✍️ By Malik Mukhtar
📍 www.ainnbeen.blogspot.com
📅 July 2, 2025
“Medicine is a humanitarian profession. In war, it becomes a moral defiance.”
—Anonymous Gaza paramedic, 2024
The Last Heartbeat of a Doctor
Dr. Marwan al‑Sultan was not just a cardiologist. He was the heart of Gaza’s northern healthcare system. As director of the Indonesia Hospital—one of the last functioning medical outposts in northern Gaza—he worked around the clock treating blast victims, operating with headlamps under siege, and somehow managing to keep both patients and staff alive amid rubble and rations.
And now? He’s dead.
Killed by an Israeli airstrike on July 2, 2025.
Along with his wife. Along with his children.
His apartment wasn’t a command center. It was his home. His resting space between surgeries. His last refuge. Until it wasn’t.
Let that sink in: a cardiologist was silenced by a state-of-the-art missile. A man who repaired hearts… had his stopped by a war machine.
Gaza’s Doctors: The Most Dangerous Job in the World
Dr. al‑Sultan is not the first. He joins a martyrdom registry that’s expanding with grim regularity.
- Over 1,400 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
- At least 70 of them in the last 50 days alone.
- Ambulances are targeted. Maternity wards are shelled. Surgeons are gunned down en route to duty.
On Eid al-Adha, the holiday of sacrifice, Gaza gave the world nine medics in one day—sacrificed not at the altar of peace, but under drone surveillance. No one claims they were fighters. Not even the IDF. They were just… there. Too visible to live, too inconvenient to spare.
But Wait—There's a Bigger Problem: Slogans
According to Bret Stephens, columnist at The New York Times, the real threat isn’t missiles turning doctors into mist. It’s language.
Specifically, the phrase: “Globalize the Intifada.”
In his July 1 op-ed, Stephens explains how this chant is “a sinister call for global violence cloaked in human rights language.” He is—once again—deeply wounded, morally panicked, and intellectually heroic.
Forget the images of dead children lined up in morgues built from sandbags. Forget the mass graves behind hospitals. Forget starvation by design, siege by satellite, and the wholesale execution of Gaza’s medical class.
No, the emergency is… a protest slogan.
To paraphrase Stephens: “How dare these activists show solidarity when Israeli civilians live in fear?”
As if fear were an equal currency to mass burial.
As if feeling unsafe on a subway is the same as dying while triaging a triple amputation under artillery fire.
Weapons vs. Words: A Global Obscenity
The intellectual gymnastics required to write Bret Stephens’ article while Gaza’s surgeons are being vaporized could qualify for Olympic gold.
It takes a rare form of blindness—or moral selectivity—to watch a genocide unfold and ask, “But what about the tone of their resistance?”
Because here’s the truth:
- “Globalize the Intifada” is not a call for terrorism. It’s a desperate cry from people tired of dying silently.
- It doesn’t mean knife attacks in Brooklyn. It means solidarity, civil disobedience, accountability.
- It means if a hospital is bombed in Gaza, there should be protests in London, speeches in Chicago, boycotts in Brussels.
But to the columnists in Midtown Manhattan, resistance must come with subtitles, disclaimers, and apologies—while their governments supply the very weapons that murder those speaking out.
Let’s Pretend Together
Let’s pretend that every doctor in Gaza is a combatant.
Let’s pretend that every ambulance carries rockets.
Let’s pretend that hospital directors moonlight as Hamas generals.
Let’s pretend all this makes it okay.
Let’s pretend until the last medic is gone.
Let’s pretend until Gaza’s veins run dry.
And when the final hospital collapses, when the final surgeon’s hands are severed, we can write another op-ed:
“Why Did Gaza Fail to Build a Healthcare System?”
The World Will Mourn in Hindsight
In a few years, they’ll name halls after Dr. Marwan al‑Sultan.
Global leaders will sigh. They’ll say, “We should have done more.”
But in July 2025, his blood was just another drop on the mosaic of civilian sacrifice.
And Bret Stephens? He’ll still be fretting about slogans.
Because nothing terrifies the colonizer like the language of the colonized.
Especially when that language refuses to die quietly.
📍 For more: www.ainnbeen.blogspot.com
📢 Raise your voice. Before they silence the last one.
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