By targeting European Hospital and Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the Israeli military is further decimating Gaza’s already devastated medical system.
Dr. Refaat Alathamna, an anesthesiologist at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, stepped outside for a short break during his 24-hour shift on May 13 when the hospital was bombed. “I had to throw myself on the ground,” he told Drop Site a few hours later, speaking from inside the hospital. “I hid behind a tree, because I couldn’t reach the door of the intensive care unit to hide. I didn’t know what it was.”
A hospital security camera captured the moment multiple Israeli airstrikes hit the hospital complex at 6:19 pm. Dozens of hospital staff and civilians, including children, can be seen walking in and out of the emergency entrance before a series of missiles slam into the hospital’s inner courtyard, sending bodies flying through the air.
In another video taken on the nearby Salah al-Din road and posted by Mohammed Abu Rijeh, a local aid organizer in Khan Younis, large towers of dark smoke can be seen rising into the air as the initial strikes hit. After a few seconds, another series of strikes sends civilians running for cover. At least 20 people were killed in the attack on the European Hospital, according to Zaher Al-Wahidi, the head of information for the Ministry of Health.
Alaa Al-Ghoul, an ICU charge nurse at the hospital, said that she was treating a one-year-old girl when the attack happened. “I have never heard of anything like that in all my life. Shrapnel flew. The ceiling fell on my patient. At that time, I was waiting for the time of my death from the intensity of the bombings.”
This was the second hospital the Israeli military attacked that day. In the early hours of Tuesday, the military bombed the nearby Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. That attack killed two people, including prominent journalist Hassan Eslayeh, who was being treated for wounds from a previous Israeli assassination attempt in April.
As with the Nasser hospital attack, the Israeli military openly admitted to bombing the European Hospital, claiming without evidence both that they were targeting Hamas in a tunnel underneath the hospital complex and that they had taken steps to “mitigate the risk” to civilians. Dr. Alathamna told Drop Site that the hospital received no warning of the attack. When he went back inside after the strikes, he said it was “total chaos” and that there was damage all around, including to the hospital’s oxygen system and to a section of the ICU.
The attack has rendered the hospital largely inoperable, Dr. Alathamna told Drop Site, and only a part of the ICU unit was still functioning. He added that the Israeli military’s continuing attacks have made it impossible for any necessary repairs to be made.
“It was very difficult for the entire medical team, because that medical team is parents: they have families,” Alathamna recounted. “To tell you the truth, my brothers called me. My wife was left crying on the phone. My children wanted to talk to me, but I couldn’t see anyone. I simply told her we were fine.”
Photos and videos from the hospital courtyard show several large craters in the ground; a bus had collapsed into one of them. In a video taken by photojournalist Bara Lafi just outside the hospital, dust billows around as civilians scream. “I saw injured people who were scared, and they didn’t know what to do,” she told Drop Site. Lafi, who was mourning the loss of her friend and colleague Hassan Eslayeh, managed to keep filming even as another loud attack was launched. “I’m just working without thinking. I don’t want to cry anymore.”
According to Gaza’s Civil Defense, they recovered some of the injured and wounded but were initially prevented from returning to the hospital. In a statement on Tuesday, they said, “The crews are still unable to return to the area to recover the remaining martyrs, whose bodies are scattered around the hospital, due to the intensity of the shelling and the occupation forces’ deliberate targeting of anyone trying to reach them.”
Dr. Alathamna confirmed that the hospital’s staff could not reach many of the victims outside in the hours after the attack. “No one dares to go out,” he said.
Gaza’s Devastated Healthcare System
The devastating dual attacks on Tuesday are the latest in Israel’s systematic assault on Gaza’s medical system since October 7, 2023. In a report released in December, the United Nations said the pattern of attacks on Gaza’s hospitals has decimated the healthcare system and that the Israeli military had blatantly disregarded international law in targeting hospitals.
“As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe in fact became a death trap,” Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said as part of the report’s release. “The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.”
The attacks have left Gaza’s hospitals barely functioning in combination with the weight of Israel’s ongoing full-spectrum blockade, now in its third month. Zahed Rahman, an American nurse from New Jersey who worked at the European Hospital last spring, returned from another medical trip to Gaza two weeks ago. Rahman told Drop Site that the impact of the blockade has been completely crippling for doctors and patients. “Here you have the luxury of having everything available at your fingertips,” he said. “Over there, you are strapped for everything. Simple things like gloves, hand sanitizer, topical anesthetics, or injectable anesthetics. So you couldn’t use them for things like chest tube insertions. These patients would be awake in agonizing pain, and you would have to insert a chest tube into their body while they’re awake.”
Rahman worked at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah during his most recent trip to Gaza and said that the lack of food is also worsening an already catastrophic situation for patients in hospitals. “Nutrition is a fundamental necessity for healing, for survival. You have children as young as five, six years old, that I saw who were so weak due to the lack of nutrition that sometimes you could count their ribs. You can count their spine and their survival is solely dependent on nutrition,” he said.
“Food should not be weaponized. Medication should not be weaponized.”
On Monday, a panel of international food security experts said that the Israeli blockade has put Gaza at “critical risk of famine,” deepening an already horrific humanitarian situation, with one million people barely able to get enough food and hundreds of thousands facing possible starvation.
Soon after the attack on Tuesday, Rahman received calls from nurses with whom he had worked during his time at the European Hospital last year, and they were distraught and in shock, he said. In a video call with them later, one of the nurses, Ahmed Aqel, said that despite the attacks and extreme challenges, they had to keep working. “The situation is too hard,” he said in the recording shared with Drop Site. “But we made the decision that we will stay and keep on caring for our patients. We refuse to leave the hospital.”
The attacks on both hospitals came a week after Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said the military would launch a more intensive and expansive assault on Gaza, with the Israeli cabinet approving plans to seize the entire enclave. Even amid widening criticism of the humanitarian blockade, the Israeli government has given no signals that there will be a shift to allow food and aid into Gaza.
Like so many Palestinians in Gaza, Dr. Alathamna and his family have been displaced numerous times, losing their home and everything they knew. For now, he said he is trying to just keep his family and his patients alive, despite how impossible that has become in Gaza. “As a doctor and a father, I have two rules: I have to take care of my family. I also have to do my duty to my patients and work,” he said.
“We hope they’ll stay away from the hospitals because hospitals only provide medical services, treating patients. But, unfortunately, they haven’t left the hospitals alone.”
Kavitha Chakuru is an Independent journalist and documentary filmmaker
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