Pulling Out Teeth Just to Live: How Israel Has Devastated Dental Care in GazaAlong with other medical supplies, dental materials have not been allowed into Gaza for the past three years, forcing patients to choose between unaffordable treatment, extraction, or painkillers.
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DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip—At midnight, inside a tent in Deir al-Balah, Nour Abo Shamala put her head against the pillow with a plastic cup of salt water beside her. Sleep didn’t come. A bolt of pain ran from her front tooth to the top of her skull and across her head. The only sounds in the night were the wind outside and her groans. She felt around for the plastic cup in the darkness and rinsed her mouth with the water. It brought no relief to the ache in her upper jaw. She soaked a rag in cold water, pressed it against her mouth, and waited for dawn. Abo Shamala, 22, has lived with this chronic pain since February. She graduated university with a teaching degree just before the genocide began in October 2023, and has never had the chance to work. The family lives on aid. They were displaced from their home in Jabaliya more than five times before reaching Deir al-Balah in May 2024. This past May, three months after the pain in her tooth first began, she went to one of the few dentists still working in the area. The decay had reached the nerve, the dentist told her, and the tooth needed root canal treatment, or she would lose it. It would cost 300 shekels (about $100). She told him she couldn’t afford to pay it. The dentist said the only other option was to remove the tooth for 50 shekels (about $16). “I can’t pay 300 shekels, and if I have them, it would go to things that matter more,” Abo Shamala told Drop Site News. “I’m a girl. Imagine me without a front tooth. How would I laugh or talk to people?” She also knew she wouldn’t be able to have the pulled tooth replaced any time soon. The dentist warned her that the infection would worsen, and that the tooth was eroding from the inside and could break at any moment. The waiting has cost her. Months of painkillers left her with an inflamed stomach, diagnosed at a UNRWA clinic. She can no longer bite into bread or fruit, and cuts her food into small pieces to chew on her back teeth. “If the treatment was 80 shekels the way it used to be, I wouldn’t have waited a single day,” Abo Shamala said. Seven months on, her tooth is still salvageable but she is still waiting for the price for root canal treatment to come down. Over the past three years, proper dental care in Gaza has been all but destroyed, along with the rest of the enclave’s health care system, devastated by sustained targeted attacks by the Israeli military and a crippling siege that includes vital medical supplies. Israeli airstrikes have destroyed 80 percent of the dental clinics in Gaza, completely or partially, and more than 100 dentists have been killed since the genocide began, according to Irfan Eshtaiwi, the head of the dentists’ syndicate in Gaza’s southern governorates. The syndicate receives daily notices from dentists who are shutting down or scaling back to emergency care only. Beyond the blocked supplies, the clinics that remain are working without reliable electricity, running water, or sterilization materials. Another patient with dental issues faced the same difficult choice as Abo Shamala but made a different decision. Ahmed Abo Dan, 34, sells chocolate from a small street stand in Deir-al-Balah. He was displaced from his home in northern Gaza in October 2023, after the Israeli military issued sweeping displacement orders for the 1.1 million Palestinians living north of Wadi Gaza to move to the south. In March, Abo Dan began suffering from pain in his tooth. Painkillers were largely unavailable at the local government clinic, and he often could not afford to buy them himself, forcing him to endure the constant ache. When he finally saw a dentist in June 2026, he was given two options for his molar: a root canal treatment for 450 shekels (around $145), or extraction for 30 shekels (around $10). “I’m displaced and can barely scrape together the price of a bag of bread for my children,” Abo Dan told Drop Site. He chose extraction, and borrowed the 30 shekels from a friend to pay for the procedure. The tooth was pulled in July. “War has made us pull out our teeth just to live,” he said. Another tooth has started to hurt him. “I’m afraid to go and be told I need treatment I can’t pay for all over again and maybe lose another tooth.” Hardly any dental supplies have entered Gaza since October 2023, according to both Eshtaiwi and Dr. Osama Jaber Al-Shanti, the former dean of the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Palestine. Last month, Al-Shanti took part in a demonstration by dozens of dentists who gathered in their white coats outside the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in western Gaza City to demand the entry of dental supplies into Gaza. The siege has continued in violation of a “ceasefire” that went into effect over a year ago. “They claim these are dual-use materials,” Al-Shanti told Drop Site. “It’s a label used to evade and restrict, to keep useful materials out of Gaza.” Small quantities do get in, he said, through a limited number of private