Destroying Hospitals
A message written by Médecins Sans Frontières’ Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila on a hospital whiteboard normally used for planning surgeries, before he was killed in a strike on Al-Awda Hospital on November 21, 2023.
Roadmap
This page describes Israel's decimation of Gaza's hospitals - and indeed, it's entire health care system.
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Overview - a brief overview of the calculated, full-spectrum attack on Gaza's health system, including attacks on every single hospital, killing and torturing of health workers, and depriving hospitals of basic and essential medical supplies (not to mention food and water).
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Intentional Decimation of the Entire Health Care System - this section describes the total collapse of Gaza's health care system in a way that can only be described as intentional, leading to incalculable (and preventable) disease, suffering, and death
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Attacking Hospitals - this section describes Israel's brutal assaults on several of Gaza's most important hospitals in greater detail, revealing a pattern of intentional and systematic destruction
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Blocking Essential Supplies - including everything from medical equipment and medications, to soap and gauze for bandages, to food and clean water for patients and doctors.
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Attacking Ambulances - this section describes Israel's repeated assaults on ambulances and medical personnel seeking to rescue the wounded
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Killing Health Care Workers - this section describes Israel's mass murder of health care professionals, both by targeted strikes on their homes as well as on hospitals, leaving over 1,500 dead.
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Disappearing, Imprisoning, and Torturing Health Care Workers - Israel has detained, disappeared, abused, and tortured hundreds of health care workers.
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Attacking Maternity Wards and IVF Clinics - Israel has systematically attacked maternity wards and women's health facilities, leading to a surge in maternal and neonatal deaths. This is a key element of genocide - the attack on a people's past, present, and future.
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Denying Medical Evacuations - Israel has systematically blocked people from being evacuated to receive life-saving treatment. In the limited cases it has allowed such evacuations, it has often forced patients to waive their right to return to Gaza.
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Israeli Claims - Israel claims that Hamas uses hospitals as "command centers." However, there is almost no credible evidence to support these claims, and Israel has repeatedly been exposed lying and fabricating evidence. Moreover, what little evidence it has mustered does not come close to justifying the brutal assaults it has conducted under the principles of international law.
Overview
Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza’s health care system are calculated and systematic. They include:
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Attacking every single hospital, often multiple times. Not a single hospital in Gaza is fully functioning. The few hospitals that can still operate are often barely functional.
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Killing over 1,500 health care workers, while disappearing, detaining, and torturing others in extraordinary numbers.
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Starving hospitals of essential supplies that are readily available a short distance away– including basic medicines (such as anesthetics and insulin), basic supplies such as soap, gauze, and saline, food and water for doctors and patients (even baby formula), equipment such as incubators and surgical tools, and fuel to run life-saving machinery.
A United Nations Committee of Inquiry concluded in September 2024 that such attacks collectively constituted “a concerted policy to destroy the health-care system of Gaza.”
Israel has deliberately destroyed Gaza’s health system precisely at the moment when it has created a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions – when nearly every single person in Gaza is either injured, sick, or starving, and most civilians are in desperate need of medical care. Skin diseases and other illnesses run rampant and polio—previously eradicated—has even reemerged, paralyzing small children.
Isreal has blown up cancer hospitals, dialysis clinics, maternity wards and IVF clinics – depriving people of necessary medical care now and for years to come. It is clear: it intends to destroy Gaza so that Palestinians will either die or be forced to leave.
The result is a severe loss of access to life-saving treatment and a “drastic deterioration in health outcomes.” The cumulative effect of Israel's relentless bombing, destruction of shelters and sanitation, and forced starvation campaign - at the very same time it has annihilated Gaza's health care services - is almost unimaginable. After his fifth mission to Gaza, UNICEF’s James Elder described “fourth-degree burns I didn’t know existed,” children screaming in pain with no anesthetics, and others dying of thirst or treatable illnesses with no immune systems left.
Intentional Decimation of
Gaza's Health Care System
Overview
This section discusses:
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The Significance of Israel's Destruction of Gaza's Health Care System
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The Scale of Devastation
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Evidence of Intentional Destruction
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The Incalculable Impact
Significance
Israel's attack on Gaza's health care system - including every single hospital, 36 in total - is a clear sign of genocide. In war, you attack armies - combatants. Systematically attacking hospitals is about attacking a society, civilians, and their ability to survive. There is a reason hospitals receive special protection under international law.
Indeed, hospitals are sacrosanct under international law, and protected except for extremely limited circumstances - that is, (1) if a hospital is actively being used for military purposes, (2) the military advantage gained by attacking is so significant that it outweighs the potential harm to civilians, and (3) all feasible precautions are taken to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. If there is any doubt, a hospital must be protected.
Despite this, Israel has attacked, bombed, besieged, or invaded every single hospital in Gaza - often multiple times - destroying medical equipment, generators, and solar power, banning medical supplies and fuel, killing and torturing medical workers, all while failing to provide any serious or credible evidence of military use that could justify such attacks. The UN noted that Israel has not provided evidence of its claims that hospitals are used by Palestinian militants - allegations which remain “vague and broad, and in some cases appear contradicted by publicly available information.”
The result is that at a time of tremendous need, civilians in Gaza have extraordinarily limited access to medical care. The result is immense and unnecessary suffering, disease, and loss of life. A UN report on the destruction of Gaza's health care system described injured people who died while waiting to be hospitalized or treated in Gaza's overwhelmed hospitals, non-fatal conditions which have become fatal due to the lack of medical care, huge increases in maternal and child mortality, and accelerated spread of infectious diseases. Cancer patients and others with chronic conditions have lost access to critical treatment. As Doctors Against Genocide stated, “destroying healthcare systems is a genocidal tactic to accelerate death. Without functioning hospitals, lives cannot be saved.”
Israel's attacks on hospitals and clinics also has a broader significance. It means there is not a single place of safety or refuge for the people of Gaza, and little or no hope for recovery. It is both a physical and a psychological war on the civilian population.
The Decimation of Health Care in Gaza
Israel's unprecedented assault has led to almost complete destruction of the entire health care system in Gaza at the very moment that Israel has also unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe with its brutal bombing campaign and its starvation of the entire population.
Israel has systematically attacked every single hospital - bombing, besieging, and invading hospitals in weeks-long attacks. As of May 2025, the World Health Organization announced that at least 94% of hospitals in Gaza were damaged or destroyed. Of 35 hospitals, none are fully functioning and half are no longer operational. Six are destroyed and 12 are “out of service.” Only 17 are “partially functioning.” This has left only 2,000 beds for a population of 2 million people enduring a catastrophic genocide and forced starvation campaign.
Israel destroyed the sole cancer specialist hospital in Gaza, the Turkish–Palestinian Friendship Hospital. Israel first rendered it inoperative and turned it into a temporary Israeli military base, leaving cancer patients without basic facilities and unable to access treatment. Then, on March 21, 2025, Israel demolished the hospital in a controlled demolition. Given that it was being used as a military base by Israel, there is no possible claim that it was being occupied or used by Palestinian militants, and no justification whatsoever for its destruction.
The hospitals that remain open are “barely functioning.” An open letter by 100 international doctors who volunteered in Gaza say that remaining hospitals still operating are at “near-total collapse.” They have sustained serious damage and lack basic supplies – including food, medications, gauze, and soap.
“The emergency department of
Kamal Adwan Hospital, north of Gaza City, was unrecognizable as a health-care facility.”
~ Clayton Dalton, American E.R. Doctor
This isn't a recent development. Already in November 2023 - only one month into Israel's genocidal onslaught - doctors in Gaza interviewed by The New York Times reported that 23 of 35 hospitals were no longer functioning. They said:
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The hospitals are like orphanages. “There is even a new medical term that we are [using]. It must be added to medical books. WCNSF. Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.”
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“We are using vinegar to treat wound infections.”
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We “use light from [our] phone” for surgery.
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“We don’t even have bread for medical staff.”
“There is no health system to speak of left in Gaza.
Israel’s military has systematically dismantled hospital after hospital.
What remains is so little in the face of such carnage.
It is preposterous.”
~ Doctors Without Borders, February 2024
In April 2024, only 8 out of 24 UNRWA health care centers were even partially operating. Save the Children announced that “Six months of constant bombardment, siege and obstruction of aid deliveries have annihilated the health system.” An Independent UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israel's attacks had led to the “collapse of the health care system.”
After one year - in October 2024 - the WHO reported that Israel had attacked 109 health care facilities, 32 hospitals, and 114 ambulances. A Forensic Architecture analysis of the first 10 months of Israel's genocidal campaign found that Israel had forced 35 hospitals to stop service one or more times, bombed or attacked 31 hospitals, besieged 11 hospitals, and violently invaded 10 hospitals.
A key element of Israel's assault on health care is the way in which it deprives of them of essential supplies - including many that are inexpensive and readily available nearby. Israel has systematically blocked medical aid and fuel to hospitals, rendering them non-functional, blocking incubators and baby formula for newborns, and forcing doctors to operate without anesthetic as patients scream in agony. A lack of medicines and equipment condemns those with serious injuries and chronic illnesses to a grim and painful fate. On August 12, 2025, the UN reported a “catastrophic” situation, with critical supplies depleted, and 52% of medicines entirely out of stock. Doctors lack even basic supplies - like soap, gauze, and food. Even the small amount of supplies brought in the personal luggage of international doctors - including baby formula - are regularly confiscated by the Israeli military.
