In Gaza, patients are no longer asking, "What is wrong with me?", they are asking, "Is there anywhere left that can tell me?" With labs reduced to rubble, machines broken beyond repair, and supplies blocked at the borders, diagnosis itself has become a casualty of war. And without diagnosis, people are dying silently, without names for their illnesses, and without a chance to fight them.

Laboratories that once formed the backbone of Gaza’s healthcare system now stand in darkness, no power, no reagents, no functioning equipment. Blood samples are carried from one shattered hospital to another in a desperate search for the last operational CBC machine. Hormone tests, tumour markers, ultrasounds, and even basic scans have disappeared. What remains are doctors forced to guess, and patients dying not of illness, but of medical blindness.

Dr Ahmad Muhaysin, a clinical lab specialist in central Gaza, says more than half of diagnostic equipment is out of service. His lab, partially burned, working with expired reagents and salvaged machines, barely serves the most critical cases. "We treat samples like gold," he says, "but the truth is, many of us are just waiting for the inevitable collapse."

The toll is measured in lives. Soha Jadallah, a 50-year-old cancer patient, used to be tested every three months to monitor her liver tumour. Now, she hasn’t had a single test in six months. Her abdomen is swelling, her pain intensifying, but no hospital can tell her what’s happening. “I’m not afraid of dying,” she says quietly. “I’m afraid of dying without knowing why.”

Pregnant women like Ghadir Hussein face a different kind of terror, carrying life in a world where the basic tools to protect it no longer exist. Eight months into her pregnancy, she’s never seen an ultrasound. “Every woman dreams of hearing her baby’s heartbeat,” she says. “I don’t even know if mine is still alive.”

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 514 laboratory devices are no longer functioning, and supplies for essential tests could run out completely within weeks. With hospitals overwhelmed and diagnostic centres deliberately bombed, medical care in Gaza is collapsing, not just from lack of treatment, but from the absence of the tools that tell us what needs to be treated.

In the quiet corners of shelters and field clinics, patients are fading away, not because they cannot be saved, but because no one can even name what is killing them. And in Gaza, that silence is becoming louder than any bomb.