According to a Palestinian watchdog group, Dr. Marwan Sultan returned home with his family at 2:15pm on Wednesday at 2:15pm.
Soon at Alsifa Hospital in Gaza, an NBC news crew was spotted there as grieving family members and colleagues surrounded the body of a cardiologist.
At the morgue, hospital workers wiped blood from the Sultan’s ashes, scratched their faces and injured their faces wrapped in white, painted sheets. According to the video, visitors hug him and kiss him, echoing around the room.
“My father was just a doctor and a person who cared for his patients,” said Ahmad, one of the surviving children of the Sultan, who said his voice was shaking.
Ahmad, 17, told NBC News that his family had been evacuated to an apartment in Gaza along with five other displaced people when the Israeli bomb was hit. He then cried in the arms of his relatives.
The Sultan is a cardiologist at Indonesian Hospital, one of the largest medical facilities in northern Gaza that has been treating sick and injured people since the war in the Gaza Strip, and it broke out in October 2023.
“He was a rare doctor,” Dr. Munir Bahsh, director of the Ministry of Health, told tears between NBC News. “A man with deep expertise and deeper conscience. We didn’t just lose a doctor. We lost a man, a lifeline for many.”
Healthcare Worker Watch (HWW), an organization that monitors and validates attacks on Palestinian health workers, said it was the 70th worker killed in Israeli airstrikes in the past 50 days.
