One thread, every collection
Medics & Humanitarians
Doctors, paramedics, surgeons, aid workers — and the record of their targeting.
51 entries across 8 collections
The Death of Yasser Arafat
2004
After two years confined by Israeli forces to his wrecked Ramallah compound, the PLO chairman dies in a French military hospital. The cause remains disputed; an era of Palestinian politics ends with him.
The flour massacre
2024
In the pre-dawn dark of 29 February 2024, Israeli forces opened fire on crowds waiting for a rare aid convoy on Gaza City's coastal road. Gaza's Health Ministry counted at least 112 killed and more than 750 wounded — people who had come out in the cold, in a starving north, for flour.
Abdel Jalil Al-Fayoumi
Survivor of the 'flour massacre' on al-Rashid Street
Abdel Jalil Al-Fayoumi, 22, survived the February 29, 2024 'flour massacre,' in which at least 112 Palestinians were killed around an aid convoy in Gaza City; after hours of searching he found the body of his 15-year-old cousin Moatasem at Al-Shifa Hospital.
Adnan al-Bursh
Head of orthopedic surgery at al-Shifa Hospital
Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, 50, head of orthopedics at al-Shifa Hospital, died in Israeli custody at Ofer prison four months after soldiers detained him while he was on duty at al-Awda Hospital; a UN expert said he had reportedly been beaten and bore signs of torture, and demanded an independent international investigation.
Anas al-Sharif
Al Jazeera correspondent in Gaza City
Anas al-Sharif, one of Gaza's most prominent journalists, was killed with five colleagues in an Israeli missile strike on the Al Jazeera tent outside al-Shifa Hospital; Israel claimed responsibility, alleging he led a Hamas cell — an accusation CPJ said lacked credible evidence and fit a documented pattern.
Bilal el-Essi
28-year-old killed seeking flour for his family
Bilal el-Essi, a football-mad 28-year-old from Gaza City who was quick with a joke, went to the seafront Al Rashid Road with two of his brothers in the pre-dawn dark of 29 February 2024, joining hundreds waiting in the cold for a rare convoy of food aid. He was killed when Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd — the aid-convoy killings Gaza's Health Ministry says left at least 112 people dead and more than 750 wounded, remembered as the flour massacre.
Fadi al-Wahidi
Al Jazeera cameraman
Fadi al-Wahidi was shot in the neck by Israeli fire while filming near Jabalia refugee camp, leaving him paralyzed; Israel blocked his medical evacuation for 122 days despite appeals from UN experts, before he was finally evacuated to Egypt on February 8, 2025.
Ghassan Abu Sitta
British-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon
Ghassan Abu Sitta spent 43 days operating under siege in Gaza's al-Ahli and al-Shifa hospitals at the start of the war, then became one of the conflict's most prominent medical witnesses, giving testimony to British police and evidence to the International Criminal Court.
Hind Rajab
Six-year-old from Gaza City
Hind Rajab, six, was killed with six relatives when Israeli tank fire hit their car as they fled Tel al-Hawa, after she spent hours on the phone with Red Crescent dispatchers pleading for rescue; the two paramedics sent to save her were also killed, and forensic investigators concluded a tank fired on the car from as close as 13 metres.
Hussam Abu Safiya
Pediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan Hospital
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was detained when Israeli forces raided and shut down Kamal Adwan Hospital — the last major functioning hospital in northern Gaza — and has been held without charge or trial under Israel's 'unlawful combatant' law ever since.
Ibrahim Zaher
Al Jazeera camera operator in Gaza City
Ibrahim Zaher, 25, an Al Jazeera camera operator, was killed with four colleagues when an Israeli missile struck the network's tent at al-Shifa Hospital — the channel's entire Gaza City team, lost in a single strike that press-freedom groups called a targeted attack.
Mariam Abu Daqqa
Freelance visual journalist for The Associated Press
Mariam Abu Daqqa, 33, was one of five journalists killed in an Israeli 'double-tap' strike on Nasser Hospital that killed at least 20 people; a second missile hit journalists and rescue workers responding to the first strike, in an attack captured live on video.