Israel also deprives hospitals of fuel, while bombing their generators and solar panels - with dire consequences for patients. Human Rights Watch has reported how Israel's blockade has led directly to the deaths of babies. For example, on November 9, 2023 Israeli airstrikes hit Al-Nasr Medical Center in Gaza City, cutting off the neonatal intensive care unit’s oxygen supply. Israel forced staff to evacuate the next day, leaving babies that could not be transported alone in intensive care. Weeks later when doctors were able to return, they found four babies dead and decomposing - left alone to die by Israeli soldiers. That same month, five premature babies died at al-Shifa Hospital - which was under siege by Israel - as a result of a lack of electricity for incubators. This is still happening. In June 2025, Doctors Without Borders described how a lack of fuel caused electricity at Al-Helou Maternity Hospital in northern Gaza to cut out several times, shutting off ventilators and oxygen and putting babies’ lives at immediate risk.
The scale and systemic nature of Israel's all-out onslaught on Gaza's health care is unique. Len Rubenstein, the chair of the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition (SHCC), a group of nearly three dozen member organizations, said: “I would be the last to underestimate what happened in Syria or Ukraine or Tigray [in Ethiopia] or Myanmar. But the relentlessness of the attacks in Gaza are astonishing and unique. The kind of sickening regularity, it's almost hard to fathom.” “We're talking about the obliteration of an entire health care system,” added Professor Joelle Abi-Rached.
The Destruction is Intentional
Independent experts, human rights organizations, and over 100 international doctors who have volunteered on the ground in Gaza all say Israel's decimation of Gaza's health system is intentional and calculated - a key element of its genocide - and not simply a byproduct of “war.”
In April 2024, the World Health Organization called Israel's destruction of Khan Younis and its medical facilities “disproportionate to anything one can imagine.” A year later, a WHO representative said that Gaza's health sector was “being systematically dismantled.”
Over 100 international doctors who spent time volunteering in Gaza likewise say they witnessed Israel's intentional annihilation of Gaza's healthcare system.
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45 American doctors and 30 British doctors wrote an open letter to the U.S. and U.K. governments in July 2024, saying:
The sheer devastation itself reveals Israel's intent. It simply isn't believable that the destruction of an entire healthcare system could ever be justified under international law. It simply isn't believable - nor has Israel offered any credible evidence - that every single hospital was used in a significant way by Palestinian militants.
But there is yet more evidence that Israel's rampage through Gaza's hospitals was genocidal and unnecessary. When Israel demolished the sole cancer specialist hospital in Gaza, the Turkish–Palestinian Friendship Hospital, there was no doubt it was not being used by Palestinian militants. That's because it had been rendered inoperative and turned into an Israeli military base - itself a stark violation of international law.
Similarly, Israeli forces appear to have systematically and deliberately destroyed medical equipment in hospitals they raided. For example, during the ceasefire in early 2025, Doctors Without Borders reported, “We were utterly shocked to observe that in the Indonesian hospital every medical machine seemed to have been deliberately destroyed; they were smashed to pieces, one by one, to make sure no medical care could be provided anymore.” American E.R. doctor, Clayton Dalton wrote about his visit to the Indonesian hospital in The New Yorker:
Impact: Unnecessary Suffering and Incalculable Loss
At a time of enormous need – an unending stream of mass casualty events, widespread disease, and mass starvation – there is hardly anything left of Gaza’s health care system to care for, heal, or treat the surge of patients, innocent civilians. The World Health Organization has stressed that “the systematic dismantling of the health system in Gaza is a death sentence for tens of thousands of Palestinians in need of health care.” Simply put, medical care is often the difference between life or death, a leg healed or amputated, a baby saved or lost.
The list of preventable or treatable illnesses and injuries that instead - due to a lack of medical care and supplies - led to unnecessary suffering and death is almost unfathomable. It included:
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Horrific impacts for pregnant mothers and babies. According to 45 American doctors, “Those of us who worked with pregnant women regularly saw stillbirths and maternal deaths that were easily preventable in any third-world healthcare system. ... The pregnant women we treated often gave birth to underweight infants, and they were unable to breastfeed due to malnutrition. This left their newborns at high risk of death given the lack of access to potable water anywhere in Gaza. Many of those infants died. In Gaza we watched malnourished new mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies.” Women in Gaza are now three times more likely to experience a miscarriage and three times more likely to die during childbirth, according to CARE International.
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Survivable injuries turned fatal. Physicians for Human Rights found that Israel's restrictions on medical supplies led to preventable suffering and death. Doctors described “numerous cases where patients, including children, arrived at health facilities with injuries that under normal circumstances would have been survivable but proved excruciating or fatal due to delays in care or lack of essential resources such as anesthesia, blood products, or sterile surgical equipment. The result was a cruel paradox; doctors and nurses ready to save lives but unable to do so for lack of most basic supplies.”
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People who can never walk again because the equipment needed to stabilize broken bones or prevent/treat infections simply isn't available. As described by an American doctor who visited Gaza, “You couldn’t repair bones with plates and screws, he said, because the wound would get infected. Instead, in a process called external fixation, doctors pushed metal pins through the skin and into the bone; the pins were attached to a scaffold outside the body. The resulting infection rate was still as high as eighty per cent. Because the hospital lacked saline to irrigate wounds, doctors mixed tap water with chlorine meant for swimming pools. That day, a young man was having an operation in what had once been an exam room. A surgeon said that a drone had shot him in the thigh, splintering his femur. External fixation had stabilized the fracture, but the bone had become uncontrollably infected. The surgeon swatted away a fly, then held the wound open to show me the bone’s sharp, broken ends. He was planning an extreme form of amputation called hip disarticulation; if the patient survived, he was unlikely to walk again.”
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Chronic conditions untreated. This includes dialysis patients without access to treatment, diabetics without insulin, people suffering from high blood pressure without medication, and cancer patients without treatment or medication. The UN reported that at least 1,100 patients of kidney failure were facing death because of a lack of dialysis treatment. In May 2025, the last remaining cancer hospital in Gaza closed after repeated Israeli strikes. The European Hospital in Khan Younis served 10,000 cancer patients. Despite efforts to evacuate them for treatment, Israel has continually refused to let many of them – including children – to leave.
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Spread of infectious diseases. The destruction of the health care system has also exacerbated the spread of infectious diseases, caused by Israel's mass displacement of the population, overcrowding in ever smaller spaces, destruction of the sanitation system, and denial of clean water. For example, the UN warned that 96% of Gaza households are unable to safely access water for daily use, and toilets are inaccessible to three-quarters of the population. Lack of access to medical care compounds this situation, accelerating the rate of disease spread. As a result, people in Gaza suffer from widespread diarrhea, skin diseases, and hepatitis A. Polio even reemerged, paralyzing children.
Attacking Hospitals
The view from the destroyed emergency department at Al-Shifa Hospital, in northern Gaza. Video by American E.R. doctor Clayton Dalton
Overview
Israel has attacked every single hospital in Gaza - in addition to killing over 1,000 health care workers and systematically starving hospitals of medicines and essential supplies. Israel's most prominent human rights organization, B'tselem, accused Israel of genocide, highlighting that already “in the very first weeks of the assault, most hospitals and clinics in Gaza could no longer provide even basic medical care. As of June 2025, only 17 out of 36 hospitals in the Strip are still partially functioning, while facing critical shortages of staff, fuel, and medical equipment.”
Hospitals quickly turned into sites of mass death, even as heroic doctors, under unimaginable hardship, sacrificed and worked tirelessly to save as many as they could. Doctor's Without Borders' Tanya Haj-Hassan lamented, “There is no way to rationalize the repeated targeting of nearly every single hospital in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel's onslaught on Gaza's health care system was swift and unrestrained. In November 2023, Israel bombed the labor and delivery ward of Al-Shifa hospital and the pediatric cancer unit at Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. That same month the World Health Organization (WHO) said that none of Gaza's hospitals were functional enough to treat critical trauma cases or perform surgery anymore. Physicians for Human Rights in Israel reported that “Very early into the war, all major hospitals in northern Gaza, including al-Shifa, the Indonesian Hospital, al-Quds, al-Ahli Arab, and al-Awda, were shelled, besieged, or forcibly evacuated. ... By late October, over one-third of hospitals in Gaza (12 of 35) and nearly two-thirds of primary healthcare clinics (46 of 72) had shut down due to damage from hostilities or lack of fuel.”
WHO reported 670 attacks on healthcare in Gaza between October 2023 and January 30, 2025, affecting 122 health facilities and 170 ambulances. In March 2024, the Israeli army demolished the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital—Gaza’s only specialized cancer treatment—in a controlled demolition. Given that the Israeli army had been occupying the site - and not Palestinian militants - there is no imaginable justification for its destruction.
(a) airstrikes or shelling on the hospitals, often resulting in serious damage;
(b) besieging the hospitals - preventing Palestinians from accessing the hospital and blocking
food, water, and medical supplies, while cutting off fuel;
(c) raiding the hospital, including with tanks and bulldozers;
(d) detaining medical staff, patients, and displaced people sheltering inside the hospital;
(e) forcing patients and others to leave the hospital; and finally
(f) withdrawal, leaving severe damage and rendering the hospital non-functional.
Throughout Israel's genocide, Gaza’s hospitals have eked back services, often through the heroic efforts of medical workers, aid agencies, and civilians, only to be repeatedly struck or besieged again.
The scale of Israel's all-out assault on health care in Gaza is almost unimaginable. In one two-week period, in May 2025, Israel deliberately:
Israel's relentless and repeated attacks on hospitals and clinics across Gaza, turning them into deadlyi infernos, stripping them of all protection, and killing patients and medical staff, has become so frequent that it has been all but normalized in western media.
There are numerous detailed accounts - including reports by the UN, human rights organizations, and historians. This section aims to provide some illustrative examples of Israel's onslaught on Gaza's hospitals, without purporting to be comprehensive. Below we examine:
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The Destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital - the largest, best, and most important hospital in Gaza
The Destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital
The Israeli military’s first major operation against a hospital was its November 2023 attack on Al-Shifa Medical Complex - Gaza’s largest and best hospital, the beating heart of Gaza’s health care system. Israel raided the facility a second time in March 2024, leaving it in complete ruin by April 1. Al-Shifa constituted 30% of the capacity of the health system in the Gaza Strip. Israel had bombed, besieged, and invaded it, burned or blew up the buildings, and destroyed the medical equipment.