traders who pay very high fees to bring them through, and those black market costs are then built into the price of services offered by clinics. Before the genocide, a syringe of resin used for fillings that cost 70 to 80 shekels (around $23–26), now costs 1,200 shekels (around $388), according to Al-Shanti, an increase of 1,500%. Root canal treatment, which cost 70 to 150 shekels before the genocide, now runs 500 to 700 shekels at most clinics, Al-Shanti said. He charges 300, because he is still working through inventory he purchased earlier at a lower price and in bulk. The 300 does not cover his costs, yet he maintains the price to avoid turning away patients. At Al-Shanti’s clinic in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City earlier this month, three people sat waiting—a mother with her young son and a man resting his cheek in his hand. It’s the third clinic Al-Shanti has had to set up from scratch since October 2023, after Israel destroyed two of his previous clinics in strikes and displacement forced him to abandon another. The clinic has none of the sharp anesthetic smell that usually permeates dental offices. In the treatment room, a scratched yellow chair with a rusted base stood against freshly painted walls, fitted with a new control board and basin. The chair is the only piece of equipment that survived his second clinic, bombed in early 2024. He pulled it from the rubble with a ruined control board and a broken basin. A technician managed to repair the chair by fitting parts from a chair destroyed in another Israeli strike. The repairs cost Al-Shanti more than a new unit would have with spare parts also skyrocketing in price, but he had no choice with no new dental equipment being allowed into Gaza.
At his clinic, Al-Shanti is still able to provide fillings, extractions and root canals. However he has been forced to stop implants, whitening, bridges, and dentures due to a lack of supplies. He said his was one of the few dental clinics still operational. Most of his colleagues have stopped working altogether. Ayman al-Shabrawi, who owns a dental laboratory in the Al-Saha area of Gaza City, told Drop Site he has closed part of it and laid off two thirds of his staff, and expects to shut the rest if medical supplies continue to be blocked. The Gaza Center for Human Rights said in August that Israel bars a wide range of purely therapeutic dental materials and equipment under the dual-use label, and that the resulting prices have pushed dentists toward tooth extraction as the only remaining option. In Khan Younis governorate, the center said, only one government dental clinic and two UNRWA clinics are still operating, alongside a small number of private practices. In March 2025, Al-Shanti screened children in displacement camps in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis for a Save the Children Netherlands program, which also carried out medical screening for orphans. He found large numbers of children with untreated decay that no one was following up on, and whose families could not take them to a dentist. Malnutrition, he said, has made it worse. Most of the children in Gaza are not examined at all, he said. Warda Shaath, a dentist in Khan Yunis, said most dental treatment has to be rationed because supplies are simply not available. Light-cured fillings, for example, have disappeared from the market, she said. Some procedures that cost around 50 shekels (around $16) before the genocide now cost close to 250 shekels (around $81). About 90 percent of her patients now ask to have the tooth pulled rather than to receive treatment, she said, because they cannot pay for a filling or a root canal. If the supply shortage continues, she is considering closing down the clinic next month. Shaath still does implants, with materials she buys on the black market at very high prices. One of her patients, a 32-year-old mother of four, lost several teeth when her house collapsed on her. She needs four implants. The full treatment would cost around 10,000 shekels (around $3,300), and the first stage alone would cost close to 5,000 shekels (around $1,615). Shaath said the clinic tried to find a way to cover the costs but they were unable to, and the woman left in tears. Dentists say they want to help their patients but are left without any options with the ongoing Israeli siege. “The moment supplies enter, the first thing I will do is message all my patients and drop my prices immediately,” Al-Shanti said. The profession has a human side, he said, and is not only about profit. Back in her tent, Nour Abo Shamala’s front tooth is growing weaker and darker. A small piece broke off the edge of the tooth recently when she bit down on a piece of dry bread. She is still waiting for Israel to allow supplies to come in, so the prices can come down. Become a Drop Site News Paid SubscriberA paid subscription gets you:✔️ 15% off Drop Site store ✔️ Access to our Discord, subscriber-only AMAs, chats, and invites to events, both virtual and IRL ✔️ Post comments and join the community ✔️ The knowledge you are supporting independent media making the lives of the powerful miserable You can also now find us on podcast platforms and on Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Telegram, and YouTube.
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