Three clinics in thirteen months. That is the casualty count behind Dr Mohammed al-Khalidi’s current practice, which operates out of a tent in al-Mawasi, in southern Gaza. Al-Khalidi is a specialist in prosthetics and orthotics — the field that fits artificial limbs and braces — and his patients, in a territory where amputation has become one of the signature injuries of the war, are not short in number.
The chronology, as Eyad Al-Qatrawi reported for Al Jazeera, runs like this. His first clinic, on al-Bahr Street in Rafah, was destroyed by Israeli bombing in April 2024. He set up again, twice, in the Old City of Khan Younis. Both of those clinics were destroyed in May 2025. After the third loss he salvaged whatever medical equipment he could move and relocated to al-Mawasi, where he has received patients in the tent for the past two years.
His case sits inside a wider shift that Al Jazeera’s reporting describes as a real estate crisis: with commercial and medical premises destroyed or unaffordable across the strip, Gaza’s professionals have converted tents into surgeries and offices, working in the same displacement encampments where they and their patients live.
The location matters. Al-Mawasi is the coastal area the Israeli military designated a “humanitarian zone” and repeatedly ordered Palestinians from other parts of Gaza to move into. The designation has not made it safe. The UN Human Rights Office said in June 2025 that Israeli forces had kept striking the tents of displaced families there even while directing new evacuees toward it, and the BBC reported conditions in the overcrowded zone worsening as strikes on tents continued. Strikes on tents in al-Mawasi were still being recorded this month, including one on October 7, three days before Al Jazeera’s piece ran.
Al-Khalidi’s tent is therefore both workplace and evidence: a specialist clinic running on salvaged equipment, in a zone whose official status has not stopped the bombing. The equipment he could not carry out of Rafah and Khan Younis has no announced replacement.