Of all their seven children, Abed Elrahman Hamdouna’s parents worried about him the most during the war in Gaza. Hamdouna was a volunteer ambulance driver in northern Gaza, “risking his life to help people who were injured”, says his father, Hosny Hamdouna. They knew about the repeated Israeli attacks on Gaza’s health facilities which have claimed the lives of hundreds of healthcare workers.
So when a ceasefire was reached in October 2025, they were cautiously relieved. But that relief turned to shock after Hamdouna, a 31-year-old father of two, was killed in a reported drone strike west of Gaza City two weeks ago, as he was on his way to a family Ramadan iftar, to break fast with his brothers.
His death is a shocking reality check on the large numbers of civilians that continue to die in Gaza. Since the ceasefire was announced on 10 October last year, Israel has killed 677 and injured a further 1,800 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Israeli strikes in Gaza have averaged about 10 a day across the territory over the past five months.
“There’s no ceasefire,” says Hamdouna’s father. “It’s all talk, for the media. In reality, there’s no ceasefire.”
Hamdouna’s brothers, his wife and two young children were busy preparing maftoul, a Palestinian dish made of bulgur wheat, and meat for iftar. When his brother, Mohammed, tried to call to check where he was, there was no answer. “His battery must be dead,” he says he thought, knowing that his brother normally charged his phone at work.
Soon after, 20 minutes before iftar time, Mohammed got the news and immediately rushed to the hospital. En route his father was calling. Their parents had travelled to Egypt before the war started, got stuck there and hadn’t seen Hamdouna in more than two years. “I didn’t know what to tell him,” says Mohammed.
Hamdouna is one of 1,700 healthcare workers killed during the war in Gaza, including four killed during this latest ceasefire.
UN experts have said that “the targeted destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system” by Israel’s military “amounts to ‘medicide’” and accused Israel of “deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics and hospitals to wipe out medical care in the besieged enclave”.
“The Israeli occupation bears full responsibility for every humanitarian worker we have lost in Gaza and for the destruction of our ambulance and emergency capabilities,” says Fares Afana, the head of emergency services in northern Gaza, who says they have now lost almost 80% of their ambulances since the start of the war.
International organisations, including the UN, have found that Israel’s actions in Gaza, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed, are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide”. Amnesty International has said Israel is still committing genocide in Gaza even after the ceasefire “by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, without signalling any change in their intent”. More than 75,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Before the ceasefire, Hamdouna lived alongside other healthcare workers at the hospitals and centres where they were based, and were rarely able to see their families. Hamza Nabhan, a fourth-year medical student, says he often accompanied Hamdouna on runs to reach the injured, as the ambulances had become little more than transport vehicles and were not equipped for emergency care.
“I said it and I will continue to say it: the paramedics, the firefighters and the civil defence workers are the real heroes of this war and Abed Elrahman was one of those heroes.”
Nabhan says he had spoken to Hamdouna just a few hours before hearing the news that he had been killed. “How? Why? I couldn’t comprehend … it’s so difficult. Someone you love, you just talked to, suddenly disappears from your life.”
Before the war, Nabhan says he had aspirations of continuing his medical studies in Germany and had started learning the language. Now, he says he has reached a point of such despair that the only way to survive is to live moment by moment. “I think about how to wake up, charge my phone, fill my water container. I don’t think about tomorrow.”
Afana says that when the ceasefire came into effect last year they had been hopeful that healthcare workers would be safer. “Unfortunately this did not happen … it’s still a war zone.”
“We are weak. There is nothing we can do. Nothing is in our hands,” says Nabhan.