November 2023: Bombing, Siege, and Invasion
In November 2023, the Israeli army began attacking Al-Shifa Hospital - including airstrikes on ambulances (killing or injuring 21 people), and attacks specifically directed at the maternity ward and the ICU.
Israeli forces encircled the hospital and imposed a siege, cutting off fuel and firing on anyone who tried to enter or leave. Al-Shifa had already run out of fuel for its main generators on October 21 due to the Israeli blockade. A small generator for the intensive care unit ran out of fuel on November 11 and could not be replenished. Israel also blew up the main water line to Al-Shifa, leaving the hospital without oxygen or water. Five premature babies died when incubators stopped working due to a lack of fuel. Human Rights Watch reported that from November 11 to 17, 40 patients at al-Shifa died, largely due to power cuts. “A few families tried to leave but they were targeted; now they are lying dead outside the hospital. We cannot get to them,” said Gaza's Deputy Health Minister from inside the hospital.
28 prematures babies were evacuated from Al-Shifa. 5 died due to Israel cutting off fuel for incubators.
On November 15, Israel raided the hospital. It forcibly evacuated patients, medical staff, and displaced people who were sheltering there in the hopes of safety - in the ultimately vain hope that a hospital would be spared. Eyewitnesses reported that Israeli forces fired on civilians even as they followed evacuation orders. 25-year-old Ridana Zukhra said she left Al-Shifa with her children when Israeli forces ordered people to evacuate. Despite holding white flags, a tank fired at the group, badly wounding her 5-year-old daughter, whose leg had to be amputated.
Israeli forces withdrew 9 days after they raided Al-Shifa, leaving it almost completely non-functional. After the withdrawal of the Israeli military, three mass graves were reportedly found at the hospital, with at least 80 corpses, raising serious concerns that crimes were committed. Some of the bodies were found with catheters and cannulas still attached, suggesting they had been patients.
The Second Raid on Al-Shifa: March 18-April 1
With the slight reprieve of the first ceasefire, Al-Shifa resumed limited services in January 2024. However, Israel's second assault on Al-Shifa mere weeks later would be more deadly and damaging than the first - leaving Gaza's premier health care institution in ruins and the patients, medical staff, and displaced families who sheltered there with stories of trauma and terror. There were testimonies of systematic crimes including deliberate killings, summary executions, and torture of displaced people and patients. Patients and doctors said the Israeli army shot at them while they evacuated, and tanks fired at the ICU “nonstop.” Patients died due to lack of medical care, and Israeli forces destroyed the specialized surgery building.
Initially, Israeli forces cut off all electricity, food, water, and medicine - and denied WHO requests to access the hospital. A doctor told the BBC that two patients on life support died because of the electricity cut. For days, patients were held without food, water, and medicine, with critically wounded patients lying on the floor. There was no ventilation or ability to clean, no water or medication, leading to septic wounds with white flies. Doctors said they ran out of gloves so they started using plastic bags to change wound bandages, which ran out as well. Over the first two days, one doctor reported that 11 patients died, including a woman who went into shock, heart disease patients, older people, and a 14-year-old girl with diabetes, who was alone.
According to one survivor, when the soldiers entered the hospital complex, everyone was ordered to evacuate the buildings. Drones carrying speakers broadcast the army’s orders, telling people to exit and gather in the courtyard. “The drones kept saying, ‘come out, you animals.’” Footage showed a four-year-old girl, Saja Junaid, whose face was severely burned by an Israeli attack on her house in the Jabalia refugee camp, forced to leave al-Shifa Hospital where she was receiving treatment. Israeli forces destroyed evacuated buildings. After ordering the evacuation of patients and staff huddled in the reception building to the oncology building, for example, Israeli forces shelled the reception building.
This list of atrocities that ensued is startling. According to numerous survivors, Israeli forces starved, tortured, and murdered doctors, hospital staff, families and children. Bodies were subsequently found with their hands and feet tied, some flattened by bulldozers and tanks. UNICEF condemned the “footage of death and carnage,” and observed that “While famine is ravaging the Strip and children need urgent health care, hospitals are destroyed condemning an entire population to slow and agonizing deaths.”
CNN reported that witnesses saw Palestinian journalists and health workers blindfolded, handcuffed and stripped down to their underwear. An elderly patient told the Agence France-Presse that he witnessed Israeli soldiers “beat all the young men and arrested them.”
Patients also described execution-style killings. A patient said that an Israeli soldier forced a man with a post-operative fractured leg to stand up and strip, despite his pain, and threatened to shoot him. He said that after a soldier ordered another man to go outside, “we heard shots fired, and they brought him back as a dead body.” Another survivor described seeing groups of 3-10 men being brought to hospital buildings, gunshots were heard, and the soldiers left to bring another group of people. A teenage boy described Israeli soldiers shooting at a group of people rounded up into one room, shooting and laughing, killing children and the elderly, as well as his brother and father.
Several doctors, nurses, and medical staff were reportedly killed or executed, and a pharmacist was executed in front of patients. According to Human Rights Watch, Dr. Khaleel Skaik posted on social media that when he returned from being interrogated with his hands tied and arms raised, a soldier shot him, severing his right thumb. Two other doctors said Israeli forces used them as “human shields,” to open or break open doors and enter and check whether rooms were empty.
The Horrifying Aftermath
When Israeli forces withdrew on April 1, 2024, the hospital was in ruins and bodies were strewn across hospital grounds. Graphic videos surfaced. A Palestinian journalist reported 381 bodies were recovered in and around the hospital. Hundreds of corpses were found, including some burned and others with heads and limbs severed.
Astonishingly, the IDF Chief of the General Staff claimed that not a single medical personnel or patient was harmed, and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett claimed not a single civilian was killed. These brazen lies were precursors to Israel's claim that “there is no starvation in Gaza.” They illustrate the impunity with which Israeli leaders know they can act.
An official with Medical Aid for Palestinians, a U.K.-based charity, said that rebuilding Al-Shifa could take more than twenty years. Israeli forces also demolished and torched homes around the hospital.
Israel's Justification: The Fictitious Hamas Command-and-Control Center
Prior to the attacks, as early as October 2023, the Israeli army called Al-Shifa Hospital the “main headquarters for Hamas terrorist activity,” and posted a video rendering of an elaborate underground network of tunnels.
After the first raid in November, however, the Israeli army released two videos of what it claimed were tunnels under the hospital and weapons found in an MRI room. Israel's claim of an extensive network of tunnels looked ridiculous, as its own video, as well as a Washington Post investigation, showed very limited tunnels that bore no resemblance to the sophisticated network it had used as justification for attacking the hospital.
The videos also showed a paltry number of weapons. It showed three duffel bags that the Israeli military claims were found hidden in an MRI lab, each containing an assault rifle, grenades, Hamas uniforms and flak jackets. Additionally, the army showed assault rifles without ammunition clips and a laptop that it said were found. Former U.S. State Department legal advisor Brian Finucane said “These arms by themselves hardly seem to justify the military fixation on al-Shifa, even setting the law aside.” Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill stated he had seen more guns in the homes of Americans than in this purported Hamas Pentagon under al-Shifa Hospital.
Analysts also pointed out that because of Israel's banning of journalists, there was no way to know if these handful of weapons were even found there, or if they had been planted there by Israel itself. However, there was evidence to indicate the latter. CNN pointed out that an IDF video on November 15 showed a military spokesperson touring the facility, during which an AK-47 gun was seen behind an MRI machine. Fox News and the BBC were subsequently granted access to the hospital under Israeli military supervision. In their reports filmed after the IDF clip, two AK-47 guns are visible in the same location. It is unclear where the second assault rifle came from, but it is clear the scene had been altered.
“Israelis have a multidecade track record of lying, of promoting false information, releasing doctored videos.” Mouin Rabbani, a Middle East analyst, told Al Jazeera, “Israeli forces have invaded Shifa Hospital and been inside it for 12 full hours – having refused any independent party to accompany them – and now we're supposed to believe that there were Hamas militants in there being pursued by the Israeli military but they somehow left their weapons behind?”
After its March 2024 raid on Al-Shifa, the Israeli military released footage that it said was of Palestinian fighters inside the hospital firing at Israeli forces. However, Sky News reported that it had determined that the video actually showed fighting outside Al-Shifa. None of the patients or medical staff who spoke to Human Rights Watch said that they saw Palestinian fighters inside the hospital compound during Israeli military operations. This is consistent with similar interviews published by the international media.
Late 2023: The Systematic Destruction of Health Care in Northern Gaza
In November 2023, around the same time as Israel's first raid on Al-Shifa, Israel also bombed the pediatric cancer unit at Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital and carried out a systematic attack on hospitals across north Gaza, attacking Kamal Adwan, the Indonesian, and al-Awda hospitals. By late December, not a single hospital in the north remained operational.
The Israeli Attack on Nasser Hospital: February - March 2024
According to the BBC, on February 8, a nurse was shot and wounded while in the operating room, and numerous others were killed or wounded simply walking near windows or trying to enter or leave the hospital. The Israeli military rejected a request from WHO to visit the hospital on February 10. On February 13, Israeli soldiers sent a handcuffed hostage, a young man, to deliver a message to evacuate a hospital in Khan Younis, then shot and killed him as he tried to walk back outside the hospital. Two days later Israeli forces raided the hospital. Satellite imagery from the very next day shows parts of the hospital complex had been razed, with bulldozer tracks visible. By February 18, the hospital ceased to function. 100 patients and 15 doctors remained, along with “the decomposing bodies of eight ICU patients who died for lack of oxygen,” the UN reported.
