'I am a doctor, and I cannot save a child'

An excerpt from 'Diary of a Young Doctor' by Gaza physician Dr Ezzideen Shehab

Dr Ezzideen Shehab is a young doctor from northern Gaza, born in 1995 and raised in Jabalia. He went to Arafat Gifted Secondary School and did his medical training in Iran at the University of Isfahan. He returned to Gaza just a few days before 7 October 2023 and has provided medical care to its people ever since.

The below is an excerpt from his upcoming book, Diary of a Young Doctor, available to purchase now through Readers and Writers Against Genocide.

17 July 2025

I am a doctor. And I cannot save a child. There: I have said it. What is a doctor, if not a liar with trembling hands? What is medicine, if not a prayer whispered into the dark, hoping something, anything, will answer?

Four months ago, the child fell ill. His name is Qasem. I say ‘child’, but I mean something more: I mean a flicker of grace in a world that has spat on grace, trampled it beneath tanks, suffocated it beneath bureaucratic signatures and steel walls. Almost two years ago, a bomb fell at four in the morning. A single bomb: that was all it took to erase forty-two names from the Book of the Living. My family, every last one of them, turned to silence in the span of a breath.

But Qasem lived. He and his mother crawled out from under the ruins, not because of skill or science, but because of some strange divine arithmetic I still do not understand. Surely the universe would not be so precise in its cruelty as to spare a mother’s life only so she could outlive all four of her children, and watch the last one vanish by inches.

Qasem bruises now. Not from injury, but from breath, from pressure, from life. His gums bleed. His tiny hands shake. His blood turns against him in slow, merciless rebellion. They call it Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura. An elegant name, too elegant for something so wretched.

And I, his doctor, his cousin, his useless, weeping doctor, have nothing for him. No treatment. No transfusion. No hospital bed. Only forms, permits, border checkpoints, and a phone that does not ring. We applied for his transfer. They marked his file Urgent: Category A. But no one comes.

Meanwhile, the boy lies in a tent. Yes: a tent. There is sand in his hair. Insects at his feet. He no longer cries the way children cry. He cries like a man: quiet, long, accepting. His eyes are not angry. They are tired. Each morning, I go to him, like a priest visiting a parishioner. I kneel at his bedside, not to heal, but to witness. To bear the unbearable truth: That a world which allows this is not a world that loves children. That I am not a doctor, but a mourner-in-waiting. That Gaza is not a place, but a diagnosis.

Qasem is not alone. There are over 11,000 patients in Gaza: their names neatly stacked in files, their diagnoses typed in black ink, waiting on desks that do not move. More than 5000 of them have cancer. They do not ask for mercy, only for permission. They wait for chemotherapy, for radiation, for one open gate. And I, the man with the stethoscope and the shaking hands, cannot save even one. The death is not sudden. It comes in paper cuts, in stamps, in silences. It comes wrapped in the civility of diplomacy and the white lies of delay.

No: this is not war. This is accounting. And every day we wait, one more number is subtracted from the future.

18 July 2025

It was 1:15 a.m. And I was not asleep; no, I was wrestling with myself, with the ghosts of my own insignificance, with that terrible heaviness that descends after long hours of service, when the world is dark, and your soul is darker still. And then, a cry. A woman’s cry. Not a scream, not a call for help. No, this was something else. It was the cry of existence itself. Raw. Ancient. Infinite. As though pain had taken human form and now walked barefoot down my street.

I staggered to the window. The street was devoured by darkness, so complete it felt like God Himself had looked away. She moved through it, trembling, crying. Each sob a shudder against the very order of things.

A man called out to her. His voice old, uncertain. ‘Why are you crying, daughter? What’s happened?’

She said: ‘I’m displaced.’

Only that. But the weight of that word. That one word held in it the screams of nations, the shame of kings, the silence of heaven.

‘I lost my family before sunset,’ she said, ‘and I stopped here to rest. I fell asleep. Now I’m alone. I’m afraid of the dark. I’m afraid of the dogs.’ And she pleaded. To strangers. To men at windows. To the night itself. ‘Walk me,’ she said, ‘just walk me to where they might be.’

And finally, a few came down. Young men, boys perhaps, carrying more doubt than courage. I stood at the window. I watched. And I did nothing. No, worse. I felt. I felt the shame of standing above. Of not crying when I should. She was young. Maybe twenty. She must have had a home once. A real one. With warm tea and soft lamps and parents who argued gently over dinner. They would never have let her walk alone.

But war takes everything. Everything. It takes the house and leaves the ceiling. It takes the bread and leaves the hunger. It takes the father and leaves the shadow. And worst of all, it takes dignity. Quietly. Silently. Like a thief who knows exactly what you value most. There is no nobility in war. No poetry. No glory. Only what remains after the screaming stops: Dust, silence, and the unspoken knowledge that something sacred has been desecrated.

This night, this woman, this moment of crying in the dark. It will not be recorded in any treaty. It will not be remembered in any speech. It will vanish. And that is the tragedy. For this was a war, too. A war without soldiers. A war without witnesses. A war fought in the soul of a woman afraid to walk alone.

Displacement, they call it. As if home were a folder to be misplaced. As if safety were a line on a map that moved by accident. But displacement is not just the loss of land. It is the exile of trust. It is the dismantling of silence. It is the breaking of the human frame, again and again, until what remains is not a woman or a man, but a being who simply continues, without hope, without rest, without question.

And for women, this exile comes wrapped in an even greater silence. Their fear, their wounds, their trembling dignity, it all remains hidden, swallowed by the thunder of men’s wars and men’s victories. They are not named in the headlines. But they bleed too. And often, they bleed alone. She was not crying only for herself. She was crying for all of us. For all the nights we chose silence over courage. For all the moments we watched and did not act. For every child lost to noise, and every woman abandoned to darkness.

I tell you: That night, something sacred walked barefoot in the street. And the world looked away.