By Staff Reporter
Israeli forces have unleashed a new wave of attacks on Gaza, striking areas near some of the few hospitals still functioning, while their ground assault on Gaza City leaves a mounting civilian toll.
At least 83 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces on Thursday, medical officials told Al Jazeera.
Missiles struck areas around al-Shifa and al-Ahli hospitals, disrupting some of the last fragile lifelines left for the starving, sick and wounded. At least 15 people were killed outside al-Shifa, while four more died in a separate attack near al-Ahli.
Hamas condemned the assaults as a “full-fledged war crime”, noting they came “less than 24 hours after the release of a new UN report documenting the occupation’s commission of the crime of genocide against our people”.
The group said the strikes amounted to “a blatant message of defiance and blatant contempt for the international community”.
The UK’s Middle East minister, Hamish Falconer, said he was “horrified” by the overnight bombardment of another hospital, al-Rantisi, which tends to injured children in Gaza. “Babies in incubators and children on dialysis should not be under bombardment,” he posted on social media.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said the children’s hospital was struck three times, forcing 40 patients to flee. Another 40 remained trapped inside with staff.
‘Medicide’
Doctors Without Borders (MSF), meanwhile, mourned the death of one of its own. Hussein Alnajjar, a nurse and father of three, died of shrapnel wounds after an Israeli strike near his tent. He had been working with MSF clinics in Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis since early 2024.
The United Nations inquiry published earlier this week that declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide also highlighted Israel’s destruction of the Al Basma IVF centre – which obliterated 4,000 embryos and 1,000 sperm and egg samples, calling it “a measure intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza”, and one of the acts defined as genocide under the 1948 convention.
The UN say such patterns are a systematic campaign to dismantle Gaza’s health sector, which they describe as “medicide” – the killing of health workers and destruction of hospitals to wipe out medical care in the enclave.