The World Health Organization described the destruction at Nasser Hospital and surrounding areas of Khan Younis as “disproportionate to anything one can imagine.” Nasser Medical Complex – once the “backbone” of the health system in southern Gaza, and the second largest hospital in the Gaza Strip – was non-functional, as were two other hospitals in the area according to the WHO.
Israel called this all-out assault on Nasser Hospital a “precise,” “limited,” and “sensitive” operation. International and local healthcare workers who had been in the hospital said they never saw any Hamas fighters there.
In March 2025, Israel struck Nasser Hospital again, targeting and killing a person who did finances for Hamas' political wing and who was receiving treatment at the hospital for wounds sustained in an earlier Israeli strike. The attack was blatantly illegal under international law; it would be like Hamas bombing a hospital simply because Netanyahu was seeking treatment there. The attack also killed a 16-year-old that was scheduled to be released the next day.
The Siege and Invasion of Kamal Adwan Hospital: October - December 2024
From October 2024 to January 2025, Israel executed a military campaign aimed at erasing northern Gaza, including blocking virtually all humanitarian aid. Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last lifeline in the north, endured months of bombardment, siege, and raids. Kamal Adwan was the last somewhat functioning hospital in north Gaza, receiving sick and wounded patients and operating a maternity ward and nursery for newborn babies. In December 2024, after 80 days of siege and bombings in which Israel terrorized the hospital with snipers, tanks, and quadcopter drones, Israel carried out a large-scale attack, burning and bombing the hospital and abducting its director (a pediatrician whose son it had previously killed and who had beseeched the international community to save the hospital and its patients). Israel expelled all its terrified patients into an active war zone, including mothers that had just delivered babies and severely wounded patients, with no means of transportation and nowhere to go for safety.
Over 80 Days of Siege
The siege of Kamal Adwan lasted over 80 days - with intense bombing and firing from snipers, tanks, and drones. On Oct. 23, Israel killed Dr. Mohammed Ghanim, an emergency physician, using a quadcopter. It launched air strikes that hit the hospital, including the medical oxygen generator, leading to the death of two children in the ICU. On November 4, Israel bombed the pediatric and nursery wards of Kamal Adwan.
In early December, Israeli forces killed at least 4 medical staff and a 16-year-old boy in a wheelchair. On December 11, CNN and the UN reported that tank fire hit Kamal Adwan’s maternity department, killing two women and injuring others. On Dec. 12, soldiers entered and allowed police dogs to attack staff, patients and others, multiple witnesses said. Witnesses said the troops ordered boys and men, ranging from their mid-teens to 60, to line up outside crouched in the cold, blindfolded and nearly naked for hours of interrogation. “Every time someone lifted their heads, they were beaten,” said a lawyer who was detained. After the soldiers withdrew, the men saw the bulldozer had crushed tents that previously sheltered some 2,500 people. Most of the displaced had evacuated, but Abu Safiya said he found bodies of four people crushed, with splints from recent treatment in the hospital still on their limbs.
On December 18, more shelling sparked a fire in the ICU, knocking it out of service, while Israeli bulldozers surrounded the area around the hospital, destroying streets and infrastructure, and quadcopter drones targeted the medical complex.
A few days later, the hospital director said the hospital continued to be attacked by bombs, snipers, and drones - including the intensive care unit, the neo-natal unit, and the maternity ward. The bombardment continued as the hospital director, Dr. Abu Safiyah, sent video missives to the international community and penned an op-ed in The New York Times entitled “I’m One of the Last Doctors in This Hospital in Gaza. I’m Begging the World for Help.” He said Gaza’s hospital system was collapsing under Israel’s relentless bombardment. He pled to the world to let aid in to save the patients who could still be saved. “We need protection from the international community,” he said. The world failed Dr. Abu Safiyah. He was later abducted by the Israeli army—possibly in retaliation for his attempts to publicize what Israel was doing to Gaza's hospitals—and has been imprisoned and tortured ever since.
On December 27, Israeli forces ordered the total evacuation of the hospital, forcing desperately ill and wounded people to flee and shutting down one of the only places providing medical care in Gaza. Dr. Abu Safiyah refused to leave, saying that the evacuation of ICU patients would be a death sentence.
Israeli forces stormed the hospital, burned and severely damaged the laboratory, surgical unit, and various departments. They detained all boys and men over 16 years of age, and arrested most of the medical staff with no information on their whereabouts”, except two doctors. They detained and beat medical staff and patients.
Dr. Abu Safiyah was the last person to leave the hospital. In the last photograph, we see him walking in his lab coat over the rubble of Gaza toward an Israeli tank, after he had heroically refused to abandon his patients. In this one image we see the depths of Palestinian humanity, and the horrific inhumanity of Israel's genocide.
As described below, Dr. Abu Safiyah has been held without charge, severely beaten and starved in detention for over 7 months at Israel's notorious torture camps. Israeli soldiers told him “we don’t want you to go on Al Jazeera anymore.” His lawyers say he has been beaten with electric stick to try to extract a confession, put in solitary confinement for 25 days, interrogated continuously, fainted due to feeling suffocated, lost 40% of his body weight, and denied medication and doctor visits.
A Hospital Destroyed
After 80 days of siege, bombardment, and invasion, the hospital was ravaged by fire. Smoke “poured out of broken windows, staining the exterior black.” An American doctor, visiting the ruined hospital in early 2025, said in “the neonatal I.C.U., which had been the last such unit in northern Gaza, destroyed incubators were strewn across the floor. After raiding the I.C.U., Israel had released a video of what it said were weapons found in an incubator,” a claim so ridiculous it's hard to imagine anyone would even make it. “In another wing, Hamad showed us three charred operating rooms.” Physicians for Human Rights in Israel reported that: "The hospital's essential infrastructure, including its surgical unit, laboratory, operating theatres, and oxygen production systems, was destroyed or severely burned during the assault. … With no remaining medical facilities, no operational ambulances, and no rescue infrastructure, northern Gaza's health system was erased."
Israeli Claims
Israel claimed that Kamal Adwan hospital was a “Hamas terrorist stronghold.” Like Al-Shifa, Israel claimed there was a Hamas command-and-control center at Kamal Adwan, but produced no evidence. Before Israel's attack, the hospital director offered the Israeli army to have eyes inside the hospital, but they refused. The military said soldiers uncovered weapons, but it showed footage only of a single pistol.”
Days after the destruction of Kamal Adwan hospital, the Israeli military ordered all patients, staff and displaced Palestinians sheltering in Al-Awda hospital in north Gaza to leave immediately as well, or else be bombed and killed. According to the AP, the Israeli military has never made any claims of a Hamas presence at al-Awda. When asked what intelligence led troops to besiege and raid the hospital last year, the military spokesman’s office did not reply.
Blocking Medical Aid
Overview
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza have long said that Israel was obstructing aid, as disease and near-famine gripped Gaza. Over 100 international doctors who volunteered in Gaza likewise wrote an open letter, clearly stating that Israel has blocked the “entry of critical supplies – medications, surgical tools, food, and even baby formula.”
Indeed, there is no credible dispute that Israel is blocking desperately needed medical aid, as well as food and clean water to a civilian population that it has made homeless and upon whom it has unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe. Israel even blocks fuel to hospitals, while bombing generators and solar panels.
As a result, critical shortages of medicines and essential supplies have led to countless civilians deaths from preventable or treatable causes. Throughout Israel's genocide, doctors have been forced to operate without anesthetic. Just imagine: amputations and c-sections without anesthetic. Basic medications and equipment - like insulin and incubators - are simply unavailable.
Blocking Medical Aid
From the first weeks of Israel's genocide to today, there has been a catastrophic shortage of equipment, medicines, and basic supplies. The UN reported in August 2025 that 52% of medicines were entirely depleted. Israel has systematically and arbitrarily blocked anesthetics, as well as incubators for premature babies, and insulin for diabetics. Doctors describe not even having soap to wash hands their before surgery and sowing people together with decade expired sutures. Israel's has blocked thousands of trucks of aid lined up at the border of Gaza, banned medical NGOs from entering Gaza, and even prohibited international doctors from bringing in any supplies for patients, including baby formula.
The impact of Israel's denial of aid is stark: Children have died, not because their injuries were unsurvivable, but because hospitals lacked blood, antibiotics, and the most basic supplies that are readily available in any large hospital. Ha'aretz reported that diabetic children in Gaza are dying because Israel’s restrictions on test strips force parents to guess blood sugar levels, making every dose of insulin a life-or-death gamble. The AP and New Yorker report that Gaza’s ICUs are swarming with flies, miscarriages and maternal deaths are soaring, and premature babies are dying—the incubators that could save them are stranded on aid trucks forbidden from crossing the border.
Doctors report feeling helpless. An American surgeon recounted: “There was an 8-year-old boy gasping with blood foaming at the nose and the mouth. Next to him was a 6-year-old girl, her head was open with her brains exposed, her intestines were falling out…all I could do was tell their family just hold their hands.” A pediatrician told The Guardian, “Often, I feel devastated because there’s something so simple the child needs to survive, and we just can’t provide it,” he said. Three severely malnourished patients died in intensive care this week, one of them a girl who would have probably survived if doctors had been able to give her intravenous potassium, normally a basic medication, and now impossible to get hold of in Gaza. ... These cases haunt me, they never leave my mind. This child could have gone back to her family and lived a normal life. But because one simple thing wasn’t available she didn’t survive.”
Denying Food and Water
Israel's starvation of Gaza - described on the Starvation page of this website - is not only a catastrophic health crisis in and of itself. As an open letter by over 100 international doctors details, “Patients cannot heal without adequate nutrition and access to comprehensive health services. If someone survives being shot by an Israeli soldier or a blast injury from an Israeli warplane, they still have to heal from their wounds. Malnutrition is a major barrier to full recovery, leaving people susceptible to infections for which very little treatment is now available in Gaza.” Put simply: Your body cannot heal when you have not eaten properly in days or sometimes weeks, as is now commonplace in Gaza.
