Months after the October 2025 ceasefire agreement took effect, medical workers at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City have resumed restoration efforts after the hospital was destroyed in April 2024, with the emergency department reopened as a triage space meant simply to keep people alive. Yet the gains remain fragile and incomplete.
According to the hospital's director, doctors have converted the maternity ward into a surgical ward and reopened dialysis and operating rooms, recovering about 50 percent of Al-Shifa's capacity, but with catastrophic shortages. The scale of loss tells the story: before the conflict, Al-Shifa had three CT scanners; today, it has none, its MRI and x-ray machines are scarce and damaged, and laboratory equipment has been destroyed, with the neonatal intensive care unit wiped out entirely.
The ceasefire has not brought the relief doctors and patients desperately need. According to Gaza's health ministry, the medicine deficit has actually grown after the ceasefire, with lack of medication reaching 52 percent, a rate not reached throughout the war itself. The medicine deficit for chronic illnesses stands at 62 percent, meaning that 62 percent of people with chronic conditions are unable to take their medication regularly, leading to deterioration in health and death.
The human cost is tangible. There were 1,244 kidney patients in Gaza before the October 2023 start of the war; now that number stands at 622, with about 30 documented as killed in direct Israeli attacks and hundreds of others estimated to have died from lack of access to dialysis services. Nearly 20,000 patients remain trapped inside Gaza, including 4,500 children in urgent need of treatment unavailable within the territory, while more than 1,200 patients have died waiting for permission to leave Gaza for life-saving medical care.
Al-Shifa currently serves all of Gaza City and northern Gaza, and has become the main referral centre for critical injuries and complex medical cases throughout the entire north, with approximately 300 beds, ten operating rooms, and twenty intensive care units for a population of nearly 800,000 people. Staff shortages compound the crisis: according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 1,722 healthcare workers have been killed in Israeli strikes over the past two years.
The broader healthcare infrastructure tells a story of systemic collapse. Of Gaza's 36 hospitals, only 18 remain even partially functional as of mid-December, with all but three field hospitals operating under severe limitations. According to Gaza's health ministry spokesperson, there are no functioning hospitals left in northern Gaza, forcing people to walk several kilometres on foot to reach Al-Shifa or Al-Ahli Hospital.
The hospital's reconstruction itself remains precarious. The destruction is systematic, with hospitals being rehabilitated and resupplied only to be exposed to hostilities or attacked again, a destructive cycle that must end. Between 28 January and 11 February 2026, according to Gaza's Ministry of Health, 109 Palestinians were killed, 252 were injured, and 10 bodies were recovered from under the rubble.
In December 2025, a cohort of 168 Palestinian doctors completed their specialist certifications at the hospital's destroyed facility, a symbolic act of professional resilience in the face of extraordinary hardship. But symbols of resilience cannot substitute for functioning medical infrastructure or life-saving medicines. Al-Shifa's partial recovery illustrates the broader problem: even where reconstruction is attempted, supply chains remain broken, demand vastly exceeds capacity, and the ceasefire has done little to fundamentally alter the conditions of scarcity that define Gaza's healthcare crisis.