Photograph Source: Screen Shot from Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) Facebook video

On Thursday, December 25th, 2025, during Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians, 168 students graduated from medical school, in Gaza. Wearing their white coats, they stood in front of the ruined façade of what was formerly Gaza’s largest hospital, the Al-Shifa Medical Complex. As a backdrop, the destroyed building realistically conveys perils the graduates faced while earning their medical degrees. Throughout the last two years of their studies, they risked assassination, injury, arrest, imprisonment, and torture, as well as attacks on their own family members.

Israel has waged a systematic campaign to destroy Gaza’s health care delivery and to kill or imprison health care professionals. From October of 2023 to October of 2025, The World Health Organization documented687 Israeli attacks on Gazan health care facilities and 211 attacks on ambulances. These attacks killed 985 people. In the same time period, Israel detained over 306 health care workers.

Health Care Workers Watch – Palestine, a nongovernmental organization, reports that 95 Palestinian health care workers are still in prison, eighty of whom are from Gaza. Prisoners who have been released from detention report........

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