For two decades, his job and purpose in life was to heal people. But Dr Mohammed Abu Mughaisib also wanted to stay alive.
So, when he could no longer even look after himself, and the hunger was too much to bear, he took a rare chance to leave Gaza.
I would never have imagined starving, the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medic said.
But my head hurt and I had pain in my stomach from starvation.
After working non-stop at hospitals throughout Gaza over the past two years, Dr Abu Mughaisib was evacuated to Ireland in mid-September, along with a group of students taking up scholarships.
Safe and fed, he is now able to reflect on his time working in increasingly dire conditions as Israel's offensive destroyed medical and other critical infrastructure - and how he feels about leaving colleagues behind.
The decision was very difficult, he told me, sitting in a peaceful park in Dublin – with a soundtrack of birdsong, rather than bullets, drones and explosions.
The contrast between the two worlds was almost overwhelming for him.
I'm physically here but my heart and soul are in Gaza, he said. It's very strange seeing people living a normal life, and it will take time to get used to it.
I'm happy that I'm a survivor. Because I could have been killed or injured anytime. But I'm sad that I left behind my colleagues and my people.
Dr Abu Mughaisib was in charge of operations for the international medical charity in the Gaza Strip, including all its hospitals, clinics and mental health services. It is one of the biggest providers of medical services in Gaza.
He struggled to put into words the indescribable consequences for his colleagues of the past two years of war, with Israel's offensive leaving Gaza's hospitals under severe strain, with some forced to close and others operating at drastically reduced levels.
He told me about medics forced to sip glucose solution just to give themselves a little energy to carry on working.
At one point, among doctors and nurses, the only topic of conversation in the hospital was food, and the desperate hunt for it. Starving doctors were treating malnutrition, he said.
And the injured just kept coming.
When you enter a hospital, you smell blood, he told me.
Hospitals are meant to be holy places, sterile places but in Gaza it's like going to a public market. Patients are literally lying on the ground because there are no beds for them.
There are not enough doctors to look after them. In the intensive care unit, they wait for someone to die, to admit another critical patient.
There were no signs it's only targeting Hamas, said Dr Abu Mughaisib.
It's the civilians, the population, me, my friends, my colleagues, my neighbours, they are not Hamas.
We are the ones who were killed and injured and running from one place to another and starving.
Dr Abu Mughaisib's reflections have shed light on the challenging conditions faced by medical professionals and civilians in Gaza amidst a humanitarian crisis.
