Is there a breaking point for resilience? Gaza teeters on it daily, bent but not broken, as the world measures its very survival in percentages. The figures paint a stark truth. Last month, the World Health Organization documented damage to 33 of Gaza's 36 hospitals during Israeli military operations, leaving just 21 partially functional.
At the same time, local sources, including the Palestinian Health Ministry, issued an alert at the start of this week, asserting that Gaza's hospitals and medical centers are facing critical shortages of essential medicines due to Israel's blockade and military actions. The ministry further detailed the severe impairment of remaining emergency, surgical, and intensive care units, noting the near-total depletion of 40% of vital drugs and 60% of medical supplies.
How can an already crippled healthcare system endure the confluence of a supply blockade, the targeted destruction of infrastructure, and the decimation of medical personnel? It is precisely for this reason that analyzing the individual events exacerbating this catastrophe, beyond the overarching issue of the blockade, becomes paramount. The medical provisions that do manage to enter Gaza confront a bitter reality: there are no longer intact facilities to house them, nor a sufficient number of healthcare professionals to administer them.
How Gaza’s Healthcare System Was Destroyed
Gaza’s health system suffered its first devastating blow as early as October 17, 2023, just 10 days into the war on Gaza. On that occasion, hundreds of Palestinians seeking refuge in the car park of Al-Ahli Hospital were killed in an attack, according to Palestinian health officials. Israel claimed the explosion at the facility was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an accusation the armed group denied. The Gaza Health Ministry reported 471 fatalities and 342 injuries. A journalist who arrived at the scene an hour after the blast told Human Rights Watch: “There was no space to walk because there were body parts everywhere, and injured and dying people. The people at the scene were mainly children, the elderly, and women.”
On November 25, Bassam Naim, head of Hamas’s political and foreign relations department, addressed several questions about the October 17 explosion. He stated that the ministry’s investigation into the attack had been hampered by ongoing hostilities but that “preliminary information in our possession definitively points to Israel’s responsibility.” Naim added that Israeli authorities had warned the hospital to evacuate “hours” before the blast and asserted that “no faction of the Palestinian resistance — to our knowledge — possesses in its arsenal a missile with the same destructive power capable of killing such a large number of people as the bomb used in this incident” against the hospital.
That episode was merely the first in a grim series. On November 3, 2023, an Israeli airstrike hit an ambulance convoy engaged in evacuating the wounded from the northern Gaza area, besieged by fighting. According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in the enclave, the raid resulted in 15 deaths and 60 injuries.
The Israeli military justified the bombing by stating they had identified “an ambulance used by a Hamas terrorist cell.” Military sources alleged that several militants from the group were killed in the attack and accused Hamas of using the vehicles to transport fighters and weapons. This version was vehemently denied by Izzat El Reshiq, a Hamas official, who labeled the accusations “baseless.” Ashraf al-Qidra, a spokesperson for the Gaza Health Ministry, clarified that the ambulance was part of a convoy targeted near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
While announcing their intention to release further evidence, the Israeli military did not present any concrete elements to support their claims in the initial 24 hours following the attack. The international community reacted with outrage. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in a social media post, expressed “utter shock” at the attacks on ambulances and reiterated that “patients, healthcare workers and medical facilities must be protected.”
Approximately two more weeks passed before tragedy struck again. On November 21, 2023, an airstrike on Al-Awda Hospital claimed the lives of Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila and Dr. Ahmad al-Sahar from Doctors Without Borders (MSF), along with another physician, Ziad al-Tatari. The humanitarian organization reported that Dr. Abu Nujaila and Dr. al-Sahar were inside the facility when it was struck on the third and fourth floors.
Further medical personnel, including MSF staff, sustained serious injuries. MSF had consistently shared information with the warring parties regarding Al-Awda Hospital, as a functioning medical facility, and about the presence of its staff there. Furthermore, GPS coordinates had been routinely provided to Israeli authorities.
In the following days, on November 24, the World Health Organization released a shocking statistic. A staggering 187 attacks against healthcare facilities and workers had already been documented in the Gaza Strip since the Israeli war on Gaza began. Among the most severe incidents was the Israeli siege of the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, which persisted for days in November 2023. Images circulated after the troops withdrew depicted a completely ravaged structure, with dozens of charred and decomposing bodies abandoned amidst the rubble.
The same hospital was forced to close in the early days of January 2025 following repeated attacks by Israeli forces.
During the peak of the January offensive, specifically on January 22, Israeli forces, advancing deep into the western area of Khan Younis during the most intense fighting witnessed in Gaza at that time, stormed one hospital and placed another under siege, obstructing wounded individuals’ access to trauma care, according to Palestinian officials. Troops entered the Al-Mawasi district, adjacent to the Mediterranean coast west of Khan Younis, the main city in the southern Gaza Strip, for the first time. There, they raided Al-Khair Hospital and arrested medical staff, as reported to Reuters by Gaza Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society communicated that tanks had encircled another hospital in Khan Younis, Al-Amal, the agency’s relief headquarters, with which contact with personnel had been lost.
Three days of siege, 90 casualties, and two irreconcilable narratives. The Israeli forces’ incursion into Al-Shifa Hospital on March 20, 2024, left a trail of death and grave accusations. While the Israeli military reported 90 militants killed, surviving witnesses, displaced individuals seeking protection within the wards, described a different reality characterized by arbitrary detentions, abuses, and civilian patients becoming targets.
Ismail al-Thawabta, director of the Gaza government’s press office, contested the Israeli military’s claims of fighters being killed, asserting that all the victims were wounded patients and displaced persons.
