A living hub for the people of Palestine — those who shaped it, and those who stood with it.

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Faces of Palestinian Medicine

Palestinian medical professionals exemplify compassion and expertise, advancing healthcare and nurturing well-being amidst adversity.

  • 17 doctors and healers
  • Born 1882–1981
  • 4 from Gaza
Augusta Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives, JerusalemAugusta Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem
A Palestine Red Crescent ambulance in Manger Square, BethlehemA Palestine Red Crescent ambulance in Manger Square, Bethlehem
Augusta Victoria Hospital, JerusalemAugusta Victoria Hospital, Jerusalem
Photos: Uri Aloni (CC BY-SA 4.0), Mark Nakasone (CC BY 2.0), Bukvoed (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons

About Medicine

Healing under siege.

Palestinian doctors have practised medicine through occupation, exile and war. In Jerusalem in the early twentieth century, Tawfiq Canaan worked as a physician while recording the folk beliefs and healing traditions of the Palestinian countryside.

Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a doctor from Gaza, led the Palestinian delegation at the 1991 Madrid peace talks. Eyad El-Sarraj founded the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme to treat the hidden wounds of occupation, and surgeons like Ghassan Abu Sitta have worked in Gaza’s hospitals through its wars.

The people in this path are surgeons, psychiatrists, researchers, nurses and medics. They treat patients, train the next generation, and record what war does to the body and the mind.

All 17 doctors and healers

Every face in Medicine, from the earliest pioneers to the voices of today.

Born across the decades

Tap a decade to filter · 1 without a recorded birth year

  1. 1880s
  2. 1890s
  3. 1900s
  4. 1910s
  5. 1920s
  6. 1930s
  7. 1940s
  8. 1950s
  9. 1960s
  10. 1970s
  11. 1980s

17 doctors and healers