She once saved lives with gentle hands and a steadfast heart, her smile a rare comfort in Gaza’s shattered hospitals. Nurse Iman Kawarea was known not only for her skill, but for the humanity she brought into every ward she entered. Yet on a quiet Monday evening, the woman who gave life to others lost her own, not in the clinic where she worked, but in a tent meant to shelter her family from the storm.

In the Al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis, Iman was with her husband, nurse Ahmad Majed Salah, himself a devoted caregiver at Nasser Medical Complex. Both had seen pain. Both had fought to save others from it. But this time, there was no one to save them. An Israeli missile struck their modest tent without warning. The silence that followed was louder than the explosion. In an instant, everything was gone.

Ahmad could mend the wounds of war, but not this one. His family was buried under the weight of it, his wife, a doctor whose name had once meant hope, left alone to grasp the unimaginable.

Iman’s grief echoes that of Dr. Aya Al-Najjar, whose nine children were incinerated in an Israeli airstrike in May. A week later, her husband died too, leaving behind only memories and unbearable loss. These are not isolated stories. They are Gaza’s daily reality.

Iman is more than another name on a growing list. She is the embodiment of Gaza’s strength: a woman fighting two wars, one in the corridors of crumbling hospitals, the other in the hollowed-out ruins of her own heart. She survives not because she must, but because she carries a truth too powerful to silence: that resilience endures even when everything else is taken.

For 647 days, Gaza has endured a genocidal war. Displaced civilians are bombed in tents. Children starve. Aid is blocked. And yet, the spirit of people like Iman remains, battered, grieving, but unbroken.