Marwan al-Sultan
Cardiologist and director of the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza
Dr. Marwan al-Sultan, 49, director of Gaza's Indonesian Hospital and one of the last two cardiologists in the Strip, was killed on July 2, 2025, when an Israeli airstrike struck the rented Gaza City apartment where his displaced family was sheltering; his wife, a daughter, his sister and his son-in-law were killed with him, and the Israeli military said it had struck a 'key terrorist' and was reviewing harm to civilians.
Mohammed Qreiqeh
Al Jazeera correspondent in Gaza City
Mohammed Qreiqeh, 33, gave his last broadcast minutes before an Israeli missile hit the journalists' tent at al-Shifa Hospital, killing him with correspondent Anas al-Sharif, cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal, and other media workers; UN experts called the strike a deliberate attempt to silence reporting from Gaza City.
Rakan al-Najjar
Ten-year-old killed with eight of his siblings in the strike on the al-Najjar family home
Rakan, ten, was one of nine children of doctors Alaa and Hamdi al-Najjar killed when an Israeli airstrike hit the family home in Khan Younis; his name — Rakan Hamdi Yahya al-Najjar, ten years old — appears on the Gaza health authorities' list of the war dead published by The Guardian.
Razan al-Najjar
Volunteer paramedic during Gaza's Great March of Return
Razan al-Najjar, 21, a volunteer medic treating protesters at the Gaza boundary fence, was fatally shot by Israeli fire as she stood with fellow medics about 25 meters from the fence in her medical uniform; a B'Tselem investigation concluded she was deliberately targeted, and spatial analysis commissioned by The New York Times traced the shot to a sniper's position at the fence.
Sidra al-Najjar
The baby of the al-Najjar family, killed with eight of her siblings in the strike on their home
Sidra, the infant daughter of doctors Alaa and Hamdi al-Najjar, was killed with eight of her siblings on May 23, 2025, when an Israeli airstrike destroyed the family home in Khan Younis while her mother was on duty at Nasser Hospital; CNN, citing the children's cousin, described her as the breastfed baby of the family and reported the missing infant as seven months old — the Guardian and Drop Site News instead identified the family's six-month-old as her sister Sayden.
Yahya al-Najjar
Twelve-year-old killed with eight of his siblings in the strike on the al-Najjar family home
Yahya, twelve, was the eldest of the nine children of doctors Alaa and Hamdi al-Najjar killed when an Israeli airstrike destroyed the family home in Khan Younis; his mother, a pediatrician on duty at Nasser Hospital, ran home to find the house on fire, and his father died of his wounds nine days later.
Yasser Mamdouh El-Fady
Journalist shot dead by a sniper while covering the siege of Nasser Hospital
Yasser Mamdouh El-Fady, 40, a journalist with the Kan'an News Agency, was killed by sniper fire near Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis as Israeli forces besieged the city's largest functioning hospital; UNESCO's Director-General condemned the killing and demanded an investigation.
Zomi Frankcom
Australian aid worker killed with six World Central Kitchen colleagues
Lalzawmi 'Zomi' Frankcom, 43, of Melbourne, was one of seven World Central Kitchen workers killed when Israeli drones struck their convoy in Gaza; an Australian government inquiry found the attack resulted from serious failures of IDF procedures, mistaken identification and errors in decision-making.
Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi
Pediatrician and co-founder of Hamas, killed three weeks after succeeding Ahmed Yassin · 1947–2004
The pediatrician from Yibna, a refugee at six months old, who was one of the seven founders of Hamas in 1987, spokesman of the Marj al-Zuhur deportees, and was killed by Israeli missiles on 17 April 2004, twenty-six days after succeeding Ahmed Yassin.
Eyad al-Sarraj
Psychiatrist and founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme · 1944–2013
Gaza's first practising psychiatrist, who built mental health care under occupation into a form of human rights work.
Fathi Shaqaqi
Physician and founder of the Islamic Jihad Movement, assassinated in Malta in 1995 · 1951–1995
The physician from Rafah refugee camp, son of a family expelled from Zarnuqa, who founded the Islamic Jihad Movement and was shot dead by Mossad agents on the island of Malta on 26 October 1995.
