Sat Sep 06 10:29:35 UTC 2025: ## Gaza’s Medical Students Learn to Save Lives with ‘Nothing’ Amidst Devastation
**Gaza City** – In the war-torn Gaza Strip, medical students are receiving an education unlike any other, learning to practice medicine not from textbooks, but from the brutal realities of a healthcare system on the brink of collapse. With universities destroyed and resources dwindling, these students are being trained to make impossible decisions and save lives with virtually “nothing.”
A medical student at al-Azhar University, speaking to Al Jazeera, described how their medical education has been transformed by the ongoing conflict. Forced to attend lectures on mobile phones under the faint glow of flashlight, these students are learning from older peers who have been thrust into practice prematurely.
One such mentor, Dr. Khaled, a fifth-year medical student, recently lectured at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, a facility overwhelmed with patients and lacking basic supplies. His lesson: how to save a life with nothing. He recounted a recent case of a young man pulled from rubble with devastating injuries. Without a neck stabilizer, Dr. Khaled held the man’s head perfectly still for 20 minutes, using his own body as a brace.
Another harrowing example involved a woman with a deep pelvic injury needing urgent sterilization. With no Betadine or alcohol available, chlorine – a caustic chemical typically used for cleaning – was used on her wound. “We used chlorine,” Dr. Khaled admitted, his voice trembling with guilt, “because there was nothing else.”
This reality echoes the desperate measures seen throughout Gaza. The student recalled a video of Dr. Hani Bseiso, an orthopaedic surgeon, amputating his niece’s leg on a dining table with a kitchen knife, water, and a plastic bag, all without anaesthesia, as they were trapped by the conflict.
The hardest lesson, however, is learning when not to treat, when to allocate scarce resources to those with a higher chance of survival. As Dr. Khaled explained, “In medical school, they teach you to save everyone. In Gaza, you learn you can’t – and you have to live with that.”
The toll on medical professionals is immense. Exhausted and often starving, they continue to teach and treat patients. “The war is not only depleting medicine,” the student writes, “it is consuming the very bodies and minds of those who try to heal others.”
For Gaza’s medical students, medicine is no longer just about knowledge and skills, but about surviving long enough to use them. It is about reinventing medicine every day and enduring unimaginable moral tests, where wounds run deep through flesh, dignity, and hope itself.
First Piper 