The Electronic Intifada 2 February 2025
Israel has left northern Gaza a wasteland.
APA imagesOn 12 December, just over a month before a ceasefire went into imperfect effect in Gaza, the Israeli military killed Dr. Said Jouda, 68, while he was traveling from Kamal Adwan Hospital to Al-Awda Hospital to perform surgery.
Accounts differ about whether it was an Israeli tank, an Israeli sniper or a quadcopter, but his killing brought to 1,057, the number of health workers killed in Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza since October 2023, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry.
What is not in doubt is Jouda’s dedication and heroism.
Jouda could have evacuated to the south when Israel ordered all residents to leave northern Gaza at the outset of its all-out assault there in early October 2024.
By early November, at least 100,000 people, including doctors, had fled south amid a ferocious Israeli attack that has left the north a wasteland.
Jouda could have left.
He stayed, choosing to stand with his fellow medical professionals to aid his community during Israel’s genocide.
He was the only orthopedic surgeon left working in the north. And despite the immense danger, Jouda never wavered in his commitment to treating his patients. He regularly moved between medical facilities in the north, working with what limited medical staff and scarce resources were available.
Relatives had urged him to leave several times, but he told his wife: “If you could see the unseen, you would choose the reality, and my first and last choice is to stay and work.”
“No matter how much I talk about him, words will always fail me. He tirelessly worked for us as a family and for the Palestinian cause,” his wife Raeda told The Electronic Intifada in December.
Nakba lesson
Perhaps his refusal to leave – like for so many others – was rooted in his personal history.
Jouda’s parents were forcibly displaced from the city of Ashdod to Gaza in 1948 during the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that saw some two thirds of the Palestinian people forced into refugeehood to clear the way for the “Jewish state” of Israel.
That is what “never again” means to Palestinians and suggestions now from US President Donald Trump to enact another Nakba will be met with the same refusal from Palestinians that at least in part seems to have motivated Jouda’s refusal to leave his home in Gaza.
Jouda refused to leave even despite the heavy price paid by his own family.On 12 November 2024, Jouda’s nephew Muhammad was killed in an Israeli attack on a street near his house in Beit Lahia in the north. Without losing composure or stepping back from his duties, Jouda announced the loss of his young relative himself before leading prayers for the funeral.
Less than a month later, on 4 December, while in the operating room, Ala Qaoud, the patient he was treating, told him he had witnessed the killing of the doctor’s youngest son, Majd, 24.
“I came out of the operation and, while still under the influence of anesthesia, I was rambling saying, I had placed Majd under a tree so that at least his body would remain in its shade,” Qaoud said later to The Electronic Intifada.
Jouda was killed eight days after Majd died.
Relentless attacks
The Israeli military “deliberately killed my father,” a second of Jouda’s three sons, Muhammad told The Electronic Intifada in December.
Speaking before the ceasefire came into effect, the younger Jouda warned that more would follow.
“He was not the first, and he might not be the last if the world continues watching these crimes against humanity in silence.”
Israel’s attacks on the health care sector in Gaza over 15 months of genocidal aggression were “relentless,” according to Doctors Without Borders.
More than 1,000 health care workers have been killed, health facilities and equipment, including hospitals, clinics and ambulances, were deliberately targeted and at least 310 medical staff have been arbitrarily detained, including Jouda’s erstwhile colleague, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya.
Several health workers have died in Israel’s prison camps over the past 15 months, including Dr Adnan al Bursh, the head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital, and Eyad Al-Rantisi, head of the obstetrics department at Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Ahmad Majd is a writer in Gaza.
