Overview

A powerful eyewitness account of the genocide in Gaza by an extraordinary young writer and general physician. Five days before 7 October 2023, a young Palestinian doctor returns to Gaza, having completed his medical studies abroad. His family gathers to celebrate his achievements and to welcome him home. On 11 October, forty-two members of his extended family are killed in an airstrike, and thus begins his incredible story of survival and service to his people. For more than eight months, Dr Ezzideen Shehab volunteers at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, witnessing at first hand catastrophic injuries and deaths, and working under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. Constantly targeted by the Israeli Defence Forces, the Indonesian hospital is ultimately destroyed. In December 2024, Dr Shehab co-founds the Al-Rahma Medical Clinic to provide free medical care in northern Gaza, where no functioning hospitals remain. The clinic is damaged multiple times, and in July 2025 is forced to close. Dr Shehab and his family are displaced for the fifth time, with no hope of ever returning to their demolished home in the north of Gaza. In his testimony of these months, Dr Shehab’s clarity and humanity shine through. He describes the people he treats, the devastation of his homeland, and his incomprehension at the world’s silence in the face of the unfolding genocide. Diary of a Young Doctor is a deeply moving and unforgettable work that bears witness to one of the most shameful periods in recent history.

Full Product Details

9781917189705

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘I literally fell to my knees and wept on finishing this book. As the doctor suggests the whole world should. Nothing has conveyed to us so powerfully the unbearable shame of being safe, being complicit, or being silent, while Gaza is murdered, while Gaza is starved and destroyed. This is more than literature or reportage, this is a reckoning with the undeniable failure of humanity. The world has chosen to fail Gaza and this book is a staggeringly powerful witness to and indictment of that evil. It is a real-time account from inside the atrocity and it should shatter indifference. It is a miracle of resilience, clarity, and truth. It reckons with the unfathomable and should shake the souls of millions. It might stun you, but please, not to silence. Scream the doctor’s words from the rooftops. Scream his right to live.’ -- Max Porter ‘To open this book is to descend into the circles of hell and witness human beings enduring the unendurable … In stories that could have come straight from the Old Testament … The beauty of Shehab’s prose and the depth of his compassion for the people he tries to help makes his diary a document of heartrending power and eloquence.’ -- Fiona Capp * The Age * ‘Ezzideen’s book is essential reading for every single person alive today, and every person in the future looking back on this haunting time. This book is a diary, but it is also poetry, and art, and hope, and a call to courage. It is a remarkable achievement in so many ways and it will irrevocably change all who read it. Please, I urge you, read it, read it again, give it to a friend, give it to a stranger. Just read it. The world owes a huge debt to Ezzideen.’ -- Lucia Osborne-Crowley ‘Dr Ezzideen’s harrowing but tender stories of the barely living will haunt me long after the images of death and destruction fade. Beneath the political rubble there are human beings, enduring the unendurable, and Ezzideen bears witness with mounting grief and fury, his words unveiling the true horrors of this genocide even as his own heart and soul splinter across the page.’ -- Lauren Dubois ‘With every entry, Ezzideen stitches together what is left of our humanity and reminds us of the terrible privilege of bearing witness. His empathy, honour, and heart represent the best of us and is a rallying call to use our own power to stop this genocide and to fight for those rendered trapped by injustice, dehumanisation and cowardice.’ -- Amy Remeikis ‘What a privilege to read these words from a brave and compassionate witness to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. When language is often insufficient to describe the daily horrors, Dr Ezzideen Shehab conjures a world of grief, resistance and unimaginable resilience. Read this book.’ -- Antony Loewenstein ‘Written under siege and in the shadow of unrelenting violence, Dr Ezzideen Shehab‘s words carry both the clinical precision of a doctor and the searing intimacy of a witness. These are writings of unbearable clarity, carved out of catastrophe, that will not allow the world to look away.’ -- Sara M Saleh ‘Ezzideen Shehab’s diary is the literature of a genocide; and as the literature of other genocides has changed minds and worlds, so too Shehab’s writing must change the humanity of each reader who encounters his words. Shehab writes with the precision of his medical training, the humility of his Hippocratic oath, and the soaring poetics of the Palestinian people that may only be extinguished with the last of our breath. His entries are ethnographic, precise, standing in for the aperture of a camera when the images of Gaza’s destruction can no longer tell the story of its people. What Shehab must document is profoundly painful – the anatomy of deprivation, hunger, silence, and despair, and the monolithic and calculated cruelty of Israel as the 21st century’s most infamous genocidaires. It is my duty, as it is your duty, to carry the record he has made to “the tribunal of eternity”: though we may all be found wanting, Shehab’s shining prose is an invitation to fight with every part of your being. As his account confirms, nothing less will do.’ -- Micaela Sahhar

Author Information

Dr Ezzideen Shehab is a young doctor from northern Gaza, born in 1995 and raised in Jabalia. He went to Arafat Gifted Secondary School and did his medical training in Iran at the University of Isfahan. He returned to Gaza just a few days before 7 October 2023 and has provided medical care to its people ever since.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available