When I started studying nursing at Al-Azhar University, I knew I wanted to work at Al-Shifa Hospital. It was my dream.

It was the largest and most prestigious hospital in the Gaza Strip. A group of the best doctors and nurses in Palestine worked there. Various foreign medical missions will come to provide training and care there as well.

Many people from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip requested medical assistance at Al-Shifa Hospital. The hospital’s name means “healing” in Arabic, and it was indeed a place of healing for the Palestinians of Gaza.

In 2020, I graduated from nursing school and tried to find a job in the private sector. After several short-term jobs, she joined Al-Shifa Hospital as a volunteer nurse.

I loved my work in the emergency department very much. I went to work with passion and positive energy every day. I would meet patients with a big smile, hoping to relieve some of their pain. I always loved hearing patients pray for me in gratitude.

In the emergency department, we were 80 nurses – men and women – and we were all friends. In fact, some of my closest friends were colleagues at the hospital. Alaa was one of them. We took turns together and went out for coffee outside of work. She was a beautiful girl, very kind and loved by everyone.

It was these friendships and comradery among the staff that helped me hold on when the war began.

From the first day, the hospital was filled with infected people. After my first shift that day ended, I stayed in the nurses’ station crying for an hour about everything we had been through and all the injured people I saw suffering.

Within days, more than a thousand wounded and martyred people were in the hospital. The more people are brought in, the more effort we will put in trying to save lives.

I never expected this horror to last more than a month. But she did.

The Israeli army quickly called my family and told us that we had to leave our home in Gaza City. I was faced with a difficult choice: to be with my family in this horrific time or to be with the patients who needed me most. I decided to stay.

I bid farewell to my family who were displaced south to Rafah and stayed in Al-Shifa Hospital, which became my second home. Alaa also stayed behind. We supported and comforted each other.

In early November, the Israeli army asked us to evacuate the hospital and imposed a siege on it. Our medical supplies are starting to dwindle. The generators that powered the life-saving equipment quickly ran out of fuel.

Perhaps the saddest moment was when we ran out of fuel and oxygen and could no longer keep the premature babies who were under our care in the incubators. We had to take them to the operating room where we tried to keep them warm. They were struggling to breathe and we had no oxygen to help them. We lost eight innocent children. I remember sitting and crying for a long time that day for those innocent souls.

Then on November 15, Israeli soldiers stormed the compound. The attack came as a shock. As a medical facility, it was supposed to be protected under international law, but that clearly did not stop the Israeli army.

Just before the raid, our administration informed us that they had received a call that the Israelis were about to storm the medical complex. We quickly closed the emergency department gate and gathered inside around the nursing office in the middle of it, not knowing what to do. The next day we saw Israeli soldiers surrounding the building. We couldn’t leave and were running out of medical supplies. We struggled to provide treatment to the patients who were with us.

We have no food or water left. I remember feeling dizzy and almost fainting. I didn’t eat anything for three days. We lost some patients due to the Israeli siege and raid.

On November 18, Dr. Muhammad Abu Salamiya, director of Al-Shifa Hospital, came to tell us that the Israelis had ordered the evacuation of the entire medical complex. If I had a choice, I would have stayed, but the Israeli army left me no choice.

Hundreds of us, doctors and nurses, had to leave along with many patients. Only about twenty staff members remained with bedridden patients who could not be moved. Dr. Abu Salamiya also remained behind and was arrested several days later. He disappeared for the next seven months.

Me and dozens of my colleagues are heading south under Israeli orders. Alaa and a few people defied these orders and headed north to their families. We walked several kilometers and passed Israeli checkpoints, where they made us wait for hours, until we were able to find a donkey cart that could take us part of the way.

When we finally arrived in Rafah, I was very happy to see my family. There was a lot of crying and comforting. But the joy of being with my family was quickly overshadowed by the shocking news.

Alaa was able to return to her family in Beit Lahia, who had been displaced to a school shelter. But when she and her brother went to their abandoned house to retrieve some of their belongings, an Israeli missile hit the building and they were martyred.

The news of her death came as a huge shock. A year later, I’m still living with the pain of losing my best friend – one of the kindest people I’ve ever known who loved helping others and who was always there to comfort me in difficult moments.

In March, Israeli soldiers returned to Shifa. For two weeks they are commotion Through the hospital, leaving death and destruction in their wake. There was not a building left in the medical complex that was not damaged or burned. From a place of healing, healing turned into a cemetery.

I don’t know how I will feel when I see the hospital again. How would I feel knowing that the place of my best professional achievements and the most cherished moments I shared with my colleagues had also become a place of death, enforced disappearance and displacement?

Today, more than a year after losing my workplace, I live in a tent and care for patients in a makeshift clinic. My future, our future is uncertain. But in the new year, I have a dream: to see healing as it was, great and beautiful.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.