Eleven days after the Al-Shifa siege, another Israeli attack shattered the fragile illusion of safety within Gaza’s hospitals. A missile directly struck the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah, resulting in the deaths of at least four people and injuries to 17 others, according to the World Health Organization and on-site medical personnel. Among the casualties were displaced individuals and journalists who had sought refuge within those very walls meant to shield them. The Israeli military justified the bombing as a targeted operation against a “command center of Islamic Jihad.”
However, images circulated through social media painted a starkly contrasting picture, depicting tents torn apart by the blast, bloodied stretchers, and the panic of those who had tentatively believed themselves to be safe.
A hospital transformed into a battlefield, a withdrawal that does not erase the horror. It was April 1, 2024, when the last Israeli troops departed Al-Shifa, concluding two weeks of operations that reduced Gaza’s largest hospital complex to a smoking ruin.
According to the Israel Defense Forces, it was being used to harbor Hamas fighters. The military described the operation as one of its most successful in nearly six months of hostilities and mentioned the killing of 200 militants, including high-ranking operatives. The assertion that all the victims were militants never received corroborating evidence; on the contrary, the U.N. health agency reported the deaths of numerous hospital patients and the endangerment of dozens more during the raid. Palestinians who fled the facility described days marked by intense fighting, mass arrests, and forced marches past lifeless bodies.
A mere two weeks elapsed before a chilling echo of past events. On October 14, 2024, at least four individuals were killed and numerous others wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a hospital compound in central Gaza, where displaced Palestinians were seeking shelter from the ongoing Israeli assault on the besieged territory. The attack, occurring in the early hours, struck the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital compound in Deir el-Balah and ignited a blaze in a densely populated tent encampment.
The precise death toll from this attack remains uncertain, as volunteer surgeon Mohammad Tahir informed Al Jazeera that the majority of the injured presented with burns covering 60 to 80 percent of their bodies, injuries from which many inevitably succumbed.
It was December 28, 2024, when Israeli forces completed their siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital, arresting 240 Palestinians — doctors, nurses, even the director, Hussam Abu Safiya, deemed culpable for refusing to comply with an order to evacuate one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza. His detention occurred the day after the army killed approximately 20 Palestinians in a raid inside the hospital, which had been one of the “most extensive operations” conducted in the territory up to that point.
They were the last hope for the wounded under the bombs, only to become victims themselves. On March 23, 2025, Israeli forces fatally shot 15 aid workers during a rescue mission in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah. Video footage recovered from the mobile phone of one of the slain Palestinian medics unequivocally demonstrated the involvement of Israeli forces, directly contradicting, as reported by Misbar, the Israeli narrative justifying the killing of the 15 Palestinian healthcare professionals.
Finally, the ultimate devastating blow. On Sunday, April 13, 2025, two Israeli missiles struck a hospital in Gaza, rendering the emergency room inoperable and damaging other facilities, according to medical personnel. Health authorities at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital evacuated patients following a phone call received shortly before the attack from someone identifying themselves as a member of Israeli security.
Hundreds of patients and injured individuals had to be transferred in the dead of night, and many of them are now on the streets without medical care, a circumstance that has jeopardized their survival. The Israeli military and the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet subsequently claimed, without providing any evidence, to have targeted a Hamas “command and control complex” inside Al-Ahli Hospital.
Experts Challenge Israeli Justifications for Gaza Hospital Raids
Having documented the series of attacks against Gaza's hospitals — each one justified by Israel with the alleged presence of Hamas fighters — increasingly stark contradictions are emerging. Israeli authorities consistently employ the same rationale, yet evidence to substantiate these claims remains systematically absent. Furthermore, prominent figures involved in investigating potential Israeli war crimes are voicing growing skepticism.
Andrew Cayley, for instance, who is leading the International Criminal Court’s investigation into Palestine, has questioned the reliability of assertions regarding military activities within Gaza’s hospitals — the justification cited for Israeli attacks on healthcare facilities in the territory. Cayley, who reports directly to ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, is overseeing the inquiry initiated in 2021 but expedited following the October 7 attacks led by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza.
Adding to these concerns is the authoritative voice of Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights. Following the attack on Kamal Adwan Hospital in late December, Türk stated that Israeli military operations inside and around Gaza’s hospitals “have had devastating consequences, just as the need for medical care reaches critical levels due to the conflict.”
While acknowledging Israeli allegations of military use of the facilities, Türk stressed that Israel “has not provided sufficient evidence to back up many of these claims” — a crucial point, given that this very justification has been systematically employed for each individual attack against healthcare infrastructure.
The repeated attacks on medical facilities constitute a grave violation of international humanitarian law and, in recent months, have become systematic. The result is that the ultimate human cost — in terms of long-term deaths and injuries resulting from the denial of aid and treatment — is impossible to predict. What has become clear is that the escalating disregard for medical and humanitarian action, and the destruction of healthcare facilities and shelters for staff, alongside the killing of doctors and patients, has eroded the immense value and right to life.
A fundamental principle is crumbling under the weight of this war: that unwritten pact that for centuries should have protected the sick and those who care for them, transforming hospitals into inviolable sanctuaries. The progressive dismantling of humanitarian space — through the annihilation of infrastructure, the elimination of healthcare personnel, and the transformation of patients into targets — is erasing not just individual lives but the very concept of the sanctity of care.
What is emerging is a chilling equation, where each destroyed medical facility or slain doctor equates to a further diminution of shared humanity. The right to life — a universal and inalienable value — is being translated daily into a mere statistical possibility, subject to the ruthless logic of military calculation.
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