Interviewer: We’ll now speak to Dr. Ezz Lulu who’s a medical doctor and president of the Samir Foundation. You spent the past two years on the front lines as a medical student in both Al-Shifa and Ahli hospitals. You then graduated in November. You’re speaking to us from Gaza City this hour. What’s it been like for you working on the front lines while you were still a medical student?

Dr. Ezz Lulu: Yeah, thank you so much for having me today. As I was a medical student, I made a decision early in this genocide. A decision shaped by the way my father raised me — to give back to my people no matter the cost. So I went to the hospital to volunteer knowing that the scale of the catastrophe was far beyond what the medical teams could handle. I left my own family behind because Gaza needed every pair of hands it could get. But nothing in medical school prepared me for these scenarios. What I faced there — I was not even a graduate yet — and suddenly I was dealing with crush injuries, traumatic amputations, fourth-degree burns, things we never studied and never imagined we would see. We were treating our own people, children, mothers, classmates, and the number of injured weighs heavily on us. We were exhausted physically and emotionally but we kept going because there was no alternative, even without having taken the official oath yet. We were already living it through the Al-Shifa hospital.

Interviewer: Important to note that when you worked at Al-Shifa hospital, it was also at the time when it came under siege by the Israeli army. That’s a responsibility that a young medical student would probably have hoped to never face, yet you did it. What would you say was the hardest part of that, or your biggest challenge?

Dr. Ezz Lulu: Actually, inside the Al-Shifa hospital the situation collapsed. Tanks were approaching. Snipers were targeting people in the corridors of the hospital and we couldn’t reach them. We had to watch patients bleed to death because moving even one meter meant becoming a target. Oxygen concentrators had started to shut down and eight patients in the ICU just died before my eyes. For the first time in my life I buried people inside the hospital. Actually, I lived through four wars but nothing like this war — it was completely different. It turned my life upside down. It taught me a painful truth: the skills we learn in medical school only work if we are allowed to reach our patients. During that week, medicine stopped — not because we didn’t know what to do, but because of this genocide. And on top of all that, during the siege I learned that 20 members of my family were killed in one air strike, including my father and my brother. I was treating patients while my mother was injured somewhere in the same hospital. No medical student should ever live this.
Interviewer: I’m sorry to hear about the family members that were killed by Israel. Dr. Ezz Lulu, you’ve been through a lot. How did that experience shape the kind of doctor that you want to be and what you want to specialize in?

Dr. Ezz Lulu: This experience shaped me deeply. I want to become a doctor who can rebuild healthcare in war-affected communities. I learned resilience, leadership, and the value of every medical worker. Losing 20 members of my own family during the war pushed me to dedicate my future to strengthening Gaza’s healthcare system so that no student or doctor lives what we lived.

Interviewer: How will you do that? What role do you think you have to play now going forward in rebuilding Gaza’s healthcare system, which has been effectively destroyed by the genocide?

Dr. Ezz Lulu: Yeah, actually young doctors are going to be the foundation of Gaza’s healthcare system. Many senior doctors were killed, displaced or exhausted. Entire hospitals and universities were destroyed. So the responsibility now falls on our generation — the young doctors and the medical students who kept working throughout this genocide. We are the ones who will reopen departments, rebuild medical education and restore essential resources. We learned medicine in the harshest circumstances and that has created a level of resilience and commitment that Gaza needs at this time. And despite everything we lost — our homes, our families, our friends — we stayed in the hospitals and continued treating people. And now we are the generation that will rebuild the healthcare system from zero, not because it’s easy, but because there is no other choice for us and for our people in Gaza.

Interviewer: Dr. Ezz Lulu, you’re a medical doctor and president of the Samir Foundation, speaking to us from Gaza City this hour. Thank you so much.