Overview

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 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 first-hand catastrophic injuries and deaths, and working under the most difficult circumstances imaginable, including shortages of life-saving medicines and equipment. Constantly targeted by the IDF, 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 Al-Rahma 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. Throughout it all, Dr Shehab posts regular updates on the situation for his patients and for his people. His clarity and humanity shine bright as he describes those he treats, and his incomprehension at the unfolding genocide and the silence of the world in the face of the ongoing atrocities. Diary of a Young Doctor is an unforgettable testimony of one of the most shameful periods in recent history.

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.

‘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

‘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

‘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

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