Several residents of the town of Redeyef gathered on Saturday, December 27, 2025, to demand the immediate opening of an administrative and judicial investigation in order to determine responsibilities in the death of the young nurse Azhar Ben Hmida Amaidi.
After crisscrossing the city’s main arteries in a peaceful but emotionally charged march, the demonstrators converged on the local Redeyef hospital, the epicenter of the protest. They transported there, carried on their shoulders, a symbolic coffin, heavily loaded with meaning, to denounce what they consider to be a failure of the conditions of security and care within the establishment.
This mobilization, in which members of the deceased’s family, her colleagues as well as representatives of civil society took part, was marked by slogans denouncing what the protesters consider to be acts of negligence and recalling collective responsibility in the face of a tragedy that they consider avoidable.
They expressed deep dismay at the persistent structural inadequacies from which the Redeyef hospital suffers, in particular the absence of specialist doctors, the chronic shortage of medicines as well as the general deterioration of health services, considering that the continued alteration of the quality of public hospital service constitutes one of the major causes of the death of the one they unanimously describe as a “martyr of duty”.
Seriously burned while on duty at the local Redeyef hospital, the young nurse succumbed to her injuries on the morning of Thursday December 25, 2025.
The tragedy, which deeply moved local and national public opinion, remains surrounded by numerous gray areas. The day after the tragedy, the victim’s uncle, Doctor Mohamed Ali Amaidi, expressed serious doubts about the official version put forward in the first hours following the accident, believing that the exact causes of the incident had not yet been clearly established.
For her part, the deceased’s aunt, a nurse at the Sahloul hospital in Sousse, formally denied the information suggesting a possible epileptic attack, a hypothesis initially put forward to explain the accident. She denounced what she considers to be a hasty justification, while pointing out the almost total absence of medical staff and the serious failures of the care conditions within the hospital establishment.
The images and videos released following the tragedy show the presence, on the scene, of an electric resistance heater, which is believed to be the cause of the serious burns suffered by the nurse. The victim should have been urgently evacuated to the Ben Arous burn center. However, the extreme seriousness of his condition unfortunately led to his death before any possible improvement.
Even before the official announcement of his death, a first protest march was organized on Thursday morning in Redeyef by several components of civil society and citizens, under the slogan: “Give justice to the victim of negligence, nurse Azhar Ben Hmida”. The demonstrators as well as several other organizations then called for the opening of an investigation.
Faced with the scale of the emotion aroused by this mobilization and the growing pressure from public opinion, official reactions would have followed.
According to several corroborating sources that we have not been able to verify, the Minister of Health, Mustapha Ferjani, contacted the family of the deceased – after her burial on Friday – to offer his condolences and ordered an administrative investigation.
This tragedy acutely relaunches the debate on the state of health infrastructure and the safety of health professionals in the exercise of their functions, in a context marked by growing demands in favor of a dignified and secure public health service.
NJ
