Dr. Fadia Malhis entered Gaza in 2001, crossing on a three-day permit that became a lifetime of exile. Born in Nablus, trained in Istanbul, she carried her medical degree into a place where childbirth and war began to share the same room. When Israel blocked her husband, a cancer specialist, from opening a radiotherapy center in Gaza, he moved to Turkey. She stayed — raising her children alone, running the obstetrics department at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest and most vital medical complex.
“Life was already a form of siege,” she says. “Before the war, we lived between blackouts, shortages, and fear.” Gaza’s health system limped along — a network of exhausted staff, improvised supplies, and parents who sold everything to educate their children into medicine. “We were the generation that refused to give up,” she says. “We worked because life itself was the patient.”
The Day the Sky Broke
On October 7th, everything changed. Within hours, Al-Shifa filled beyond capacity — sixty thousand displaced people packed its corridors. Pregnant women lay beside wounded children; doctors operated on the floor. “Our department never stopped for a second,” she recalls. “Even as bombs fell, babies came.” Electricity vanished, generators were hit, fuel was cut. “They wanted hospitals to die before people,” she says.She describes working under candlelight, using her phone’s flashlight during surgery. “We’d sterilize instruments over a flame. We stitched women with thread meant for clothes.” Yet she stayed. “If I left, who would deliver them?”
Under Siege: The Invasion of Al-Shifa
When the Israeli army surrounded Al-Shifa, Dr. Fadia and her team faced a nightmare. Drones hovered over every window, their red lights watching. “They knew who was on each floor,” she says. “They bombed the generator, the oxygen station, everything that kept us alive.” She moved between departments carrying newborns in her arms because incubators stopped working. “You hold life that weighs less than your hand, and the lights go out,” she says. “You feel God breathing for you.”
During the first invasion, she was trapped in Al-Rimal for three weeks under bombardment. When she returned, her own apartment had been destroyed. I went back to Al-Shifa — it was my home more than any place and I slept on the hospital floor with my children.
“I Built a Delivery Room Out of Dust”
She turned an unused storage space into a makeshift maternity room. “I found one delivery bed, an ultrasound, and a broken light,” she says. “I wrote on the door: Delivery Room. Because life must continue.” Each night, she delivered about five babies with one nurse beside her. “After 10 PM, ambulances were bombed, so women came on foot,” she recalls. “They were displaced, bleeding, terrified. We couldn’t send them away. We couldn’t stop.” In those days, Al-Shifa became a city of the living and the dead. “Every cry of a newborn mixed with the sound of shelling,” she says. “Sometimes we cut the cord and then ran for cover.”
(See also Gaza Stories: A Home Turned Into a Mass Grave and Gaza Stories: Hossam’s Fight to Witness.)
The Mother Who Died on the Hospital Steps
One night, an ambulance brought a woman from Al-Shaaf — nine months pregnant, her husband and brother-in-law killed in the car beside her. “She was talking until the hospital gate,” Dr. Fadia says. “Then she went silent.” On the cold floor, without light, she performed a cesarean with a scalpel in her hand. “We brought out the baby. It turned pink, it cried. We thought it would live.” Moments later, its abdomen swelled. Shrapnel had pierced through the mother into the child. “It had holes in its lungs and back. It died in my hands.”
She wept for an hour beside them. “That night broke me,” she says. “You deliver death while trying to deliver life.”
The Second Invasion and the Daughter’s Birth
In February, when Israeli tanks re-entered Gaza City, Dr. Fadia fled under gunfire. Her daughter was eight months pregnant and needed a cesarean. “There were no hospitals, no anesthesia, no oxygen,” she says. “She had already had two cesareans before — natural birth was impossible.” In a small clinic called Al-Sahaba, she found a colleague with 2 ml of lidocaine — the last anesthesia left. “He said, ‘That’s all I have.’ I said, ‘That’s all we need.’” She performed the operation herself. “Imagine a mother cutting her daughter’s abdomen with her own hands. I kept saying, ‘In the name of God.’ There was no suction, no electricity, nothing.”
The baby was born alive — a girl named Layan, after a cousin martyred months earlier. “We named her to keep the memory breathing,” she says. “Every newborn in Gaza is a resistance against extinction.”
Torture and Survival
The war stole not only her patients but her family. Soldiers detained her son and son-in-law during the raids. Her son, a dentist, endured beatings until he lost consciousness. Her son-in-law, journalist Mohammed, spent a year and three months in prison, losing fifty kilos under torture. “When we saw him on television, we didn’t recognize him,” she says. “They starved him until his face disappeared.” Still, she speaks without bitterness. “We thank God for everything. Faith is the only anesthesia that never runs out.”
Healing in Exile
Now in Turkey, Dr. Fadia tries to rebuild. Her daughter, son, and grandchildren struggle with nightmares. “My grandson started wetting himself, my granddaughter bites her nails until they bleed,” she says. “Trauma is the new inheritance of Gaza.” Her daughter Shahd, a third-year medical student, volunteered through the siege. “She stitched wounds until her hands trembled. Now she can’t sleep without pills.” Even in Ankara, they live as if the sirens still echo. “You don’t leave Gaza,” she says. “You carry it inside your chest.”
“Hospitals Became Graves”
When asked what message she wants to send to the world, her voice sharpens: “No hospital in Gaza can function now. Al-Shifa is destroyed. Doctors are martyred, detained, or displaced. We need medical missions, field hospitals, open crossings — and the world’s conscience.” She lists the numbers from memory: twenty-six thousand wounded who need surgeries abroad, twelve thousand cancer patients without medicine, sixty thousand pregnant women with no safe place to give birth. “Every delay is another funeral,” she says. She glances at a photo of her hospital, now in ruins. “We didn’t just lose walls. We lost the place where life began.”
Between Faith and Fire
Dr. Fadia Malhis ends her story the same way she begins every operation — with surrender and courage. “They destroyed everything I built in thirty years — my home, my clinic, my city. But I still thank God.” She closes her eyes and repeats what she told herself that night in the rubble: “O God, reward me in my calamity, and replace it with something better.” Her voice steadies. “Gaza will give birth again. It always does.”
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