It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means: lots of buzz surrounding Time magazine’s annual issue.Person of the Year“, a tradition that began in 1928 as “Man of the Year” but now honors a “man, woman, group or concept.”

Given how horrifying 2023 has turned out, Palestinian doctors and medical staff currently seem like an obvious choice for Person of the Year risk their lives to save others from Israel’s genocidal efforts in Gaza.

Since October 7, the Israeli military has slaughtered more than 21,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including more than 21,000 Palestinians at least 8,663 children. Accordingly Healthcare Workers Watch – Palestinean independent monitoring initiative launched jointly with The Texas doctor Osaid AlserBetween October 7 and December 19, no fewer than 340 health care workers were killed by the Israelis, including 118 doctors and 104 nurses.

Take, for example, the case of the 36-year-old nephrologist Dr. Hammam God, a father of two young children who was killed along with his own father in an Israeli airstrike on their home in November. In an October interview With Democracy Now! When asked why he refused to leave Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and move south in accordance with Israeli evacuation orders, Alloh had replied: “They think I studied medicine and did my postgraduate degree overall so for 14 years [as to] Are you only thinking about my life and not my patients?”

And it is this kind of unrelenting altruism that Palestinian medics continually display as Israel seeks to erase the concept of humanity through carpet bombing civilians The target group is hospitals and ambulances. The attack on medical infrastructure and personnel was actively supported by a cohort of Israeli doctors who jumped on the military bandwagon for this purpose cheered the bombing of Palestinian hospitals.

Palestinian medics not only became military targets, they also had to deal with them crippling bottlenecks of fuel, medicine and basic supplies – shortages that were already bad enough in so-called “peacetime”. Watching family members and colleagues die has effectively become part of the task, and the Israeli army has also dealt with it kidnap and torture Palestinian healthcare workers.

In a current one interview with the Washington Post, British-Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah — who has volunteered with medical teams in Gaza during numerous Israeli attacks over the years, this time spending 43 days in the besieged enclave — described having to “come to terms with the idea” that he wouldn’t survive. Among his patients was a young girl, the only surviving daughter of one female obstetrician at Al-Shifa Hospital, who was killed along with her other descendants in an Israeli rocket attack. Abu Sittah remembered the girl: “Half of her face was missing. Half her nose and eyelids were torn from the bone.”

Despite the all-consuming horror, Abu Sittah reported that he also witnessed great “acts of love” and resistance, such as a three-year-old boy who had lost his family and whose arm and leg Abu Sittah had to amputate: “When I When she went to check on him, the woman whose son was lying injured in bed next to him had him on her lap and was feeding him and her son.”

In conclusion, it is not just the doctors in Gaza who are heroes.

Speaking of heroes, Palestinian journalists have also increasingly come under Israeli fire because they have witnessed the increasingly deadly atrocities in the Gaza Strip. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Remarks that this war is the “deadliest time for journalists since CPJ began collecting data in 1992”; Between October 7 and December 23, 69 journalists and media workers were confirmed dead. Of these victims, 62 were Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese.

On November 20, Palestinian journalist Khadura verse was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home in northern Gaza – just two weeks after shefinal message to the worldIn it she explained: “We had big dreams, but our dream now is to be killed in one piece so they know who we are.”

In another deadly episode documented According to CPJ, on November 7, Palestinian journalist Mohamed Abu Hassira was “killed along with 42 family members in an attack on his home in Gaza.” And yet, according to Western corporate media, the slaughter of journalists and their extended families in Gaza was apparently deemed less newsworthy.

On December 15, Al Jazeera’s Arab cameraman, Samer Abudaqa killed in an Israeli attack in the southern Gaza Strip, where he bled to death after Israeli forces prevented ambulances from reaching him for more than five hours. Also injured was Abudaqa’s colleague, Al Jazeera bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, who was in one previous Israeli attack in October lost his wife, son, daughter, grandson and various other family members.

Despite the unspeakable trauma, Dahdouh continued to report.

Despite the abundance of heroism in the real world, Time Magazine has chosen American billionaire singer-songwriter and pop culture opiate Taylor Swift as its 2023 Person of the Year. According to Time attribution, Swift is indeed the “main character of the world.” (Past recipients of the award have included Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris duo, and Elon Musk – the “richest private citizen in history,” who apparently charmed the Time team by “live tweeting.”[ing] his shit.”)

But while Swift is indeed the current protagonist of a superficial world that is quickly burning into self-serving banality, one wishes that more recognition were given to the heroes of the real world. And as 2023 draws to a close with no end to the genocide in sight, name me the people of Gaza as “Person of the Year” any day.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.