Israel’s Targeted Killing of Beloved Dr. Marwan al-Sultan and His Family
After receiving repeated ominous phone calls, al-Sultan and four members of his family were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Drop Site interviewed his son.
GAZA CITY—It had only been ten minutes since Ahmed al-Sultan, a young medical student in Gaza, left the apartment where his family was staying when he heard the sounds of an airstrike nearby.
“I did not expect, even for a second, that the strike was targeting my family,” al-Sultan, 20, told Drop Site News. “I rushed back and tried to contact anyone in the family, but there was no response from anyone. I hurried to the place, and I was shocked by the scene—our apartment had been destroyed.”
That airstrike in Gaza City last Wednesday, July 2, killed at least eight people, according to the Ministry of Health, including Ahmed’s sister, brother-in-law, mother, and his father, Dr. Marwan al-Sultan. The director of the Indonesian Hospital in north Gaza, Dr. al-Sultan was also one of two remaining cardiologists in Gaza. According to a statement from Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW) dated July 2, his killing marks the 70th medical worker killed in the past 50 days.
“All the martyrs were women, in addition to my father and my sister's husband, Mohammed Imad al-Sultan. I was in shock at the scene,” said Ahmed, who is studying to be a cardiologist like his late father.
Dr. al-Sultan was not only a well-known doctor in Gaza: he was beloved. His death was a shock to an already stricken medical community. When his body was brought to Al-Shifa hospital following the attack, colleagues wept over his body, including Dr. Munir al-Bursh, the Director General of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. In footage taken in the hospital, he can be seen cradling Dr. al-Sultan’s bloodied face.
“Dr. Marwan was a father, a brother, and a beloved friend,” al-Bursh told Drop Site. “Dr. Marwan had not taken off his white coat since the beginning of the war. He was constantly by the side of patients and the wounded.”
The al-Sultan family had only moved to that apartment a month ago. They rented the unit after they were forced from their home in Jabalia due to displacement orders from the Israeli military. “We took the necessary precautions and moved to the place the occupation labelled as ‘safe.’ But, unfortunately, the place the occupation declared safe was also bombed.”
When Drop Site visited the building the day after the attack and went to the apartment the al-Sultan family had been living in, part of the ceiling had collapsed and rubble covered the floor. A few everyday items—a comb, a jug for water, a rug rustling in the wind—were mixed in and poking out of the debris. Palestinians have been robbed of these small pieces of normalcy.
According to Ahmed, there were roughly 30 people living there at the time, and the family was residing on the fifth floor. “But God decreed that it was lunchtime, and the third floor was our place to light a fire for cooking. Most of the families were downstairs preparing food,” Ahmed said. Dr. al-Sultan, his wife, daughter, sister, and son-in-law were upstairs on the fifth floor when they were killed. Both Ahmed and his sister Lubna, who was in the building at the time and survived the airstrike, said the attack hit the room their father was in. The rest of the building was relatively intact.
“The apartment we were in was directly targeted,” Ahmed said.
The aftermath of the attack on the apartment where Dr. Marwan al-Sultan and his family were living. (Abdel Qader Sabbah / Drop Site News)
One munitions analyst told Drop Site that the exterior damage indicated it was likely a 500-pound class bomb, but another said it was difficult to say with certainty without further details or a munitions fragment.
The Israeli military has previously said that it was targeting Hamas without providing any further details and that the incident was under review. When asked by Drop Site to provide further details on who was targeted, if they were killed and assessments of civilians living in the building, a military spokesperson repeated the previous statement without any clarifications. The spokesperson also said the military was reviewing “the claim that as a result of the strike uninvolved civilians were harmed.”
Since October 7th, the Israeli military has repeatedly targeted hospitals and medical workers in Gaza in what the United Nations has described as a pattern of attacks that has “pushed the healthcare system to the brink of total collapse.” Daily killings at the U.S.- and Israeli-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites have also pushed the remaining partially functioning hospitals to their breaking points. “We are walking the fine grey line between operational capacity and full disaster, every day,” a World Health Organization official recently said.
In May, the Indonesian Hospital, where Dr. al-Sultan worked, was forced out of service by the Israeli military after a brutal siegel. “Dr. Sultan was a very clear medical personnel and especially in the hospital as a medical director,” said Hadiki Habib, the chairman of MER-C Indonesia which helped build and support the hospital. “He was not a combatant.”
