GAZA – In a war where hospitals became battlegrounds and medics became targets, Dr. Marwan al-Sultan stood as a pillar of compassion, quiet strength, and unshakable resolve.
For months, he ran the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza not just as its director, but as its lifeblood, treating patients under fire, organizing emergency care with barely any supplies, and refusing to leave even as Israeli tanks and warplanes closed in.
“He stayed until the last moment,” said his daughter, Lamis al-Sultan. “He was there, monitoring the affairs of the sick and the wounded, refusing to abandon them.”
A consultant in internal medicine and cardiology, Dr. al-Sultan held the Jordanian Board and served as a professor at the Islamic University of Gaza. He helped train generations of doctors while embodying the values of humanity and service. In late 2023, after the Indonesian Hospital was heavily bombed, it was Dr. Marwan who led its reconstruction, personally supervising every detail until it reopened its doors.
“He was not an ordinary doctor,” his cousin Mohammed al-Sultan said. “He was a symbol of dedication and patience. He remained with the loyal staff under siege for two months. He saved what little food arrived for the crews and never took any for himself. Even one day before he was killed, he was focused on helping patients.”
When Israeli forces issued evacuation orders to hospitals in the north, Dr. Marwan refused to comply. “His place was with the wounded,” said Dr. Munir al-Borsh, Director General of Gaza’s Ministry of Health. “We were trapped together in the hospital… He didn’t take off his white coat. He feared for his patients more than for himself.”
In May, the hospital was finally knocked out of service after Israeli shelling destroyed its generators and vital departments. Forced to evacuate patients, Dr. Marwan and his family relocated to a home in Area 17, Gaza City, an area designated as a “safe zone.” But there was no safety to be found.
On Wednesday morning, an Israeli F-16 warplane fired a missile directly into Dr. Marwan’s room. The strike killed him, his wife Dhikra, his daughter, his sister, and her husband, the freed prisoner Mohammad Imad al-Sultan. His daughter later said the missile found them just hours after they had tried to resettle from Jabalia, hoping to avoid the violence.
At his funeral, hundreds of Palestinians gathered with tears and takbirat to bid farewell to a man who had become, to many, the beating heart of Gaza’s collapsing health system.
“It is with great sadness and sorrow that we mourn the martyr of humanitarian and medical duty,” the Ministry of Health said in a statement, calling the killing a “crime against all medical staff.”
Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, director of the Shifa Medical Complex, described Dr. Marwan as one of only two cardiology consultants in northern Gaza. “Just one day before he was killed, we were discussing cardiac catheterization cases. He stayed at the Indonesian Hospital when it was destroyed, then returned to rebuild it.
The occupation knew him. They communicated with him during the siege. If they had doubts, they could have detained him. But instead, they killed him in cold blood.”
In addition to his work at the hospital, Dr. Marwan was also the Gaza coordinator for the Arab Board of Cardiology, responsible for overseeing cardiology exams across the region, including those held remotely during the war.
His assassination is not an isolated tragedy. Since the start of Israel’s genocidal war in October 2023, more than 1,580 medical workers have been killed, including close friends and colleagues of Dr. Marwan, among them Dr. Adnan al-Borsh and Dr. Iyad al-Rantisi. Others, like Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, have been detained. Hospitals, ambulances, and medical teams have become deliberate targets.
“For nearly 22 months,” Gaza’s Ministry of Health said, “Israel, with full American support, has waged a war of annihilation, killing over 191,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and displacing hundreds of thousands.”
But perhaps nothing captures the cruelty of this war more than the loss of a man like Dr. Marwan al-Sultan, a man who devoted his life to saving others and was killed for doing exactly that.
Even in death, his white coat remains a symbol: not just of medicine, but of resistance, of dignity, of a people who refuse to let humanity be buried under rubble.
