In a quiet housing estate in Navan, Co Meath, a Palestinian orthopedic surgeon scrolls through family photos that have become a catalogue of loss. Dr. Mahmoud Abumarzouq’s younger brother, four nieces and nephews, and countless friends are gone — killed in Gaza since the war erupted after the Oct. 7 attacks — and he is pleading for the world to deliver more aid to those who remain.
“This genocide, or you call war or ethnic cleansing — bombardment, all day and night,” he said, searching for the words to contain his grief. “My family is one of those, many, many families in Gaza to have lost many family members.”
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Abumarzouq’s brother Ahmed, 30, was killed in the early weeks of the war, leaving behind a young son. The shock that followed hardened into a daily ache as the fighting ground on. Then, in March, another blow: an Israeli strike in Rafah caused a building to collapse, killing two of Abumarzouq’s nephews and two of his nieces inside their home.
His sister Saham, their mother, survived after spending six hours trapped beneath the rubble. She suffered fractures to her back and wrist, but, he says, the lasting wound is one that scans cannot detect. “More horrific is the pain in her heart, losing four of her kids at once,” he said. “It is difficult.”
The names and ages fall with a terrible precision. Mohamed, 16, had just finished his school exams. Refat, 14, was still a student. Dina, 23, was studying design. Noor, 25, taught English and had a ritual with her uncle whenever he visited Gaza before the war: morning coffee. “When I drink my coffee, all those memories come to me,” he said. “This kind of pain, sorrow in the broken heart. Every morning, I have that experience.”
Noor had given birth three days before she died. Her baby girl, Yaqut, survived the blast but was injured. Now about 6 months old, the child’s motor development is lagging, Abumarzouq said. “I have seen her in videos. She’s a little bit slower in her milestones, in her motor skills. She doesn’t move her upper limbs as fast as her lower limbs, and she doesn’t support her neck as a six-month-old should,” he said. “But she’s getting better all the time because she’s engaged in physiotherapy.”
Even for those who survived, daily life is precarious. Abumarzouq said his family is living in what amounts to a warehouse, reworked as best as they can make it habitable. “They have no electricity at all,” he said. His parents are in their 70s and live with chronic illnesses. “To get the medication for diabetes, for high blood pressure, is very difficult.”
He tries to send money to help with food and medicine, but says that too has become a maze. “It’s almost near impossible, but we try our best by all means,” he said. “It is very difficult, because they banned every bank to send money to Gaza.”
More than personal grief propels his plea for aid. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza has said 70,000 people have been killed since the fighting began, a toll that has touched every neighborhood and profession. Four doctors he knows are dead or missing. “Sometimes, when you scroll on your WhatsApp and put in the first letter, many names come up and they are not among us,” he said. “I can’t WhatsApp them anymore.”
Nearly three months into a brittle ceasefire deal, most fighting has stopped, though both sides have accused each other of violations. From Navan, Abumarzouq watches the slow churn and calls for a “complete ceasefire” and a sustained push to rebuild. “I’m hoping for the hospitals that were completely demolished to start building up again — and reconstruct the universities,” he said. “Most of the primary and secondary schools have also been completely demolished and destroyed.”
His asks are concrete: energy to power clinics and shelters; basic supplies to stem hunger and infection; funding to restore services so families can move out of ad hoc shelters and back into stable homes. “Hopefully, the international community and the people around the world will help Palestinian people to stand up again,” he said.
For now, the focus is survival. Winter presses on. Food stocks are thin. Essential medicines are scarce. “The priority is getting more aid in — food and medicines,” he said. “To get Gazans through a biting winter.”
Abumarzouq’s appeal is rooted in medicine and memory as much as in politics. He knows the rhythm of post-operative care, the fragility of healing when electricity is intermittent and clean water is rationed. He also knows the daily habits that define a family: a coffee shared before work, the laughter of students trading notes, a baby learning to lift her head. The war has broken those rhythms, but he insists it has not erased them.
“Palestinian people in Gaza are very resilient,” he said. “They will stand up again, and they will rebuild their towns. They’ll rebuild their houses.”
When he speaks of returning to Gaza one day, it is as a doctor first. Orthopedic surgery is patient work — aligning, stabilizing, waiting, rechecking. In the same deliberate terms, he sketches a path forward: ceasefire, sustained aid, reconstruction of hospitals and schools, then the long, intricate process of rehabilitation — for bodies and institutions alike.
From his living room in Ireland, a place of order and quiet, the distance to Rafah feels immeasurable and yet always close. The photos on his phone carry the weight of a family that, like so many in Gaza, exists now in fragments — one generation trying to keep another fed and medicated, a third learning to grow amid the wreckage. Yaqut’s slow but steady progress is a small measure of hope he clings to.
“Every morning,” he said, “I have that experience.” The coffee is still there. So are the memories. What comes next, he believes, depends on whether the world delivers enough food, medicine and materials so that survival can give way to recovery.
Until then, he watches from afar — and waits for the chance to put his hands back to work where he learned his craft, in a Gaza that he insists will stand again.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
