GAZA, (PIC)
She used to whisper the words “Dr. Shams” with a smile and hope behind the wooden bench in the Faculty of Medicine. On the same night that preceded a morning physiology exam, the Israeli bombing came to extinguish that smile forever.
She is the medical student Shams Magdy Al-Kahlout, who was martyred along with her brother Yusuf and others, on 30 August 2025, after the Israeli occupation aircraft bombed a residential building near the Thai junction west of Gaza City without prior warning or caution.
Recalling a story
Before memory is buried under the rubble of the ongoing war, her classmates in the third-year medicine WhatsApp group race to recall her story, building from it a portrait of a young Gazan woman whom the war did not give the chance to wear the white coat.
On the morning before the night of her martyrdom, her classmates were preparing for the physiology test. In the same apartment where the family took refuge in the Al-Rimal neighborhood, west of Gaza City, Shams was reviewing what she had studied with the night, unaware that dawn would not bring the exam, but rather the news of her passing, according to what was written by her university professor Dr. Ahmed Hammad.
“No, never. She was very normal, and she was studying,” this is how her sister Aya answered when the academic Jihad Hammad asked her: Did Shams feel anything? The answer was more tragic than any expectation; for death in Gaza does not warn anyone, and its victims are not always at the front, but often they are at their desks studying.
Heba Abu Hilal, her schoolmate before university, carries a vivid mental image of Shams, “She was my classmate in school, and a very close friend. She was very excelling, polite, and a breeze.” Then she adds what summarizes her personality spiritually, “She was a memorizer of the Quran at the Palestine Mosque in Gaza.”
“She was sitting in the seat behind me, and I used to hear her repeating: Dr. Shams, as an ambition for her, and she would repeat it with a smile and great happiness, imagining that she was a doctor,” Heba Abu Hilal, her classmate from school until university recalled.
When Heba reaches the mention of university fees, she pauses for a moment then continues, “There were difficulties in paying the fees with her, but she always said: God makes it easy, God solves it. And that’s it.” That short sentence carries an entire world of Gazan steadfastness in the face of the weight of daily life, before the war came to make those details seem as distant as a dream.
As soon as the results of the midterm test conducted by Dr. Mustafa in the Neuro lab were announced, the teacher shocked everyone: only one student obtained the full mark among all the students. When the doctor revealed the name, it was the first day directly after her martyrdom.
“That day the doctor announced the grades and was saying: Who is this who got the full mark? Shams. Oh my God! The distribution of grades was the first day after her martyrdom,” Ayat Salah, a colleague in the Faculty of Medicine said.
This bitter scene summarizes something significant: Shams was not just an ordinary student seeking success, but she was an achiever of a different caliber, witnessed by an academic record that the war could not erase, even when it erased its owner.
The Phoenix Batch
In January 2026, and over the ruins of the destroyed Al-Shifa Hospital, 230 male and female doctors from the graduates of the Faculty of Medicine at the Islamic University and Al-Azhar University held their graduation ceremony, in what became known as the “Phoenix Batch 2025.”
Sara Magdy Al-Kahlout was among the graduates, the sister of Shams who lost her foot in the war, wearing the white robe that her sister dreamed of wearing.
In that ceremony, there was a segment that exists only in Gaza: a special segment for the families of the martyred and wounded graduates. Parents carrying pictures of their martyred children instead of them, or children who came on wheelchairs or crutches or did not come at all because they are still receiving treatment abroad. As for some of them, no one knows if their bodies are under the rubble or not.
“The problem that makes parting difficult for you, is that the martyrs are not ordinary people at all. They go and leave their place empty; it is impossible for anyone to be able to fill it,” Maryam, a colleague in the medicine students WhatsApp group, said.
A documented dream
As for her friend Nour Abu Haiba, she found no words to say. She sufficed by writing the registration number of Shams in the college on the group: 220230171. No comment. No explanation. The number alone was saying everything: that there is a real name, an academic file, and a documented dream in a university database, for a student who will never graduate.
The “Targeting the Health Sector in Gaza” platform belonging to the Institute for Palestine Studies documented the martyrdom of Shams Al-Kahlout and her younger brother Yusuf due to a bombing that targeted the apartment where the family was living in the Al-Rimal neighborhood.
Shams Al-Kahlout was not the only victim from the medical and academic community in Gaza. Since October 2023, dozens of doctors, students, and professors have been martyred, in a pattern described by officials of international health organizations as systematic. Nevertheless, the people of the Strip insisted on rebuilding their health system from within; the students who were in the fifth year have started working in emergencies in hospitals in the middle of the war, and a full batch of them graduated over the ruins of Al-Shifa.
The father of Shams, Magdy Al-Kahlout, went to the graduation ceremony of the Phoenix batch not to applaud his daughter, but to stand in the “segment for the families of the martyred graduates” carrying her picture. Sara graduated, and Shams is a picture in a frame. Yusuf is under the soil. And the father stands alone carrying the presence of three children at one moment.
Heba Abu Hilal said at the conclusion of her message on the group, “God makes it easy, God solves it. And that’s it.” As if she is borrowing the last words of Shams about university fees, and applying them to everything after that.
