"They were laughing while beating me."

Today was my shift at the hospital.

Since our return to the Indonesian Hospital, I’ve been working side by side with two doctors. One of them was Dr. Mahmoud Abu Amsha.

This morning, he was late.
We called. No answer.
We waited. Still, no sign.

Then the news came, cruel and sudden: Mahmoud had been killed in an airstrike. His body was brought to the very hospital where we stood waiting for him in silence that no words could fill.

I’ve known Mahmoud not just as a colleague, but as a brother in the trenches.

When the Israeli army stormed northern Gaza and most doctors fled for their lives, Mahmoud stayed. He and Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya were the last to hold the line at Kamal Adwan Hospital. Mahmoud - the only remaining surgeon - worked tirelessly in a place that had become more graveyard than hospital.

From inside, he sent me voice notes. Fragments of despair and courage. I posted them here, hoping someone, somewhere, would listen.

When the hospital finally fell, Mahmoud was taken. Beaten. Then released.

He made it to Gaza City with nothing not even his shoes. We went together to buy him some clothes. I teased him that he wouldn’t get to wear them all before another evacuation forced him to leave them behind.

I didn’t know then that his next departure would be eternal, not displacement this time, but disappearance into the silence of death.

When I opened our free clinic, I messaged him.

He was still trapped in Kamal Adwan.

“Just stay alive,” I told him. “Come when you can.”

He survived. He showed up. He volunteered two days a week, treating the wounded without asking for anything in return. With his hands, he healed. With his presence, he gave us hope.

And now, he’s gone.

Another light extinguished in a city of endless mourning.

Mahmoud’s death is not just mine to grieve. It is a wound in the heart of Gaza’s medical soul. It is a loss to the patients who will never know his care, to the children who will never feel his steady hands in the ER, to the future we are watching collapse one healer at a time.

We did not lose just a doctor.
We lost resistance in its noblest form.

We lost mercy.

Rest well, my friend.

You gave everything.