Gaza doctor’s death in Israeli strike devastates medical community
The news that Marwan al-Sultan was killed this week in an Israeli airstrike hit Gaza’s doctors like a thunderbolt. Through 20 months of war, the cardiologist had become one of the conflict’s main narrators, describing to the world again and again the horrific scenes in his wards, even as he battled to keep the lights on at the hospital he managed in the north.
Now, videos from another hospital, just a few miles away, show how Sultan’s young son gulped through sobs as he stood over his father’s body, so anguished in his grief that he barely noticed the hands that reached out to console him. Beside him was the director of Gaza’s Health Ministry, Munir al-Bursh, who hugged the boy before beginning to cry quietly himself.
Relatives of Sultan, the director of the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalya, said that the strike on Wednesday had targeted the Gaza City apartment where he was staying, also killing the doctor’s wife, sister, youngest daughter and his son-in-law.
In a statement, the Israeli military said that it had struck “a key terrorist from the Hamas terrorist organization,” but provided no more information. “The claim that as a result of the strike uninvolved civilians were harmed is being reviewed,” it said.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has devastated the enclave’s health care system, damaging and destroying its clinics and hospitals, killing or detaining hundreds of medical workers and regularly preventing the entry of medicines and other critical supplies. Israeli officials have accused Hamas, which ruled the Gaza Strip and attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people, of operating from within or underneath local hospitals, but often with little evidence to back up the claims. More than 57,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
In June, about a month after Israeli warplanes pummeled the area around the European Hospital in Khan Younis, in a bid to kill Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar, the military showed a small group of international journalists what they said was his hiding place: a narrow tunnel that burrowed under the facility. There were no known entry points from inside the hospital, however, which remains out of service.
The closures have escalated the health care crisis so sharply that it is commonplace now for doctors in overflowing wards to treat casualties on bloody floors as the limited supply of anesthetic runs dry. Sometimes medics treat and stitch up wounds, only for the patients to die later from the infections that set in.
“Nearly all public hospitals in Gaza are shut down or gutted by months of hostilities and restrictions on the entry of critical medicine, supplies and equipment,” the International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday in a statement. “The few medical facilities that continue to function – including the Red Cross Field Hospital – are overwhelmed and running dangerously low on essential supplies, including fuel, and even body bags.”
On social media and in messages to Washington Post reporters, Sultan provided over the course of the war a harrowing account of how Gaza got to this place. In the early days of the conflict, as Israeli troops readied a wide-scale ground invasion, Sultan described the shock of the moment inside the Indonesian Hospital as like being “in a dream.” So heavy was the influx of casualties from Israel’s bombardment that he barely left the hospital – and he already feared being killed in the strikes if he did.
By November, Gaza’s telecommunications network was on its knees and Sultan said that his staff had been forced to use loudspeakers to direct medics to the Jabalya refugee camp, where hundreds of civilians had been buried under rubble in one of the war’s deadliest strikes.
“An entire densely populated square was targeted at a time when people were sitting safely at home,” he said in a message. “People who work with us now have received their relatives who were killed or injured.”
Within weeks, the Indonesian Hospital itself was under siege and almost out of equipment, and Sultan issued the first of what would become a series of urgent appeals to the international community, urging the protection of his facility and team.
The Israeli military has accused the hospital of links to militancy on several occasions throughout the war. During a raid on the hospital complex in December 2023, it said that a car that was used to carry hostages from Israel into Gaza on Oct. 7 had been located inside one of the parking areas. A year later, in December 2024, it accused militants of launching attacks on Israeli troops from an area near to, but not inside, the hospital compound.
Sultan’s family rejected any accusation that he had been involved in militancy. “He is not a member of the movement or any other group. He just cared about the patients and treated them,” his daughter Lobna said Wednesday, in an interview broadcast by the al-Arabiya television channel.
A photograph of the cardiologist’s badly damaged apartment showed that the floor he was on appeared to have been specifically targeted, with the other floors left largely undamaged.
“Why,” Lobna asked. “Can someone answer me? What did they do?”
In one of Sultan’s final messages to Post reporters, on May 14, he had listed the names of 21 people brought dead to the hospital, most no older than nine years old. Some of them had arrived in pieces, he said. “My dear sister, it’s hard, it’s really hard for me to describe to you all of these children’s injuries,” he said. “How can a child who weighs between 5 to 10kg bear a missile,” he asked.
Hadiki Habib, the chairman of the Jakarta-based relief organization that helped build the Indonesian Hospital, said that it was formally handed over to the Gaza Health Ministry in 2015. Sultan, Habib said by phone from Jakarta, became “a symbol” of the resilience of Gaza’s embattled people.
Sultan had been forced to flee the hospital twice – first during the raid in December 2023 and then in May 2025 as the Israeli army approached again and airstrikes sparked a large fire in the compound – but the hospital director never left northern Gaza or gave up on trying to keep the hospital open and caring for his patients, Habib said.
“He was known for his candor, spontaneity, and firm leadership – traits that shaped daily hospital management meetings, often filled with rigorous debates and always ending with camaraderie over coffee and shared meals,” he added.
In a tribute posted to social media Wednesday, Ezzideen Shehab, another doctor, said that Sultan had “walked among the wounded as if their pain were his own, which it was … When the children were brought in with limbs dangling like forgotten promises, he did not flee. He only looked to the heavens and whispered, ‘Prepare yourselves.’ ”
Photographs from Sultan’s social media before the war show the doctor in snapshots of a Gaza that no longer exists. In one, he is smiling as he holds up two juicy strawberries picked from Gaza’s blooming farmlands, most of which have been razed as part of Israel’s military operations.
In another image, taken ten days before the war, Sultan is seen at work, in dark green scrubs, alongside several colleagues after they had transferred a cardiology patient to the nearby al-Shifa Hospital. “A fruitful day is the day when you are accompanying the great people,” wrote Mustafa Naim, 31, another doctor, who posted the photograph on Facebook. Of the four men pictured that day, he was the only survivor left in Gaza, Naim said.
Naim said that Sultan had looked after him when he suffered a spinal injury during the war. “He used to say, ‘Since none of your family is here, we will take care of you – I’m by your side,’ ” Naim recalled.
In March, when Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza and cases of malnutrition spiked, Sultan refused to eat alone when he was at the hospital, Naim said. “He insisted on sharing meals with around 22 people.”
The cardiologist “fought not the war outside, but the greater war: the war against apathy,” Shehab wrote. “And still, he smiled. Not out of foolish hope, but out of something holier: defiance.”
“Do you know what it is to be cheerful in hell? That was his miracle. That was his rebellion.”
Loveluck reported from London, Mahfouz from Cairo, Haidamous from Beirut, and Berger from Jaffa. Mustafa Salim in Baghdad and Hazem Balousha in Hamilton, Ontario, contributed to this report.