much evidence, too many eyewitnesses, and overwhelming video and photographic evidence.

As the film shows, doctors have also been abducted to notorious “black sites.” Amnesty International has located four of these, but as their researcher Budour Hassan observed, ”What we were able to identify is just a drop in an ocean of horror.”

In Gaza the hospitals “are bombed into ash, doctors and nurses killed in their white coats, and patients — children, elders, the wounded — left to die on the floors of ruins that once promised healing,” Jboor said. And so it was time, the group decided, to do something practical about it. Time not just to talk but to rebuild.

At what is left of the al-Shifa hospital in the north of Gaza, once the biggest medical centre in Gaza with 540 beds, DAG is planning to build a new field hospital inside a perimeter fence on the hospital grounds. Fundraising is already underway and plans have been drawn up for a 140-bed hospital housed outdoors but in sturdy tents, along with two operating theatres, two recovery rooms and communal space for employees.

Phase one started on July 1 using funds already raised by DAG. Rubble has been cleared, including two hospital buildings that were beyond salvaging, designs have been drawn up and five contractors have already bid for the reconstruction project.

The engineering department at the al-Shifa hospital is overseeing the project, viewed as the only immediate solution in an emergency capacity to provide the urgent relief needed now.

Phase two, for which funds are now being sought, will be an 80-bed west wing, followed by phase three, the construction of an additional 60 beds on the east side. Damaged beds are being salvaged and repurposed. “Doing more with less” has become a daily motto. Permanent structures would have been preferable, but a field hospital is quicker and cheaper. With the entire Gaza population facing  starvation along with the daily bombings and shootings, time is of the essence there.

But the dangers of such a project are also huge, given Israel’s proclivity for targeting hospitals and killing doctors, part of a strategy to eliminate the capacity for Palestinians to survive long-term.

“We are always scared that there is a target on any reconstruction in Gaza, but that should not be an excuse for us not to do anything,” said Dr Karameh Hawash Kuemmerle, a DAG co-founder and Boston-based pediatric neurologist. “So we are hoping to raise funds quickly.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
Cartoon: Malc McGookin
Features / 1 August 2025
1 August 2025

Starmer’s decision to recognise Palestine only as long as Israel continues to massacre its inhabitants has been met with outrage, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

Demonstrators carrying Palestinian flags look on as the Ship to Gaza boat 'Handala' arrives at the port of Malmö, Sweden, May 8, 2024
Activism / 28 July 2025
28 July 2025

The crew of the Freedom Flotilla boat, Handala, warned Israel to obey international law but are now in captivity, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

HEAVY HANDED: The law does not have an age limit, the head of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said after an 83-year-old reverend Sue Parfitt was arrested at a protest in support of Palestine Action organised by the Defend Our Juries group on July 5
Features / 23 July 2025
23 July 2025

Waves of protesters are refusing to comply with the latest crackdowns on dissent, but the penalties are higher in Starmer’s Labour Britain than in Trump’s autocratic United States, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

Democrat mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a rally at the Hotel & Gaming Trades Council headquarters in New York, Wednesday, July 2, 2025
Politics / 14 July 2025
14 July 2025

From Labour’s panic over the Corbyn-Sultana formation to Democratic Party grandees distancing themselves from Zohran Mamdani, centrist cliques on both sides of the Atlantic are quick to throw the same old insult, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

Similar stories
Mourners carry the body of a Palestinian for burial after the person was killed in an Israeli military airstrike that hit a U.N. school, in Jabaliya, northern Gaza Strip, on Monday, May 12, 2025
Palestine / 13 May 2025
13 May 2025

As food and fuel run out, Gaza’s doctors appeal to the world to end the ‘genocide of children,’ reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

Former Labour Party leader and now Independent MP Jeremy Cor
Features / 18 September 2024
18 September 2024
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER reports on speakers highlighting global conflicts, from Gaza to Manipur, as Jeremy Corbyn’s initiative gathers leading lights of the left to grapple with Britain’s progressive political future
Two fellow international solidarity activists carry posters
Features / 13 September 2024
13 September 2024
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER highlights the longstanding pattern of the US government shielding Israel from accountability, as Rachel Corrie’s family joins calls for a transparent investigation into the latest killing of a US peace volunteer
A file picture of an IDF unit in Gaza
Features / 11 August 2024
11 August 2024
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER meets Breaking the Silence’s Nadav Weiman, who explains how the erasure of Palestinians from maps and rhetoric has enabled brutal occupation and murderous war