And yet, as described above, Israel has not only deprived the entire civilian population of the minimum nutrition it needs, it has deliberately blocked food and water to hospitals under siege. It assassinated a local chef and founder of Gaza Soup Kitchen who had been delivering meals to a besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital and blocked the World Health Organization from delivering food to the Indonesian Hospital after it ran out of food and water. Incidents like these are too numerous to count.
Blocking Fuel, Bombing Generators and Solar Panels
Israel has also blocked fuel to hospitals and bombed their generators and solar panels - as reported by the UN, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, NBC, Doctors Without Borders, and the Times of Israel, among others. These are flagrant violations of international law and have directly led to the deaths of countless civilians. Fuel powers hospital generators. Without it, people die, including ICU patients who require oxygen. In the assault on Al-Shifa hospital, for example, 5 premature babies died due to Israel's destruction of all energy source to the hospital. From the outset of Israel's genocide, we have witnessed hospital blackouts due to Israel's blocking of fuel, doctors performing surgery with cell phone lights. It is not a one-time occurrence. It has happened over and over again, at hospital after hospital across the Gaza Strip. This is what Israel calls "self-defense."
Attacking Ambulances
I asked the paramedics what was hardest about this work.
Responding to an air strike and discovering that it’s your own family, one said. Recovering the bodies of children, another said.
“It is strange that the world has allowed this to happen to us.”
Overview
Attacking ambulances - like hospitals - is a flagrant violation of international law. And yet Israel has systematically attacked ambulances, killing the paramedics that seek to rescue innocent civilians. Because of Israel's ban on foreign journalists in Gaza, it is not clear precisely how many ambulances Israel has attacked and destroyed, but the number is shockingly large. Just three months into Israel's genocide, the UN reported that 79 ambulances had been affected by Israeli attacks. In April 2024, an American doctor volunteering in Gaza reported that 200 Red Crescent ambulances had been targeted, while a UN Independent Commission reported in July 2024 said that 113 ambulances had been attacked and at least 61 had been damaged.
Israel often claims - without evidence - that ambulances are being used by Hamas militants, or that the Israeli military wasn't operating in the area. However, these claims have been shown - time and again - to be blatant lies, as illustrated below. Moreover, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call confirmed that Israel systematically uses “double tap” strikes in Gaza—deliberately bombing the same site twice to kill rescue workers, paramedics, and civilians trying to save the wounded. A sixty-year-old paramedic, speaking to an American doctor, confirmed this, saying that after a building was bombed drones often circled, and rescuers were afraid to enter until the drones left.
In short, Israel's attacks on ambulances are a deliberate policy and practice that has nothing to do with Hamas, but is part and parcel of Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people.
Examples of Israeli Attacks on Ambulances
1. The Massacre of 15 Medics in Ambulances - and Israel's Attempt to
Cover it Up
In March 2025, 15 medics in 5 ambulances were on their way to recover the bodies of two paramedics killed by Israeli fire when they, too, were ambushed by Israeli soldiers. They were killed in a barrage of gunfire and buried along with their ambulances in a mass grave. Israel blocked access to the area for several days.
When the ambulances and bodies were ultimately discovered, the vehicles were crushed and partially buried under the sand. Some of the medics had their hands or feet bound, suggesting they had been shot after being detained. The sole survivor of Israel’s aid worker massacre told The Guardian he watched wounded colleagues beg for mercy before soldiers executed them one by one. A forensics consultant who examined five of the bodies said there was evidence of execution-style killing in some cases based on the “specific and intentional” location of shots taken at close range.
The Israeli military falsely claimed soldiers opened fire because the ambulances had been advancing suspiciously with their lights off. This - it was later revealed - was a brazen lie. On April 3, the Israeli military says it was investigating the killings, and maintained that “terrorists” were advancing in the ambulances.
Before the ambush, an Israeli commander from the Golani Brigade (which carried out the massacre) told his troops, “Everyone you meet is an enemy. If you see a figure, open fire, eliminate them, and move on. Do not hesitate.” A senior military intelligence source told the Guardian that Unit 504, a military intelligence team with a reputation for cruelty and reckless behaviour including torture, was also present during the attack.
Journalist Ryan Grim observed: “Burying the ambulances themselves along with the medics they executed is one of the elements that makes this latest crime so extraordinary and revealing. A group of IDF soldiers collectively agreed to use a bulldozer to bury the ambulances in sand, with the men they had just killed, on the apparent hope that nobody would notice that 15 men were missing. Consider how far down the path of dehumanization you have to be to get there.” Israel claimed they buried the bodies to prevent “wild animals” from eating them, but did not clarify if they feared they’d eat the ambulances, too.
2. Killing 6-year-old Hind Rajab and the Paramedics Who Tried to
Rescue Her
On January 29, 2024, 6-year-old Hind Rajab was evacuating north Gaza in a car with her family when they came under heavy tank fire. Surrounded by the dead bodies of her family, she called the Palestinian Red Crescent, begging for help. Her scared voice can be heard in the heartbreaking audio.
The ambulance that was sent to rescue her was dispatched after coordinating its movements with the Israeli military. It was hit by a tank shell at a distance of some 50 m from the family’s car. Hind was still alive at the time that the ambulance was dispatched. The ambulance was destroyed by an Israeli tank, killing both paramedics as it approached Hind. Hind also perished, and the car she was in was riven by 355 bullets.
Israel initially lied and said no Israeli military had been in the area. A Washington Post investigation found that Israeli tanks were in fact in the area at that time.
In short, Israeli soldiers brutally murdered a 6-year-old girl, her family, and the paramedics who rescued her—and then tried to cover it up. It all happened in broad daylight.
The ambulance dispatched with two paramedics to rescue 6-year-old Hind. Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images
3. Killing 3 rescue workers as they tried to reach the wounded
Israel killed three paramedics and a journalist in Gaza City’s Tuffah neighborhood in early June 2025 as they tried to rescue the wounded and retrieve bodies from a prior Israeli strike. Among the dead was Hussein Muhaisen, who weeks earlier had been filmed carrying a small girl away from a fire. He had previously been interviewed by The New York Times, saying “My job is mostly rescuing children. We will continue working til we die.”
There are numerous other examples - each a horrific violation of international law, representing the murder of people who dedicate their lives to saving others. For example:
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In early November 2023, Israel carried out a strike on a marked ambulance just outside of al-Shifa hospital. Contrary to the Israeli claims, Human Rights Watch said it "did not find evidence that the ambulance was being used for military purposes." The Washington Post analyzed the videos and found no evidence of weapons or individuals in military clothing. Human Rights Watch further added that under IHL ambulances must not be attacked, even if they transport wounded combatants, and said the attack could be a war crime. The attack was condemned by the World Health Organization.
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On 18 November 2023, two people were killed while traveling in a clearly identified Doctors Without Borders evacuation convoy in Gaza City. Doctors Without Borders termed it a "deliberate attack."
The list goes on. Indeed, it is not limited to Gaza. Israel has deliberately struck ambulances and rescue workers in the West Bank and Lebanon as well.
Killing Healthcare Workers
Overview
Israel has systematically targeted Palestinian health care workers - as well as hospitals - killing over 1,580 since October 2023, and imprisoning, abducting, and torturing countless others. Such extensive killing of healthcare workers is not an accident. Physicians for Human Rights Israel concluded: "This is not collateral damage, but a pattern." Indeed, Israel killed 70 healthcare professionals in just 50 days. And since the start of the war, Israel has killed six heads of departments at Gaza's premier hospital, al-Shifa, including the heads of internal medicine, ob-gyn, emergency care, pathology, radiology, and orthopedics.
The impact is clear: there are simply not enough specialists and doctors left to care for Palestinian men, women, and children – now or in the future. As The New Yorker reported, in Nasser hospital, an American doctor “saw several children with severe brain injuries. The hospital had no neurosurgeon, so there was little that could be done for them.” Physicians are not easily replaceable - a single specialist requires decades of training.
In short, Palestinian healthcare workers are being deliberately targeted and killed in record numbers as part of Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Countless more are imprisoned and subject to torture. All are being forcibly starved.
Below, we provide a few illustrative examples of the heroic doctors and nurses Israel has intentionally killed.
Examples
The Torture and Killing of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh
The story of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh is emblematic of what so many medical professionals have suffered under Israel's genocide. A surgeon and a professor, Dr. al-Bursh was the head of orthopedics at al-Shifa Hospital. After being forced to evacuate following the raid on al-Shifa, he refused to abandon his patients, and relocated to the Indonesian Hospital, where he survived Israeli military attacks later that month, only to then move to al-Awda, where he was ultimately abducted by the Israeli military. Dr. al-Bursh worked around the clock to treat his patients, sleeping in the hospital and documenting for the world the extreme conditions health care professionals and patients in Gaza were forced to endure.
As explained in more detail in the next section, Dr. al-Bursh was raped and tortured to death in an Israeli prison. He was never charged with any crime - and not a single soldier has been investigated, arrested or tried for his murder.
The Targeted Killing of Dr. Marwan al-Sultan
He was 1 of only 2 cardiologists in all of northern Gaza. The expertise he had - expertise needed to treat the injured - is not easily found, and his death greatly reduced the chances of cardiac patients in Gaza surviving.
Dr. Marwan al-Sultan (left) and the airstrike that appears to have specifically targeted his apartment (right).
As the photos of the aftermath show - and his surviving family has testified - Dr. Marwan al-Sultan appears to have been specifically targeted by the Israeli military. In the weeks before he was assassinated in a “safe zone,” officers repeatedly called him with ominous messages—urging him to “stay safe” while warning, “we know where you are.”
