Dr. Marwan Sultan was taking a rare break from work to be home with his family Wednesday when, at 2:15 p.m., the renowned cardiologist became a grim statistic: the 70th health care worker to be killed by Israeli fire in the past 50 days, according to a Palestinian monitoring group.
Soon after at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, an NBC News crew there witnessed grieving family members and colleagues surround the body of the cardiologist, who was killed along with his wife, daughter, son-in-law and sister.
In the morgue, hospital workers wiped blood off Sultan’s ashen and scratched face as his body lay wrapped in a smeared white sheet. Visitors embraced and kissed him, their wails reverberating around the room, according to the video.
“My father was just a doctor, just a human caring for patients,” one of Sultan’s surviving children, Ahmad, said as his voice trembled.
Ahmad, 17, told NBC News that his family was taking shelter in an apartment in Gaza with five other displaced families when the Israeli bomb hit. Later, he wept in the arms of a relative.
Sultan was a cardiologist and the director of Indonesian hospital, one of the largest medical facilities in northern Gaza, where he had been treating the sick and wounded since the war in the Gaza Strip broke out in October 2023.
“He was a rare doctor,” Dr. Munir Bursh, the director general of the Health Ministry, told NBC News between tears. “A man of deep expertise and an even deeper conscience. We didn’t just lose a doctor — we lost a man who was a lifeline to so many.”
Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW), an organization that monitors and verifies attacks against Palestinian health care workers, said that Sultan was the 70th worker to be killed in Israeli airstrikes in the past 50 days.
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