It was my childhood dream to study medicine. I wanted to be a doctor to help people. I never imagined that I would study medicine not in a university, but in a hospital; not from textbooks, but from raw experience.After I finished my BA in English last year, I decided to enrol in the medical faculty of al-Azhar University. I started my studies at the end of June. With all universities in Gaza destroyed, we, medical students, are forced to watch lectures on our mobile phones and read medical books under the light of our mobile phones’ flashlights.Part of our training is to receive lectures from older medical students, who the genocidal war has forced into practice prematurely.My first such lecture was by a fifth-year medical student called Dr Khaled at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah.Al-Aqsa looks nothing like a normal hospital. There are no spacious white rooms or privacy for the patients. The corridor is the room, patients lie on beds or the floor, and their groans echo throughout the building.Due to the overcrowding, we have to take our lectures in a caravan in the hospital yard.“I’ll teach you what I learned not from lectures,” Dr Khaled began, “but from days when medicine was [something] …
