Yahya Ismail was born and raised in Khan Younis, a city in the southern Gaza Strip that has lived under Israeli blockade since 2007. In 2019, aged eighteen, he left Gaza to study medicine at Zagazig University in Egypt. He always planned to come back.
When the war broke out in October 2023, Yahya was midway through his degree, more than four hundred kilometres from home. His family remained in Gaza. Over the months that followed, they were displaced more than seven times.
"I was living daily between prayer and waiting," he says. "I was studying on the pulse of the news, trying to hold my focus while watching everything fall apart."
The losses came one after another. His uncles, the men who had stepped in as his closest support after his father died, were killed. So were their children. So were friends he had known since childhood.
"My city, as I knew it, no longer exists," he says.
Yahya kept studying
Now 25 years old, he is completing his medical internship year at Zagazig University and is on course to graduate in February 2027. His goal is to specialise in gastrointestinal surgery, a choice he made long before the war and one that is rooted in something deeply personal.
His father died of a disease affecting the digestive system. That loss, Yahya says, changed everything about how he understands the work.
"I see this specialty through the eyes of a physician who understands the pain scientifically, and through the eyes of a son who lived it as a human being," he explains.
For nearly two decades, Gaza's healthcare system has been strained to breaking point by the blockade, which restricts the movement of people, medicines, and medical equipment in and out of the Strip. Since October 2023, the situation has become catastrophic. Hospitals have been bombed and overwhelmed. Trained medical staff have been killed or displaced. The Palestinian Medical Association has warned of a near-total collapse of health services across the territory.
Palestinian medical students studying in Egypt represent a critical part of what any future recovery will depend on: doctors who are qualified, committed, and ready to return. But the war has made finishing their degrees far harder than anyone anticipated. With family income cut off as a direct consequence of the conflict, hundreds of students found themselves unable to pay their university tuition fees, with their studies, and their futures, suddenly at risk.
It is precisely this gap that the Return to Rebuild Scholarship was created to fill. Funded by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development and delivered through GlocalShift Foundation, the programme pays unpaid tuition fees directly to Egyptian universities on behalf of Palestinian medical students in their internship years, so that they can continue their studies despite the loss of family financial support. To date, around 600,000 US dollars has been disbursed for 107 students, keeping them enrolled and on course to graduate.
Yahya was one of those students
"It was a message of trust," he says. "It told me that my efforts were seen, and that someone believed in my potential despite all the challenges. It gave me the psychological grounding I needed to keep going."
He is keeping going. When his internship ends, he intends to pursue specialisation in general surgery, building the expertise he will need to work in a healthcare system that, by the time he returns, will require rebuilding almost from scratch.
"I believe medicine is a mission before it is a profession," he says. "I want to be a surgeon who combines technical skill with human care, someone who understands what a patient is carrying, not just what is wrong with them."
He does not know what he will find when he goes back. He knows he will go back.
"My goal," he says, "is to be part of the efforts that ease the pain. I want to return to Gaza and serve my community, with knowledge, with skill, and with everything I have been through."
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