Gaza Herald – In Gaza, the white coat has become a witness not only to the suffering of patients, but to the personal grief of the doctors, nurses and paramedics struggling to keep the enclave’s shattered healthcare system alive. Medical workers who spend their days treating Palestinians wounded in Israeli attacks have repeatedly found themselves receiving the bodies of their own children and relatives.
The tragedy struck Gaza’s medical community again on September 19 when Basir al-Bursh, the eldest son of Dr. Munir al-Bursh, director-general of Gaza’s Ministry of Health, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in the al-Zahra area west of Jabalia refugee camp.
Images showed Munir al-Bursh carrying his son’s body after the attack. The loss was not his first: his young daughter, Jinan, was killed in an Israeli strike in December 2023 that also wounded him. Israel’s military acknowledged targeting Basir and described him as a militant, but provided no further details supporting the claim.
Al-Bursh’s grief echoes that of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, whose son Ibrahim was killed near the hospital in October 2024. Abu Safiya performed funeral prayers for his son before continuing his work at the hospital. Israeli forces later detained him during their December 2024 raid on Kamal Adwan, and he remains in Israeli custody.
Perhaps one of the most devastating examples came in May 2025. Dr. Alaa al-Najjar, a pediatrician at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, was treating Palestinian children when an Israeli strike hit her family home. Nine of her ten children were killed. Their bodies were brought to the same hospital where their mother had been working to save the lives of other children.
Her husband, Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar, was critically wounded in the same strike and later died from his injuries. Their surviving son, Adam, was also seriously wounded.
Other Gaza healthcare workers have endured similar losses while continuing to work through repeated Israeli attacks, displacement and the collapse of medical infrastructure. Ambulance crews and hospital staff have received news of the deaths of family members while treating casualties, forcing medical workers into an almost unimaginable position: attempting to save the lives of strangers while mourning their own families.
The scale of the devastation extends across Gaza’s medical community. UN data published earlier this year reported that more than 1,700 health workers had been killed since October 2023, while others have been detained or remain missing.
Among the most prominent was orthopedic surgeon Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital, who died in Israeli detention in 2024. His death prompted reports of torture and mistreatment and demands for an independent investigation.
Behind these numbers are doctors who have buried children, nurses who have lost entire families and paramedics who have continued responding to attacks while their own relatives lay beneath the rubble.
For Gaza’s healthcare workers, the distinction between caregiver and victim has increasingly disappeared. They treat the wounded while wounded themselves, receive the bodies of their own children in the hospitals where they work, and return to patients because there are too few medical professionals left to take their place.
In Gaza, the white coat no longer shields those who wear it from war. Too often, it has become the uniform in which doctors save another family’s child while mourning their own.
