Dr. Hamdi Al-Najjar was in surgery when the strike hit his family home. His wife, Dr. Alaa, was at the same hospital — Al-Aqsa Martyrs — treating wounded patients. Between them, they had spent the war doing what doctors in Gaza had been doing since October: working without rest, without adequate supplies, and without any guarantee that the building they were standing in would still exist in an hour.
The strike killed nine of their children. Nine. The number resists comprehension. You read it and your mind tries to downscale it, to find a way to process the information. It cannot.
Dr. Hamdi survived but was critically wounded, transferred to intensive care in the same hospital where he had been saving other people's children hours earlier. His wife learned what had happened to her own family while surrounded by other families experiencing the same thing.
The Al-Najjar case was reported extensively by Reuters and Al Jazeera and became one of the most widely cited examples of what humanitarian organisations describe as the destruction of Gaza's medical infrastructure — not through the bombing of hospitals alone, but through the systematic elimination of the lives that hold that infrastructure together. When you kill a doctor's children, you do not just destroy a family. You destroy every surgery that doctor would have performed, every life they would have saved, every student they would have trained.
The Al-Najjars represent a double erasure: the loss of the people they loved, and the loss of the people they would have healed.