Attacks on medical workers have occurred everywhere: from hospitals to their homes, while driving or trying to go to an aid distribution site, or in their tents in camps. Last week at Nasser Hospital began and ended with the killing of two of its doctors: Dr. Shehada Asqoul, a pulmonologist, who was killed on Monday in his tent, and Dr. Mousa Hamdan Khafaja, an obstetrician, who was killed along with three of his children on Saturday.
The attacks have also taken the form of threats, according to Ahmed al-Sultan. “Even in Jabalia, an Israeli army officer called him before the evacuation and said to him, ‘Stay safe, my dear Marwan.’ But when I heard the word ‘my dear,’ it struck me like lightning,” Ahmed recalled. “[The officer] told him: ‘Leave Jabalia, leave this place. This area is dangerous. Head west of Gaza City.’”
Dr. al-Sultan continued to receive threats after this, according to Dr. al-Bursh. “They had called him after he was displaced from his home and they said: ‘We know where you are and where you are staying.’ The occupation was always and constantly in contact with him in a manner of surveillance and threat."
Gaza’s Martyred Medical Workers
In the above photo from a 2022 graduation ceremony at the Islamic University of Gaza’s Faculty of Medicine, Dr. al-Sultan can be seen standing and smiling among his peers. Just below him on the bottom row is Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a world renowned orthopedic surgeon who worked at Al-Shifa Hospital and was detained in December 2023. According to a UN investigation, he died as a result of treatment in Ofer prison where he was allegedly beaten and sexually assaulted.
Taken exactly a year before the war began, the photo now represents a snapshot of the horrors inflicted on Gaza’s medical workers. Each row holds a doctor killed or detained since October 7th, six killed, one currently being held in Israel detention and another who had been held in detention and was released.
Dr. Emad Shaqoura, who was previously a vice dean at the school and is now a lecturer of anatomy and histology, went over the photo, counting each doctor that had been killed. Dr. Shaqoura had been living in the UK when the war started and now works remotely—both to teach students online, including Ahmed al-Sultan, but also to replace medical faculty when they are killed.
“It's a horrible impact, because if you think about the great losses and the positions of those people in the education system, in the medical education system, they are cornerstones, indeed.”
Shaqoura said that Dr. al-Sultan had been training medical students even while treating patients during the war, giving the future doctors critical experience.
Replacing him will be incredibly difficult, he said. “The people on the ground are very precious, not only for delivering the service to people and helping the viability and continuity of the hospitals and the medical service, regardless of the systematic targeting. They are also very important because of the clinical students. That kind of loss has a great impact on the health system and on medical education.”
Dr. al-Sultan’s teaching wasn’t just for students, but for young doctors like Dr. Ezzideen Shehab, who worked with him at the Indonesian Hospital last year. “When I first came to volunteer, he was the one who welcomed me,” Shehab told Drop Site. “Even though I was nervous, he said, ‘don't worry. Anything you don't know, they will teach you, and if you need anything, just come to my office.’ I still remember he used to say ‘don't be scared, the war will end soon.’ He really believed that. And somehow hearing it from him made it feel possible.”
Even with that optimism, Ahmed al-Sultan said the unending attacks by the Israeli military on Gaza’s hospitals and medical workers still took a heavy toll on his father, particularly when the Indonesian Hospital was forced to shut down.
“He was deeply saddened, because the healthcare system in the north had become dire and was rendered inoperable,” Ahmed recalled. “He was always calling on them to protect medical personnel and protect the patients. But, unfortunately, did anyone respond? No one responded to his calls.”
In recent weeks, Dr. al-Sultan told colleagues of dreams he had been having of his own father, according to Dr. Habib and Dr. al-Bursh.
“Dr. Marwan had mentioned a vision he had, where his martyred father appeared to him in a dream, embraced him, took him with him, and gave him a bouquet of flowers,” Dr. al-Bursh recalled.
“He shared this with us and said that he would become a martyr.”
Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.
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Inhumanly sick of the killer and the supporter of the killers to kill a doctor. They are not just killing a great man but all they patients that he could have helped in the future. Any person in the US who is complicit should be reported to the FBI. I know that sounds ridicules, but they want us to think that. Why should we let the sociopathic define reality?
Ho hum. It's all normalized now. WIll the press cover this? WIll any changes ensue? Horrible, horrible. Thanks for covering this.