---
title: "The Silent Laboratory of Deir el-Balah"
description: "At Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the machines that name diseases have stopped, and doctors must decide without them"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-09-29T07:26:37Z
modified: 2026-09-29T09:49:23Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/the-silent-laboratory-of-deir-el-balah-798116
language: en
tags: ["health", "war", "gaza", "medicine", "infrastructure", "mideast"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# The Silent Laboratory of Deir el-Balah

*At Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the machines that name diseases have stopped, and doctors must decide without them*

By Jan Sokol · September 29, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-silent-laboratory-of-deir-el-balah-798116

## In brief

- Al Jazeera reports from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza
- Lab director Bassem Hassan’s team provides tests doctors need to diagnose kidney disease, diabetes and more
- Blood gas testing for cardiac and intensive-care patients has been suspended
- Blood-collection tubes needed for clinical chemistry tests are in short supply

Deir el-Balah, in the middle of the Gaza Strip, is a city of tents and queues now, and at its heart stands Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where the queue that matters most is invisible: the line of blood samples waiting to be read. Bassem Hassan directs the laboratory department there. His is the room where uncertainty is supposed to end — where kidneys declare whether they are failing, where diabetes shows itself, where a doctor’s guess becomes a diagnosis and a diagnosis becomes a course of treatment.

According to Al Jazeera’s reporting from inside the hospital, Hassan’s team supplies the information on which doctors depend to tell kidney disease from diabetes and to decide how to proceed with their cases. Without it, the physicians are navigating by stars in a storm. They must choose treatments knowing the tests that would confirm or condemn their choices have been suspended or rationed.

Al Jazeera reports that blood gas testing — the measurement that tells intensive-care and cardiac staff how a failing body is breathing at the level of the cell — has been suspended entirely. Blood-collection tubes, the humble glassware without which clinical chemistry cannot begin, run short. The laboratory, the quiet ministry of the hospital on which every other ward relies, has been stripped to its skeleton by war and siege: damaged medical infrastructure, missing materials, equipment that cannot be repaired or replaced.

There is an order of power here that rarely makes the communiqués. A hospital is a hierarchy of knowledge, and at its base sits the laboratory, the department nobody photographs. When it fails, every doctor upstairs becomes a gambler. The patients of Deir el-Balah wait — for a name to give their illness, for a number on a printout, for the small certainty that modern medicine long ago taught the world to expect and that siege has quietly withdrawn.