Other Stories of Doctors Targeted by Israel
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Israel has also killed multiple doctors after ceasefires were announced. In January 2025, Israel killed Dr. Hala Abu Ahmed and her family in their home. She had worked tirelessly for 15 months, treating the most horrific injuries healthcare professionals have ever seen. She was with her family, celebrating the news of a ceasefire when Israel bombed them in their home. Israel likewise killed Dr. Saeed Nabhan, a devoted physician, alongside his father in an airstrike in Jabalia just days before a ceasefire was to take effect.
Disappearing and Torturing Healthcare Workers
Overview
Medical workers who survive Israel's airstrikes and hospital sieges have been subject to mass detention and torture by Israel. According to the WHO, over 300 healthcare professionals have been illegally transferred across the border and disappeared into Israeli prisons and secretive detention sites. Healthcare Workers Watch puts the figure at over 400. As of July 2025, Israel was detaining 28 Palestinian doctors, including eight senior specialists, with no charges, some for over 400 days. It should go without saying that the detention of healthcare workers - as well as their abuse and mistreatment - is patently illegal under international law.
In Israeli custody, Palestinian healthcare workers are subjected to torture and abuse - including extensive beatings, rape and sexual abuse, denial of medical care, cuffing and blindfolding for weeks at a time, forced stress positions (such as hanging from their arms), and unsafe and unsanitary conditions. Israel’s foremost human rights group has called Israel’s network of prisons “torture camps” in a report entitled “Welcome to Hell.”
Multiple sources and independent reports recount the harrowing detention of healthcare workers, including Human Rights Watch, Healthcare Workers Watch, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Israeli news media, and Israeli rights groups. Two top doctors have died in Israeli custody, reportedly from torture. Israel refuses to release their bodies.
The impact is incalculable. In addition to the individual trauma - physical and psychological - that Israel inflicts on these healthcare workers, this mass detention and torture is also an integral part of Israel's systematic destruction of Gaza's healthcare system. As British surgeon Nick Maynard, who volunteered in Gaza, has said, “It is a deliberate attempt to terrorise, hollow out and disable an already depleted and traumatised healthcare workforce.” The UN Human Rights Office said the mass detention of healthcare workers has had a catastrophic impact on civilians, denying injured and sick patients – as well as junior medical staff – access to the decades of medical skills of senior medics and has been a clear contributing factor in the almost total collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system.
Israel also appears to be using torture to try to extract coerced confessions of association with Hamas - as a way to legitimize and justify its attacks on Gaza's healthcare system. Human Rights Watch reported that all of the detained doctors it spoke to said that they were stripped, beaten, blindfolded and handcuffed for many weeks on end, and pressured to confess to being members of the Hamas movement with various threats of indefinite detention, rape, and killing their families in Gaza. Khader Abu Nada, 30, a nurse at Beit Hanoun hospital in northern Gaza, said that when he denied any Hamas affiliation during his first interrogation at a military base in Gaza, the commander threatened to rape him with an “electric stick.” When he continued to deny any Hamas affiliation, soldiers beat him until he was bleeding from his nose, hands, and mouth.
This section details Israel's mass detention and torture of Palestinian healthcare workers - as reported by released doctors, nurses, and paramedics, and confirmed by Israeli human rights groups, soldiers and other sources.
The Mass Detention and Torture of Palestinian Healthcare Workers
Numerous independent organizations confirm widespread torture and abuse of Palestinian healthcare workers kidnapped from hospitals and detained without charge in Israeli prisons. This includes: Human Rights Watch, Healthcare Workers Watch, B'tselem, Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and Israeli news media.
In its report “Welcome to Hell,” B'tselem documents the widespread use of electric shocks, amputations and deaths due to inhumane conditions, severe beatings, surgery without anesthesia, playing loud music until ears bleed, systematic torture, sexual abuse, and more.
Israeli whistleblowers and soldiers confirm this rampant abuse and torture of Palestinians.
A photo of Palestinians inside Sde Teiman in Israel shared with The New York Times.
While the scale of torture has reached horrifying levels, the abuse of Palestinians in Israeli detention is nothing new. Human Rights Watch found that Israeli authorities for decades have failed to ensure accountability for torture and other abuses against Palestinian detainees. According to official Israeli statistics, between 2019 and 2022, 1,830 complaints of abuse were opened against Israeli Prison Services officers, with none resulting in a criminal conviction.
With the genocide in Gaza, Israel has also specifically and systematically abused healthcare professionals in captivity. Human Rights Watch interviewed released doctors, nurses, and paramedics. “All said that they were stripped, beaten, and blindfolded and handcuffed, for many weeks on end, and pressured to confess to being members of the Hamas movement with various threats of indefinite detention, rape, and killing their families in Gaza.” It bears remembering: these were all healthcare workers, often taken while on duty at hospitals - none of whom was ever informed of the reason for their detention or charged with an offense.
“Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened. I am talking about being clubbed, being beaten with rifle butts and being attacked by dogs. There was little to no food, no personal hygiene, no soap inside the cells, no water, no toilet, no toilet paper … I saw people who were dying there.
“Every day is a humiliation, every day is degradation. There you are just a number, you are not a hospital director or a human being. I was beaten so badly I couldn’t use my legs or walk. No day passes without torture.”
~ Dr. Mohammed Abu Selmia, The Guardian
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constant beatings until they were unable to walk, teeth and limbs being broken
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starvation, with many losing 1/3 or more of their body weight
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rape and sexual abuse
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being kept in stress positions for hours at a time (such as being forced to kneel for 18 hours at a time, or hanging people from their hands)
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being blindfolded with hands and feet tied for 24 hours a day, some for over 100 days
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having loud music played at all hours to prevent them from sleeping
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being denied any hygiene, including the use of toilets, such that scabies and skin diseases ran rampant.
Human Rights Watch reported that at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility, a paramedic said he was suspended from a chain attached to handcuffs, electroshocked, denied medical care for broken ribs caused by beatings, and administered what he believed was a psychoactive drug before interrogations.
“I asked them what they were doing coming into the operating theatre,” he says. “One of the soldiers pointed at me and said: ‘Are you Dr Issam Abu Ajwa?’ I said: ‘Yes, that’s me.’ And then the beating began.”
Still in his surgeons’ scrubs, the 63-year-old Abu Ajwa says he was dragged from the operating room before being handcuffed, blindfolded and stripped.
He was then put in a military truck with other doctors, nurses and medical staff and driven away from the hospital. Less than 24 hours later he was in a detention facility in Israel, beginning what he describes as months of brutal and constant violence and abuse.
“There were no rules,” he says.
During interrogations, he says he was tortured and beaten. “They would throw me on the ground. One would hit me on the head while the other opened my ear and poured water inside,” he says.
“There was a bathroom [in the interrogation room] … [they] would take a toilet brush and tell me ‘today we are going to brush your teeth.’ I was tied up, blindfolded and three or four of them held my face, pinned it down and kept scrubbing.”
Abu Ajwa says they broke his teeth: “They have no humanity.”
“When one of the interrogators learned I was a surgeon, he said he wouldn’t let me out without ruining my hands so I wouldn’t be able to practice medicine anymore.”
Two of Gaza's most senior doctors have already died in Israeli detention due to torture.
Dr. Iyad al-Rantisi, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Kamal Adwan hospital, died at Shikma prison. The case of the second doctor - Dr. Adnan al-Bursh - is chilling and emblematic.
50-year-old Palestinian surgeon and professor, Adnan al-Bursh, was the head of orthopedic surgery at Al-Shifa hospital. He was kidnapped from inside the hospital where he was working, and raped and tortured to death in Ofer prison in April 2024. Over a year later, the bodies of the two doctors still had not been returned to their families.
Dr. Adnan al-Bursh spent the last weeks of his life treating his patients, sleeping on the floor of the hospital, and helping bury the patients he had no way of helping. He was kidnapped from inside a hospital by the Israeli army in December 2023 and like thousands of Palestinians, he was never charged with any crime. He was initially sent to Sde Teiman, the Israeli military base that has become infamous for torturing Palestinians after videos emerged of soldiers raping a Palestinian hostage.
In short, Israeli soldiers raped a Palestinian doctor to death - a healthy 50-year-old surgeon who spent his life healing others, and refused to abandon his patients to save himself. He was never charged with any crime. Not a single soldier has been investigated, arrested or tried for his murder. Dr. al-Bursh's story is devastating, but it is not unique. As of September 2025, the UN reported that at least 75 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since October 7, 2023, in many if not all cases due to torture, starvation, and medical neglect.
Another prominent example of Israel's torture of Palestinian doctors is Doctor Hussam Abu Safiya. He is a pediatrician and the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. The hospital came under siege during Israel’s assault on northern Gaza in late 2024. Israel was implementing “The General’s Plan,” which called for creating a serious humanitarian crisis as a way of winning the “war.”
Under relentless Israeli bombardment, Dr. Abu Safiya sent video messages to the world and wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, begging for help. “Only two pediatricians remain in the hospital,” he said. “Most of the specialized medical staff have been arrested by the Israeli army or evacuated. We’re working around the clock, performing surgeries, because otherwise, we’ll lose a wounded person every hour.” Dr. Abu Safiya urged the world to send surgeons, specialized medical staff, ambulances and medical equipment, saying there are no working ambulances left in Beit Lahiya and Jabalya, and without urgent aid, people would literally die in the streets. Dr. Abu Safiya refused the military's demand to evacuate the hospital and abandon his patients.
Ultimately, the Israeli army stormed the hospital, forced patients into the streets, and burned the hospital - leading to the closure of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza. During the raid, Video captured the moment Dr. Abu Safiya was seen finally leaving the hospital, walking over massive piles of rubble, in his white lab coat, toward the Israeli tank that awaited him. In that one moment, in that one image, we see the depth of Palestinian humanity – a doctor who stayed with his patients to the very last moment – in stark contrast to the inhumanity and terrifying cruelty of Israeli soldiers.
