Clayton Dalton writes:

Five months ago, when I was on a medical mission in northern Gaza, a Palestinian cardiologist named Marwan Sultan showed me what was left of the Indonesian Hospital, a hundred-bed facility that had been shelled and raided by Israeli forces. The building was riddled with shrapnel scars; its hallways were dark and cluttered with debris, and a cold wind blew through broken windows. Sultan, who directed the facility, was wearing a long white coat, a necktie, and rectangular glasses. He pointed out the twisted remains of the hospital’s generators. The operating rooms were being repaired, he said, but had no anesthesia.

Sultan was welcoming, but, after more than fifteen months of Israeli military operations in Gaza, he seemed profoundly worn down. I filmed with my smartphone as he pointed out a row of dialysis machines whose screens had been smashed in. Upstairs in the I.C.U., he showed me numerous other pieces of equipment that had been destroyed with bullets. He shook his head, speechless, with his palms turned up. When I described the damage to the Israeli military, or I.D.F., for a story published in April, a spokesperson said, “Claims that the IDF deliberately targets medical equipment are unequivocally false.”

A few months later, I gave a talk about what I witnessed in Gaza. I didn’t understand how destroying medical devices could advance any military objective. A dialysis machine isn’t a weapon, I said. A man in the audience raised his hand and asked, “How long can someone who needs dialysis live without it?” Days to weeks, I told him. “I think that’s how you turn a dialysis machine into a weapon,” he said.

On the afternoon of July 2nd, Sultan was killed by an Israeli missile along with his wife, a daughter, a sister, a niece, and a son-in-law. At the time, they were displaced from their home, staying with other families in a multistory apartment building near the Mediterranean. A surviving daughter, Lubna, has said that the “missile was dropped on his room exactly, on his place, on him precisely.” The rest of the apartment was intact, she said. In photographs of the damage, a gaping hole is visible at the site of the strike.

When I asked the Israeli military about Sultan’s killing, the I.D.F. said in a statement, without providing evidence, that it had “targeted a senior Hamas terrorist operative.” It refused to say whether Sultan was the target. “The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved civilians and takes all feasible precautions to minimize harm to uninvolved civilians,” the statement said. Sultan’s family has said that he had no association with any political group. “My father was just a doctor, just a human caring for patients,” his seventeen-year-old son, Ahmad, told an NBC News crew.

Sultan, who worked as a professor of medicine at the Islamic University of Gaza, was reportedly one of only two heart specialists left in northern Gaza. Colleagues described his killing as catastrophic for the medical community, particularly for medical trainees, who have kept the territory’s remaining hospitals running. “It is a huge loss for us,” Muneer al-Boursh, who directs Gaza’s health ministry, told me. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government of Gaza but is staffed by medical professionals. “I still cannot comprehend that he’s gone,” Boursh said.

During my time with Sultan, in February, there were reasons to be hopeful. Gaza was protected by a ceasefire, and aid was flowing in; tables piled with fresh fruit and vegetables lined the streets. Hospitals were able to replenish their supplies of antibiotics, sterile gauze, analgesics, and surgical equipment. I saw children playing hopscotch and swinging from downed power lines. I visited several warehouses in Gaza City where bundles of food were being calmly and efficiently distributed. “We hope that this is the end of the war so we can rebuild our hospital,” Sultan told me.

A month later, Israeli authorities blocked further aid from entering Gaza. On March 18th, Israel ended the ceasefire and resumed military attacks. In April, one of Sultan’s colleagues, a twenty-seven-year-old Egyptian surgeon named Mahmoud Abu Amsha, who was volunteering in Gaza, was killed in an air strike. Sultan texted me to say that he wasn’t sleeping because of nightly blasts. “We miss [a] very brave colleague,” he wrote. “Medical staff suffered a lot.”

A few weeks after that, the World Health Organization reported that the Indonesian Hospital was “out of service due to continued military presence.” A staff member was killed, the W.H.O. said, and almost all of the facility’s patients had to be evacuated. Generators that had been repaired were destroyed again. In its statement, the I.D.F. accused Hamas of “using hospital infrastructure and staff for terrorist activities.” It said that it “operates out of military necessity and in accordance with international law.” Boursh told me that he begged Sultan, “like a child begging their parents,” to leave. Sultan refused, Boursh said, because he wanted to stay with his patients.

Boursh alleged that Sultan was assassinated because of his position within Gaza’s health-care system. He said that Sultan’s salary came from the Palestinian Authority, in the West Bank, and not from Hamas; so did one of Sultan’s colleagues at the Indonesian Hospital. The colleague described Sultan as honorable—“a man without dust on him,” using an Arabic idiom. “They targeted him because he is a human, he is someone kind, and everyone in Gaza knew him,” a twentysomething medical student, whom I met during my trip there, told me in a voice note. The I.D.F. told me that it “does not target medical personnel or healthcare workers.”

According to Healthcare Workers Watch, a Palestinian non-governmental organization that has been cited in medical journals and international media reports, Sultan was the seventieth health-care worker killed in the Gaza Strip in the past fifty days alone. [Continue reading…]