George Habash
Physician, founder of the Arab Nationalist Movement and the PFLP · 1925–2008
The physician from Lydda, expelled with his town in 1948, who founded the Arab Nationalist Movement and then the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Haidar Abdel Shafi
Physician and head of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference · 1919–2007
Gaza physician who founded the Red Crescent Society in Gaza and headed the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid peace conference.
Mustafa Barghouti
Physician, founder of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society and general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative · 1954–
The Moscow-trained physician who built the Palestinian Medical Relief Society into a health service reaching over a million patients a year, co-founded the Palestinian National Initiative with Edward Said and Haidar Abdel Shafi, and came second to Abbas in the 2005 presidential election.
Razan al-Najjar
Volunteer paramedic · 1996–2018
A 21-year-old volunteer paramedic from Khan Younis, shot dead by an Israeli sniper while tending to wounded protesters in Gaza in 2018.
Tawfiq Canaan
Physician and ethnographer · 1882–1964
Jerusalem physician who documented Palestinian folk life — amulets, saints' shrines, and popular medicine — in foundational works of early twentieth-century ethnography.
Wadie Haddad
Physician and head of the PFLP's external operations branch · 1927–1978
Physician, co-founder of the Arab Nationalist Movement and the PFLP, and the architect of its aircraft hijackings — expelled by his own front, killed by poison in 1978.
Eyad El-Sarraj: The real heroes are the victims
Eyad El-Sarraj
I am proud and happy to receive this prize, but I consider that the real heroes are the victims of violence, torture and war.
Rana Nashashibi: I'd rather build a house than offer counselling
Rana Nashashibi
Next time I go to Gaza, I won't go as psychologist. I will go as a builder.
Rita Giacaman: We normalize the abnormal
Rita Giacaman
It is not enough to count dead bodies; we need to tally the effects of war by finding out what happens to the living.
Samah Jabr: There is no "post-traumatic" safety
Samah Jabr
In Palestine, traumatic threats are ongoing and enduring. There is no "post-traumatic" safety.
The Arab Nationalist Movement
ANM · founded 1951
Founded by medical students at the American University of Beirut who had watched their own towns emptied in 1948, on the premise that Arab unity was the road to the liberation of Palestine. Its Palestine Section became, after the defeat of June 1967, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine
Islamic Jihad · founded c. 1980 (organised in Palestine from November 1981)
Founded by Palestinian students in Egypt who concluded that they had found nationalists without Islam and Islamists without Palestine. Its founder Fathi Shaqaqi, a paediatrician from Rafah, was assassinated in Malta in October 1995; the movement has stayed out of elections and out of government ever since.
The Palestinian National Initiative
al-Mubadara · founded 17 June 2002
Founded at the height of the Second Intifada by a physician, an elder statesman of Gaza and a literary critic dying in New York, on the argument that Palestinians needed a democratic third force between Fatah's corruption and Hamas's armed maximalism — and that the resistance most likely to succeed was unarmed.
"Anyone else struggling with work-genocide balance?" — Gaza, and the people watching it from outside
Federica Cavazzoni, Ala' Mustafa, Cindy Sousa, Ola H Abuward, Mona Ameen Nofal and Guido Veronese, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
Thirty testimonies collected between November 2023 and June 2024 — fifteen from people in the Gaza Strip and fifteen from mental health professionals in Europe — in the only peer-reviewed study this archive has found that puts the experience of living the catastrophe and the experience of watching it in the same frame, in that order.
An Australian cohort, and how thin this evidence base still is
Susan J Rees, Tyson Whitten, Alvin Kuowei Tay, Aino Suomi, Batool Moussa, Fatima Hassoun, Nawal Nadar and Derrick Silove, The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific
A prospective cohort of 410 women in Australia, assessed before and during the war, finding significantly greater increases in panic-disorder symptoms, and poorer quality of life, among those connected to Lebanon, Gaza and the Palestinian territories. It is the only prospective before-and-after design this archive could locate — and the near-absence of anything measuring Palestinians specifically is itself the finding.