Eyewitnesses say that, upon his arrest, Israeli soldiers told him “we don’t want you to go on Al Jazeera anymore” and beat him severely. He was transferred to Sde Teiman, the notorious torture camp, where he was stripped and subjected to severe beatings.
After two months of being held incommunicado, his lawyers were finally able to meet with him for the first time in February 2025. They reported that Dr. Abu Safiya was being tortured, beaten to try to extract a confession, denied medical treatment, had been put in solitary confinement for 25 days, and was interrogated continuously, and starved, leading to a severe loss in weight.
As of September 2025, Dr. Abu Safiya has been in Israeli prison - without charge - for 9 months and counting under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law. The law lets Israel imprison people from Gaza indefinitely without charge or trial, on secret evidence they can’t challenge, while cutting them off from lawyers and family for months at a time. No due process, no habeas corpus. He is being held in the same prison where Dr. Adnan al-Bursh was raped and tortured to death. His lawyers report that he has lost more than 40 kg – about 40% of his bodyweight – and is in dire health from brutal beatings, starvation, and deprivation of medical treatment at Ofer Prison.
Attacking Maternity Wards
Overview
According to a UN Independent Commission, Israel has systematically attacked maternal and women's health care across Gaza, including direct attacks on maternity wards and IVF clinics. It has also blocked humanitarian aid, including critical equipment and medications, making childbirth a “nightmare” and 40% of pregnancies high-risk. Israel’s starvation campaign has also created immense suffering, with women so malnourished they cannot breastfeed their newborn children.
All this has led to a surge in maternal deaths, still born babies, and newborns with lifelong health impacts. Israel is seeking to erase Gaza's past, present, and future. This is genocide. This targeting of the future of a people is emblematic of genocide - which is why one of the five acts of genocide under the Genocide Convention is "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group."
Attacking Reproductive and Maternal Healthcare Across Gaza
Israel's attacks included not only direct airstrikes and tank and sniper fire, but also destroying generators and solar panels, directly resulting in the deaths of newborns in neonatal ICUs.
The Impact on Mothers and Babies
The UN said that as a result of Israel's genocidal acts, for mothers in Gaza, it was “like giving birth in the Middle Ages.” Basic equipment and crucial medications were simply unavailable. The Washington Post called childbirth in Gaza a “nightmare” - with pregnant women undergoing cesarians without anesthetic, the risk of postpartum hemorrhaging soaring, and mothers so malnourished that breastfeeding was often impossible. A UNICEF spokesperson talked of “seeing newborn babies suffer while mothers bleed to death.”
This has resulted in a surge of maternal deaths - and a skyrocketing miscarriage rate - leading the UN Independent Commission to call Israel's actions tantamount to the crime of extermination. Doctors say they no longer see normal sized babies, and instead are seeing far more stillborn, malnourished, and dying babies. Women are giving birth alone and scared. One woman described going home to a tent encampment after her husband and other children were all killed.
International doctors describe suffering and death that is entirely preventable. Thirty UK-based doctors, nurses, and medical professionals who volunteered in Gaza wrote an open letter, saying they “regularly saw still-births and maternal deaths that would be easily preventable in any functioning health system” and that due to Israel's starvation of Gaza, “Very few babies born under these conditions are likely to survive, and those who do will have their health permanently impaired.” Forty-five American physicians, surgeons, and nurses who volunteered in the Gaza Strip echoed these observations, saying, “The pregnant women we treated were particularly malnourished. Those of us who worked with pregnant women regularly saw stillbirths and maternal deaths that were easily preventable in any third-world healthcare system.”
Blocking Medical Evacuations
Israel has not only destroyed Gaza's health system - while also inflicting mass casualties and starvation - it has also blocked thousands of people from receiving life-saving care outside of Gaza through medical evacuations. The UN and a chorus of aid groups - such as UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, and B'tselem - all say the Israeli government is denying medical evacuations to critically ill or injured Palestinians, including children, often without even providing a reason. Hundreds have died as their requests languish for months without any response from the Israeli government.
In August 2025, The Guardian reported that over 600 children have died while awaiting Israeli approval for medical evacuation, with more than 16,000 still in need. In November 2024, UNICEF reported that 2,500 Gaza children were in urgent need of medical care abroad, yet evacuations were nearly halted. In July 2025, Doctors Without Borders, estimated 11,000–13,000 people—including more than 4,500 children—require medical evacuation to access care unavailable in the Gaza Strip. Yet Israeli authorities had allowed only a few medical evacuations, with many critical cases delayed or denied regardless of medical urgency.
According to the U.N.'s Office for Humanitarian Affairs, Israel approved only two major evacuations between May 7 and the end of July, despite a waiting list of 2,150 patients needing immediate evacuation for life-saving care.
The consequences of Israel's delays and denials are dire. Some children die, others must have limbs amputated. Lives are forever changed. The head of medical evacuation for Kinder Relief said a 10-year-old boy who waited for one month for approval to leave for cancer treatment in Jordan finally left in a convoy only to die a week later because he had become so malnourished in Gaza that he was too weak for chemotherapy.
The Guardian tells the story of 8-year old Abdel Karim Wahdan.
Abdel Karim Wahdan no longer has the energy to speak. When visitors arrive, the eight-year-old pretends to be sleeping so that no one looks at him. Between his frequent dialysis sessions, he cries. His bones hurt, he says.
Abdel Karim is dying. His death should be preventable but because he lives in Gaza he cannot access the treatment that would save his life. What started as acute kidney failure is now chronic: his small body has begun to swell and he spends his days between hospital beds and injections that he hates.
In many cases, doctors say, the treatment needed is simple - but unavailable in Gaza due to Israel's destruction of the healthcare system and blockade on medical aid. Overcrowding, lack of sanitation, and widespread malnutrition - all as a result of Israel's onslaught - also means disease spreads quickly, worsening the crisis.
Israeli Claims
Overview
The primary claim Israel makes to justify its decimation of the Palestinian healthcare system is that hospitals are being improperly used for military purposes by Palestinian armed groups. As this section lays out, this claim is simply not believable.
First, it defies basic common sense, and Israel has provided no credible evidence to support its sweeping claims. Indeed, Israel's claims have been debunked again and again - such as the claim that Hamas had a command-and-control center under al-Shifa hospital. The UN, multiple news investigations, a prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Israel's own Physicians for Human Rights, and international doctors volunteering in Gaza - all say Israel's claims are false and wildly exaggerated, a pretext to justify its genocidal onslaught. What's more, one might ask, if what Israel were saying were true, why has it not allowed foreign journalists into Gaza for the entire length of its genocidal war? There is simply little to no credible evidence that Hamas has used hospitals for military purposes.
Second, Israel has a clear history and pattern of lying - such as when Israel claimed to have found a list of names of Hamas militants guarding Israeli hostages at the al-Rantisi Children's Hospital. It was - in reality - simply a calendar with the days of the week in Arabic.
Finally, even if Hamas were using Gaza's hospitals for military purposes, Israel's violent and systematic destruction of Gaza's healthcare system - including over 670 attacks on healthcare facilities, according to the WHO - would still be illegal under international law. Hospitals are so critical to civilian life that they are protected except for extremely limited circumstances - that is, (1) if a hospital is actively being used for military purposes (past use is not enough), (2) the military advantage gained by attacking is so significant that it outweighs the potential harm to civilians, and (3) all feasible precautions are taken to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. If there is any doubt, a hospital must be protected. The fact is, Israel cannot show that it meets any of these criteria.
The Lie That Hamas Uses Hospitals for Military Purposes
This is such a critical claim that has been used to by Israel to justify its wholesale decimation of Gaza's healthcare system that it bears analyzing in detail.
On its face, Israel's claim defies common sense. The sheer scale of Israel’s assault – the attack on every single hospital in Gaza, the intentional destruction of medical equipment, the widespread detention and torture of healthcare workers, and the denial of medical aid - makes these claims unbelievable on their face. The idea that Hamas is hiding in every single hospital and yet no international doctor has seen any military activity, and Israel - with its ubiquitous drone surveillance - has produced no credible evidence of military activity, is simply not believable. If Israel's claims were true, it should have no problem allowing in international journalists to verify them - but it has steadfastly refused to do so from the first day of its genocidal assault on Gaza.
What's more, Israel even blew up a hospital that no one was in. Israel leveled the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital—Gaza’s only specialized cancer treatment facility—in a controlled demolition. The hospital had been forced to shut down in October 2023 due to Israel's blockade on fuel. Israel filmed the destruction, shared the footage, and claimed Hamas had been using the facility as a base. However, The Washington Post - as well as Palestinian journalists - documented that the Israeli army itself had occupied the hospital and used it as a base of their own. In other words, the only military purposes it was being used for were Israeli military purposes. The fact that it was blown up by a controlled demolition further demonstrates that there was no Hamas military activity taking place there.
Physicians for Human Rights in Israel itself concluded: “Though Israel has cited military necessity as the rationale for its actions, the scale, pattern, and nature of the operations, as well as accompanying statements, indicate the implementation of a broader policy aimed at destroying Palestinian society in Gaza and making the enclave uninhabitable.” In other words, the claim of Hamas military activity is simply a fig leaf to justify the unjustifiable - the complete destruction of Gaza's healthcare system.
Second, Israel has produced little to no credible evidence of Hamas using hospitals for military purposes.
