Notes from the Genocide

‘On this day last year, Israel killed my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, their sons and grandchildren, and my other uncle, his wife, and their three children, and my aunt. Israel targeted the house they had fled to with three F-16 rockets.’ This is from the harrowing diary - published in Britain earlier this year - kept by a young Palestinian doctor, Ezzideen Shehab, in 2024 and 2025. Subtitled Notes from the Genocide in Gaza, Shehab’s book bears witness to the destruction everywhere around him, as well as to the intensity of his own professional and family losses. 

Ezzideen Shehab was born in 1995 and grew up in Jabalia, northern Gaza. He attended Arafat Gifted Secondary School before studying medicine at the University of Isfahan in Iran. On 2 October 2023, he returned to Gaza, where his family gathered to celebrate his qualification. Within days, he was treating casualties of the war; on 11 October, dozens of members of his extended family were killed in an Israeli airstrike. He volunteered for more than eight months at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, treating severely injured patients amid bombardment and shortages of medicines and equipment.

In December 2024, Shehab helped establish the Al-Rahma Medical Clinic, working with fellow healthcare professionals to provide free treatment in northern Gaza. Repeatedly damaged, the clinic was forced to close in July 2025. By then, he and his family had been displaced five times, their home destroyed. Alongside his medical work, he recorded his experiences and shared accounts of his patients and daily life online. In an interview with the student newspaper Honi Soit, he described medicine and writing as mutually sustaining: treating people gave him hope, while writing helped him find the clarity to continue working.

His Diary of a Young Doctor: Notes from the Genocide in Gaza was published in Australia by Readers and Writers Against the Genocide in November 2025; Scribe issued the 192-page British edition on 12 March 2026. Its dated entries combine accounts of medical work with bereavement, displacement and the struggle for food and water. The writing moves between precise observations and anguished reflection, preserving individual lives and encounters within the wider destruction. See Kill Your Darlings for a few extracts, and Googlebooks for a preview.

11 August 2024

‘Today was one of the most terrifying and exhausting days at the hospital, as we received dozens of bodies. Others were severely injured with amputations and severe burns, and there were heaps of flesh from those who could not be identified. Some patients arriving in a state that defies description. I never imagined in my life that I would witness such a scene; the pain and sorrow are overwhelming me, and the sight is beyond what any human can bear. Amidst this destruction, I felt helpless and powerless in the face of all the lives we lost. Today was a nightmare that will never be erased from my memory.’

28 August 2024

‘We are just forty-eight days away from a whole year of genocide in Gaza. Read that again: A whole year! How can the world stand idly by as a whole generation of Palestinians is erased? The clock is ticking, and with each passing day, more innocent lives are lost.’

11 October 2024

‘On this day last year, Israel killed my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, their sons and grandchildren, and my other uncle, his wife, and their three children, and my aunt. Israel targeted the house they had fled to with three F-16 rockets. They were trapped under the rubble, and the search for them continued in the hope that they might be alive for two consecutive days. Some of them, we haven’t found to this day. It was a dark day in our family’s memory. A year has passed, and I still can’t believe they are gone.’

2 April 2025

‘We have descended into a kind of existence where the sun rises not to awaken the living but to expose the damned. Our days are rituals of humiliation, long lines for water, a single container passed like a holy relic among the parched, as if thirst were a sacrament now. The water trucks hadn’t come for three days, and when at last they did, the line stretched endlessly. My brother and I waited in that dust-heavy silence, and all we could fill was one gallon - one - enough, perhaps, for a single day, if we are careful, if we are lucky.

And bread, what a tragic word. Once a symbol of life, now reduced to a memory my mother resurrects through smoke and exhaustion, kneeling at the clay oven as if begging the fire for mercy. We went looking for flour, foolishly perhaps, still possessed by the hope that something might remain. A twenty-five-kilo sack, once 25 shekels, now 400. The price of bread is now the price of despair, the cost of feeding a family now measured in the currency of cruelty. We stood there, not even angry, just hollow. Not because we were noble, but because even rage had abandoned us.

The news, when I dared to read it, was another layer of despair: a chorus of distant screams translated into headlines. And when I tried to withdraw my own money, the system - what remains of it - asked for forty percent to convert it into cash. As if desperation were something to be taxed.

Now the planes return. Their scream is no longer terrifying, it is familiar. It is the lullaby of ruin. They rip through the sky not with intent but with hunger. I feel it in my bones: tonight they will take again. And still, absurdly, we breathe. That is the miracle. That is the punishment. This is not life. This is the theatre of divine abandonment, a test with no answers, a fire with no light. And we, the scorched, keep pretending we are not ash.’