Israeli incitement campaign paves way for attacks on Gaza hospitals
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warns on 9 October 2026:
The escalating official and media campaign of Israeli incitement against hospitals and medical centres in the Gaza Strip is paving the way for attacks on the healthcare facilities that remain. It seeks to deprive Palestinians of any chance of survival and to continue subjecting them to living conditions that lead to their destruction.
Using unsubstantiated claims to justify such attacks, after three years of systematically destroying the healthcare system, signals an insistence on continuing the genocide by preventing the restoration of services essential to people’s survival and eliminating the capacity to save the wounded and treat patients.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is following with grave concern the threats issued by the Israeli army on 6 October. In a video statement, the army claimed that “Hamas continues to exploit civilian centres and infrastructure for its terrorist purposes, especially hospitals and medical facilities”, but provided no evidence to support these allegations.
This repeats the approach the Israeli army has followed since the beginning of the genocide: pre-emptively attacking hospitals while making undocumented accusations linking them to military activity. It then uses those accusations as a pretext to bomb, raid, and disable hospitals, presenting the systematic destruction of healthcare as operations against military targets, even as the healthcare system in the Gaza Strip can no longer withstand further attacks or disruption.
Over the past two days, the Israeli army published six messages inciting against hospitals and medical centres in Gaza, including a post with a video on Wednesday. It claimed to have tracked two people allegedly affiliated with Hamas leaving Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. According to the army, one of them transferred explosive devices from inside the hospital and planted them near the Yellow Line to target its forces.
The published footage does not provide enough evidence to substantiate the army’s account. It neither identifies the location of the person shown near the rubble or his connection to Kamal Adwan Hospital, nor shows him leaving the hospital or carrying devices out of it. The image quality also makes it impossible to verify what he is handling or to conclude definitively that he is planting an explosive device. The footage then cuts to a daytime shot of an unidentified destroyed building, without showing its location or establishing a connection to the previous clip. These spatial and temporal gaps prevent the combined footage from serving as evidence that the person left the hospital or that the alleged devices were transferred from inside it.
The Israeli army builds its accusation against the hospital on a series of conclusions unsupported by the published material: first, it interprets the person’s movement as the planting of an explosive device; then, it claims the device was transferred from inside the hospital; and finally, it uses that claim to accuse the facility of military use. Each conclusion requires evidence, and repeating allegations does not replace the lack of proof.
Even if someone were proven to have carried out a military act outside the hospital, that alone would not prove the medical facility was used beyond its humanitarian function to commit acts harmful to the enemy, nor would it automatically make the hospital a military target. Using the video to justify targeting the hospital thus relies on the army’s allegations instead of the verification required by law.
The sequence of these claims, together with the widespread accusations that medical facilities are being used for military purposes, suggests an organised effort to prepare for targeting them. This effort portrays treatment and rescue facilities as combat sites and presents attacks against them as a military necessity. Euro-Med Monitor warns that threats could disrupt these facilities even before an attack, by blocking patients and wounded people from reaching them, impeding the movement of medical teams, ambulances, and supplies, or prompting facilities to suspend some services for fear of being targeted. This could interrupt treatment, delay lifesaving interventions, raise the risk of preventable deaths, and further deprive people of care essential to their survival.