Israel’s new Gaza offensive targets hospitals and clinics – over 10 hit in past week
Damage in Nasser Hospital in the aftermath of an Israeli strike, Khan Yunis. southern Gaza, May 2025
Nir Hasson reports in Haaretz on 25 May 2025:
A Haaretz investigation found that at least 10 hospitals and clinics in Gaza were damaged – either directly or as collateral – in IDF strikes over the past week.
The strike earlier this month on the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Yunis, intended to kill Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar, launched the army’s expanded operations in Gaza (which became Operation Gideon’s Chariots) and the start of a wave of heavy strikes against medical centers across the Gaza Strip.
The World Health Organization listed 28 strikes against hospitals in the past week, four percent of all strikes against hospitals during the war. Consequently, the hospitals are out of service, and the workload on the remnants of Gaza’s health system has grown exponentially.
Following the strikes, on Thursday, Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, the director general of Gaza’s Health Ministry, told Physicians for Human Rights – Israel that the week’s strikes resulted in 400,000 Gazans living without access to an available medical response service.
WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday that the European Gaza Hospital had ceased operations along with 17 other medical centers and first aid centers located in the space that the IDF ordered people to evacuate to in southern Gaza. He said that there is now only one functioning hospital in northern Gaza, Al-Awda, after the Indonesian and Kamal Adwan hospitals were put out of service.
The Al-Awda Hospital is also in a zone that the IDF ordered evacuated, and about a dozen medical centers are located within a kilometer of the evacuated area.
Last Thursday, Al-Awda staff returned to the hospital to discover that it had been looted. Dr. Ghebreyesus said that, even though the hospital was in service, it could barely handle the number of patients and was at risk of closing because of safety problems and limited access.
On Friday, the IDF launched attacks near the hospital. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA] said that all the hospital’s medical supplies burned in a fire following the strike.
Damage to hospitals in Gaza
Since the first day of the war, hospitals in the Gaza Strip have been in the often-deadly crossfire between the protection of the infrastructures providing humanitarian needs to Gaza’s civilian population and the Israel Defense Forces operations setting out to locate terrorists allegedly hiding in them.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Office and the Israeli government often claim that Hamas established command centers and military installations in the proximity of hospitals or in tunnels beneath them. But AP, The Washington Post, and The New York Times investigations have found that in many cases, Israel was unable to provide evidence for extensive military facilities near the hospitals that were attacked.
Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, considered its most important medical center, was occupied and struck twice during the war. Dozens were killed in the hospital. The IDF also took control of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza and, in March, destroyed the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, which, together with the European Gaza Hospital, provided most of the oncology treatments in Gaza.
However, it seems that the current military operation has unusually exacerbated the damage caused to hospitals in the Gaza Strip.
Earlier this month, nine rockets were launched against the European Gaza Hospital in the strike aimed at Mohammed Sinwar. The emergency room entrance, access roads to the hospital and the hospital’s pipes were damaged. Dr. Tomo Potokar, a volunteer British surgeon in Gaza, spoke to Haaretz about that day.
“I was exhausted,” he said. “I lay down on the bed, and at roughly 6:20 P.M., there was a series of massive explosions. It was one after the other, which is unusual. You normally hear a drone or a plane and then one or two explosions, but this was intense. I thought this might be it [for me] because it sounded like they were getting very close. I then ran downstairs to the entrance [of the hospital].”
“There were two huge craters and wounded people lying on the ground,” he said. “I went through the hospital to get to my colleague in the intensive care unit, and there was quite a lot of damage inside,” he said. Dr. Potokar described a grisly scene on his way to the emergency care unit – a lot of damage, a lot of rubble on the ground, smoke filling the corridors, and water flowing from the burst pipes. “People were obviously in complete panic, and nobody knew what was happening.”
The next day, on Wednesday two weeks ago, the IDF hit the hospital again. The strikes severed the oxygen lines and sewer pipes, and the Palestinian Health Ministry ordered it closed. After the Turkish Hospital was put out of service, both of Gaza’s two main oncology centers are out of service.
The day after the strike on the European Gaza Hospital, Al-Awda Hospital Director Dr. Mohammed Salha issued a statement about the hospital’s condition. He said that, in a single night, teams treated 52 patients.
“One of them was a baby girl, just a few months old. Both her legs had been shredded by bombings. We also received nine bodies without life. Seven of them were children… Even after 19 months of this hell, I can tell you, no one gets used to the sight of innocent babies killed or mutilated for life,” he wrote. “People are dying – not because we don’t know how to save them, but because we simply don’t have the basic minimum to save them….[and we] are all exhausted,” he added.
Palestinians evacuating the European Hospital in Khan Yunis following an IDF strike on the hospital, May 2025
The next day, Al-Awda hospital was also hit. Its entry gate and access road were both damaged. A few days earlier, the WHO reported that the hospital was overloaded with wounded patients, and its supplies were about to run out. The resumption of aid supply, which started on Thursday, isn’t helping either, as it is not reaching northern Gaza. On Friday, a fire broke out in the hospital’s medical storeroom. The Palestinians said another IDF strike on the hospital caused it.
A day later, the Indonesian Hospital was damaged. During that Saturday, IDF bulldozers blocked access to the hospital and destroyed its gates. Harrowing videos of the sick and wounded patients being dragged on beds outside the hospital by their relatives were posted on social media. A UN report stated that two patients were wounded trying to exit the hospital.
On May 19, electricity generators powering the hospital were hit, and a fire broke out on the site. A day later, the WHO reported that the hospital was barely functioning and was besieged, with 15 people still inside.
Last week, shrapnel hit the emergency room in Al-Amal hospital in Khan Yunis. There were no casualties. A day later, a Red Crescent clinic in Khan Yunis was hit, destroying the first floor. The clinic was closed down.
The Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis’s supplies warehouse was also damaged that week. There were no casualties, but the WHO estimated that 30 percent of the hospital’s supplies, including infusions and dialysis solutions, were ruined.
The Nasser Hospital is currently the only large medical center still functioning in the southern Gaza Strip.
Medical Aid for Palestinians reported, “patients are forced to sleep in hallways, with beds scattered across every available space. Six operating theatres are running non-stop, yet the constant influx of casualties far exceeds capacity. … The intensive care unit, designed for 12 patients, now houses more than 24.”
Last week, a tent housing displaced persons near the HEAL Palestine-Kuwaiti Field Hospital in Al-Mawasi was hit. Six Palestinians were killed in the strike. The hospital’s generator was damaged, and staff were forced to stop surgical operations.
OCHA reported that Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, the Jordanian Field Hospital in Khan Younis, the Kamal Adwan Hospital, and the Sheikh Hamad Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics were all damaged by IDF strikes last weekend. The Sheikh Hamad hospital suffered particularly heavy damage, causing some operations to shut down.
The Israel Defense Forces said in response that its forces have been obeying international law. “The terrorist organization Hamas systematically uses civilian buildings for terrorism, including by deliberately establishing and placing military facilities in hospitals and medical centers. Hamas exploits these facilities for storage of weapons, and even uses hospitals as launchpoints for attacks on IDF forces.” The Israeli military said that Hamas’ behavior is “a gross breach of international law, turning patients and medical teams into human shields, forcing the IDF to operate in medical facilities in order to neutralize Hamas terrorist activity in them.” “Even in these cases, the IDF’s activity is carried out in a calculated manner, while adhering to the rules of international law, and minimizing as much as possible the impact of the activity on the medical facility’s functionality,” the military stated, adding that “the IDF uses precision weaponry to minimize harm to civilians.”
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