Take perhaps the most famous example - the case of al-Shifa hospital. The Israeli government repeatedly claimed that Hamas was maintaining a command center under Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the largest and most important hospital in the Gaza Strip. Israel's claim of an extensive network of tunnels looked ridiculous, however, as its own video, as well as a Washington Post investigation, showed very limited tunnels that bore no resemblance to the sophisticated network it had used as justification for attacking the hospital. Indeed, it's possible these were the same bunkers built by Israeli engineers when Israel last controlled the site. Moreover, The Washington Post found there was no evidence the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards; rooms connected to tunnels did not show immediate evidence of military use by Hamas; and none of the five hospital buildings identified by Israel appeared to be connected to the purported tunnel network.
Israeli videos also showed a paltry number of weapons. Former U.S. State Department legal advisor Brian Finucane said “These arms by themselves hardly seem to justify the military fixation on al-Shifa, even setting the law aside.” Analysts also pointed out that because of Israel's banning of journalists, there was no way to know if these handful of weapons were even found there, or if they had been planted there by Israel itself. However, there was evidence to indicate the latter. CNN pointed out that an IDF video on November 15 showed a military spokesperson touring the facility, during which an AK-47 gun was seen behind an MRI machine. Fox News and the BBC were subsequently granted access to the hospital under Israeli military supervision. In their reports filmed after the IDF clip, two AK-47 guns are visible in the same location. It is unclear where the second assault rifle came from, but it is clear the scene had been altered.
Of course, it was not only Al-Shifa. Human Rights Watch found “repeated, apparently unlawful attacks on medical facilities,” including “the Indonesian Hospital, al-Ahli Hospital, the International Eye Care Center, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, and the al-Quds Hospital.” It said it had "not seen any information that would justify attacks on Gaza hospitals." An Independent UN inquiry investigated attacks on 110 hospitals and medical centers and found zero evidence of Hamas “command centers.” Israel furnished none either. Meanwhile, international doctors - as well as Palestinian doctors - have said over and over again that they have seen no Hamas military activity at the hospitals that Israel has so brutally raided and destroyed.
Israel has a clear history and pattern of lying about its killing of Palestinians. In addition to the fabrications it told to justify its destruction of al-Shifa hospital, Israel has told a host of other lies in an attempt to justify its decimation of Gaza's healthcare system.
In March 2025, Israel attacked Nasser hospital, killing a senior Hamas political leader named Ismail Barhoum, who reportedly headed Hamas' Charitable Institutions Association. Killing a political (not a military leader), let alone one who is receiving medical treatment, is prohibited under international law. Attacking a hospital and killing or endangering others - in this case a 16 year old boy who was expected to make a full recovery and was scheduled to be sent home the following day - simply because a political leader is there is beyond the pale. It would be as if Hamas attacked an Israeli hospital simply because Netanyahu was seeking treatment there. So Israel claimed that Barhoum was “in the hospital to commit acts of terrorism.” An American doctor, who was treating 16-year-old Ibrahim, called this claim “fucking ridiculous.” “He was wounded and he was here as a patient,” he said. “I’m telling you this as an eyewitness.” (Israel's intentional attacks on civilian governance Gaza is a key part of its genocide.)
Israel attacked Nasser hospital again in August 2025, with two strikes, killing at least 20 people, including 5 journalists as well as first responders who had arrived after the first strike. Not only did the strike hit a hospital - but it was also a well-established gathering spot for journalists. The second strike appears to have purposely targeted the rescue workers and journalists who had gathered to help after the first strike. The Israeli military first claimed it was targeting a “Hamas surveillance camera at the hospital” (let's think about this: even if true, Israel was trying to justify the killing of 20 people because of a camera). However, it was actually a Reuters camera and Reuters said the Israeli army was "fully aware" of the location of its cameraman. The following day, Israel released photos of six men killed in the strikes it labeled “terrorists.” Sky News determined that only one of the men was a combatant, and he was killed in an unrelated incident. Several mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, debunked Israel’s claims behind the attack. As outrage grew, Netanyahu called it a mistake and said Israel would investigate.
Finally, even if Israel's claims of Hamas military activity were true - and again, there is no credible evidence of this - they still would not begin to justify Israel's assault on Gaza's health system. Under international law, hospitals are protected except for extremely limited circumstances - that is, (1) if a hospital is actively being used for military purposes (past presence is not enough), (2) the military advantage gained by attacking is so significant that it outweighs the potential harm to civilians, and (3) all feasible precautions are taken to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. If there is any doubt, a hospital must be protected. Israel can't show any of these.
As detailed above, Israel has over and over again failed to provide virtually any evidence of Palestinian military use of hospitals. Moreover, as the former head of Human Rights Watch has written, Israel's attacks provided no great military advantage, while the civilian harm has been “immediate and crushing.” Nor has Israel shown much, if any, effort to protect civilians or minimize harm to hospitals. As Human Rights Watch concluded, Israel provided no secure way to flee or safe place to go when evacuating hospitals, raising “concerns that the purpose was not to protect civilians, but to terrify them into leaving.” A team of Harvard researchers has also shown that in just the first 6 weeks of Israel's genocidal war, 84% of Gaza's hospitals were within the damage range of at least one 2,000-pound bomb dropped by Israel, and a quarter were within the lethal range. These are bombs so powerful they create shock waves strong enough to burst lungs and sinuses and pancake entire buildings. “I don’t see any evidence that they tried to protect civilians or civilian infrastructure,” one of the authors said. “How could you be using these kinds of weapons, in this kind of setting, and still argue that you are adhering to international humanitarian law?”
Conclusion
Israel has destroyed Gaza's healthcare system – repeatedly bombing and burning hospitals and clinics, denying life-saving supplies, and detaining, killing, and torturing medical personnel and patients in contravention of international law - creating a catastrophic situation for the civilian population in Gaza.
These actions, taken together, and in light of the statements of Israeli leaders, permit only one conclusion: Israel has intentionally created a humanitarian catastrophe and deliberately destroyed the health care system so there is no recourse for anyone, including innocent civilians. It's no accident that the Finance Minister endorsed the genocidal aspirations of retired Israeli general Giora Eiland who in a major Israeli newspaper called for creating a humanitarian catastrophe as a way of achieving Israel’s war aims, and whose General's Plan appears to have been largely implemented. The attack on and collapse of the health care system in Gaza should be seen in this light.
As detailed in The Guardian, Israel has attacked, raided, and destroyed hospitals. It has kidnapped senior doctors leaving hospitals without specialists or supplies. Patients - including newborns - have died due to lack of electricity, while nurses and other medical personnel have been shot while in the operating room. While starving, bombing, and shooting the people of Gaza, Israel has ensured there is virtually no medical care to help them.
The result is countless - literally countless - preventable deaths and life-changing injuries. An American doctor who volunteered in Gaza wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Many amputations could have been avoided if we’d had access to standard medical equipment.” Another American surgeon told the UN Security Council, “Children didn’t die because their injuries were unsurvivable. They died because we had no blood, no antibiotics, not even the most basic supplies … My patients were six-year-olds with shrapnel in their hearts and bullets in their brains. Pregnant women whose pelvises were obliterated. Fetuses cut in two while still in the womb.” Children have died due to a lack of medicine and milk, as well as life-saving medical supplies that are ordinarily available at hospitals. A group of 30 British doctors said that as a result of Israeli attacks on hospitals and denial of supplies, “the surgical complication rate was near 100%.”
Many of the sick and wounded are left to slow and agonizing deaths. In early December 2023, Doctors Without Borders' Tanya Haj-Hassan warned: “Over 700 Gazans killed in less than 24 hours. We are getting reports and messages from healthcare workers of hundreds of casualties coming in with the most horrific burns, head injuries, shrapnel wounds, and bilateral amputations in infants, in children, in entire families. With the current brutal annihilation of Gaza’s healthcare system, these patients will die a slow and horrific death.”
Deaths from treatable illnesses have skyrocketed. The New York Times reported that dialysis patients are slowly dying of blood poisoning. In June 2024, Al Jazeera reported that 1,500 people with kidney failure face a “slow death” due to lack of medical care. By April 2025, health officials reported that 40% of Gaza's dialysis population had died.
Children with cancer cannot get treatment. A 10-year-old boy with leukemia, who could no longer access treatment, told Reuters: “Two weeks ago, I stopped being able to walk. Every day my condition gets worse and I lose something. My bones hurt and everything hurts. I wish to leave Gaza so I can receive the treatment and be able to play like I used to.” A mom lost her 5-year-old son to cancer after his transfer for life-saving treatment was delayed due to the Israeli closure of the Rafah crossing.
Gaza’s sick and wounded who die from treatable conditions aren’t counted in the official death toll.
Through its decimation of Gaza's health system, Israel has effectively weaponized starvation and disease in its genocidal campaign. Disease spreads rapidly due to the overcrowding of displaced people and Israel's destruction of homes and sanitation infrastructure. People’s bodies are weakened through lack of food and clean water, and little to no medical care, vaccines, or medication.
In July 2024, polio reemerged in Gaza, after having been eradicated for 25 years. Israel immunized its own soldiers, but for weeks refused to allow Palestinians to get vaccines. A 10-month-old baby, born into war, will now be paralyzed if he survives it. An 11-month-old boy is partially paralyzed. It's unclear how many more children have been affected. Israel later bombed the entrance to a school in a designated “safe zone” where polio vaccines were being distributed.
For the injured who survive, there is very little medical support, making life extraordinarily difficult. This, no doubt, serves Israel's hope of ethnically cleansing Gaza of its Palestinian population, pressuring them to leave by eliminating any possibility of a decent life. For example, as of August 2025, only nine prosthetic specialists remain in Gaza to serve nearly 4,000 amputees—10% of them children—amid a total blockade on materials. UNRWA reports that 83% of people with disabilities in Gaza have lost essential equipment such as wheelchairs, crutches, and hearing aids, forcing many to crawl or remain bedridden, and leaving them unable to access aid. A Reuters video documents child amputees in Gaza with few treatment options.