He was born in Gaza, and was the first Palestinian doctor to work in an Israeli hospital and has been active in promoting Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.

In his regularly scheduled report, in tears, he described their killing on-air, in a video that was widely circulated in Israel and around the world.

[1] He emigrated to Canada and wrote a 2011 memoir entitled I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity.

[3] Immediately before the 2008–2009 Gaza War between Palestinian paramilitary groups and the Israeli military, he was a researcher at the Sheba Hospital in Tel Aviv[4] and already an important figure in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

[6][failed verification] During the three-week war, he gave reports and interviews to the Israeli media on the situation in Gaza.

On January 16, 2009, a few days before the end of the war, an Israeli tank fired two shells at his home, killing three of his daughters and a niece.

The organization provides scholarship awards to encourage young women from Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Syria to pursue their studies at universities in Canada, the United States and Belgium.

[11] He wrote a 2011 memoir entitled I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity.

In February 2013, he attended the Karachi Literature Festival in Pakistan where he narrated the events surrounding the death of his daughters killed in the Israeli airstrike.

According to The Express Tribune, "there was hardly anyone in the audience who did not choke or wipe away a silent tear while listening to Palestinian doctor and author Izzeldin Abuelaish..."[12] Abuelaish described the event of his daughters' deaths as follows: We are standing in the scene of the tragedy, in the place where four lovely girls were sitting, building their dreams and their hopes, and in seconds, these dreams were killed.