Gaza Community Mental Health Programme — the Palestinian clinical record
Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP), Gaza City, Deir El-Balah and Khan Younis
The independent Palestinian mental health organisation founded in Gaza in 1990 by the psychiatrist Dr Eyad El-Sarraj. It is the longest-running clinical record of what the blockade and the successive assaults have done to people in the Strip, kept by Palestinians treating Palestinians.
Know Their Names: the children killed in Israel's war on Gaza
Al Jazeera Interactive
Al Jazeera's interactive memorial to the more than ten thousand children killed in Gaza — built from the Ministry of Health's named lists, presented child by child with names and ages, so that a statistic that defeats comprehension becomes a register of individual lives. One of the essential companion records to this archive's own Registry.
Samah Jabr — Radiance in Pain and Resilience, and the recorded lectures
Samah Jabr, Wakefield Press
The 2025 essay collection by the Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr, with a foreword by Gabor Maté — and a short list of recorded talks by her, each one opened and checked so the speaker, title and host are exactly as stated here.
The Death Toll — the documented count and the undercount debate
FALASTEEN.AI documentation desk
The Gaza Ministry of Health's documented count — more than 72,500 reported killed by late April 2026 — is the floor, not the ceiling: peer-reviewed analyses using independent methods converge on substantial undercounting, while excess-mortality projections run far higher. This entry records what is documented, what is estimated, and by whom.
The same people, measured three times — psychological distress in Gaza, 2020 to 2025
Curdin Brugger, Bassam Abu Hamad, Jan Hattendorf, Mirko S Winkler and Nicole Probst-Hensch, eClinicalMedicine
A longitudinal population-based cohort in the Gaza Strip that surveyed the same 677 adults in 2020, 2023 and 2025. High psychological distress went from 19.5% before the war to 67.2% in January 2025 — a rise measured within the same people, not across different samples.
The West Bank is not a bystander — trauma among Palestinian undergraduates during the war on Gaza
Israa Baker, Azzam Zrineh, Mohammad AL Qadire, Mayyasah Ramadan, Hameeda Abu Sneineh, Elham Kateeb and Salam Khatib, Scientific Reports
A cross-sectional study of 819 undergraduates recruited primarily at seven West Bank universities, conducted February to April 2024. 87.2% reported psychological distress and 51.9% met criteria for PTSD or complex PTSD — and 97.4% had not received specialist mental health support during the conflict period.
Trapped — Gaza's children before this war, after fifteen years of blockade
Save the Children International
Save the Children's 2022 report, a repeat of its own 2018 research, consulting 488 children and 168 caregivers in the Gaza Strip. Four in five children reported living with depression, grief and fear — sixteen months before October 2023. It is the baseline the current figures should be read against.
Unbearable suffering — the Palestinian clinicians' account of what Gaza is doing to the mind
Hanna Kienzler, Gwyn Daniel, Weeam Hammoudeh, Rana Nashashibi, Yasser Abu-Jamei and Rita Giacaman, BMJ Global Health
A commentary in BMJ Global Health written by clinicians and researchers at Birzeit University's Institute of Community and Public Health, the Palestinian Counseling Centre and the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, arguing that the psychological consequences of the assault on Gaza cannot be held inside individual diagnosis, and that justice is a precondition of healing.
UNRWA — UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
UNRWA
Established by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) in December 1949, UNRWA provides education, health care, and relief to millions of registered Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza.
WHO Health Emergency Appeal 2026 — one million people needing mental health support
World Health Organization, occupied Palestinian territory
WHO's 2026 emergency appeal for the occupied Palestinian territory, which puts the mental health need in the Gaza Strip at an estimated one million people, and records that West Bank mental health needs are acute — set against a health system in which only half of Gaza's hospitals are partially functional and 48% of primary care centres are operating.
WHO occupied Palestinian territory — health system support and emergency response
World Health Organization — occupied Palestinian territory
The WHO office for the occupied Palestinian territory supports the Palestinian health system, coordinates the health response to emergencies in Gaza and the West Bank, and publishes situation reports and data on attacks on health care.
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