In the courtyards of Al-Shifa Medical Complex — largely destroyed by Israeli military operations over the past two years — Gaza’s Ministry of Health held a graduation ceremony for 168 doctors who had completed their Palestinian Board certification. They took their professional oath among the rubble of what was once Gaza’s largest hospital, under the slogan “The Regiment of Humanity.”

The graduates completed their training, as the Ministry’s undersecretary Youssef Abu Al-Reesh described it, “amid bombardment, rubble, and bloodshed.” The ceremony was a deliberate act: a public affirmation that Palestinian medical education continues, that professional standards are maintained, and that Gaza’s healthcare system — however decimated — has not been extinguished.

Al-Shifa was targeted multiple times by Israeli forces. The hospital’s destruction was one of the most extensively documented events of the war — covered by journalists, satellite imagery, and UN investigators. What Israeli forces left behind became the setting for a graduation.

The image demands to be held alongside everything else documented on the Gaza Genocide page: the 84 deaths in Israeli detention, the 230,000 women without reproductive care, the 500+ aid workers killed, the hospitals raided and directors arrested. Gaza’s medical community has been systematically dismantled from the outside. What the graduation ceremony at Al-Shifa represents is what remains — not despite the destruction, but in direct answer to it.

One hundred and sixty-eight doctors. A professional oath. The ruins of a hospital behind them. This is what survival looks like under genocide.