On November 5, 2023, just a couple of months after the beginning of this latest assault on Palestine, my dear friend and colleague, Dr Maisara Azmi Al Rayyes, aged 28, was brutally murdered along with most of his close family in an Israeli military missile strike on his family home in Gaza City. A brilliant and gifted young doctor specialising in women’s and children’s health, Dr Maisara had returned to serve his besieged and occupied homeland after completing his master’s degree at King’s College London as a Chevening Scholar in 2019. Until the day he was killed, he repeatedly risked his life to provide desperately needed healthcare to his people under relentless Israeli attacks.
Dr Maisara was just one of more than 1,700 Palestinian healthcare professionals killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
As I wrote this, I received news from Gaza that paramedic Hussein Hassan Al-Samiri, aged 48, from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, had been killed in an Israeli air strike targeting clearly identified ambulance crews in the al-Mawasi area, west of Khan Younis. The strike hit the rescue team as they attempted to reach people wounded in an attack on tents sheltering displaced families – an attack that killed 21 people, including five children.
Al-Samiri was the fourth healthcare worker killed in Gaza since a so-called “ceasefire” was declared in October 2025 and the second in less than 24 hours. He was killed in a double-tap attack: an initial strike followed by a second, deliberate attack targeting medical responders and rescue teams as they rushed to treat the wounded. This war crime had been in the Israeli playbook for many decades. I personally witnessed double-tap attacks on ambulances and rescue teams in Beirut during the brutal and bloody Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and later in Gaza during innumerable Israeli attacks.
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In the past two years, many Palestinian health workers were also executed by Israeli forces merely for doing their jobs.
Last March, for example, Israeli soldiers executed 15 Palestinian paramedics and civil defence rescuers one by one in the al-Hashaashin area as they rushed to help the wounded at the site of a missile attack, before burying their bodies in a shallow mass grave in an apparent attempt to conceal the crime. Video footage of the killings, recovered from the phone of one of the dead rescue workers, later circulated widely across international media.
The execution of medical responders in al-Hashaashin marked one of the most extreme manifestations of Israel’s targeting of healthcare workers.
The gruesome footage shocked many, but — like irrefutable evidence of double-tap strikes — it did not prove enough to move Western governments backing Israel into meaningful action. A few issued mournful statements, others delivered stern warnings, but none acted to stop or effectively sanction Israel.
Would these governments have remained silent if Palestinian resistance had targeted Israeli healthcare workers and ambulance crews in the same way? Would they have merely paid lip service to human rights or swiftly condemned, sanctioned and punished the perpetrators? We know the answer. The continuation of carnage in Gaza reflects profound racist structural violence sustained by Western indifference. This indifference grants the settler-colony’s genocidal government impunity, and poses a deadly threat not only to Palestinian lives, healthcare and human rights, but also to the credibility of what is described as the rules-based international order, to all of us.
The scale of destruction facing Gaza’s population is staggering. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, at least 71,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, with tens of thousands more still trapped beneath the rubble. Civilian death rates exceed 80 percent, with children, women and elderly people forming the overwhelming majority of victims. Life expectancy in Gaza has collapsed from approximately 74 years to around 35 years as a result of military violence, starvation, displacement, disease and the systematic destruction of medical infrastructure.
Today, Palestinian healthcare workers continue to operate under unimaginable conditions. Hospitals and clinics have been bombed, invaded or burned, yet their services continue, often at minimal capacity. The resilience and bravery of Gaza’s medical professionals is extraordinary, but cannot compensate for the systematic dismantling of the healthcare system.
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The so-called “ceasefire” that went into effect on October 10, 2025 and presented internationally as a step towards ending hostilities, did nothing to lift Palestinians out of this misery. Their suffering continues under the cloak of this pretend “peace”. Since the “ceasefire”, Israeli military attacks have killed at least 529 Palestinians and wounded more than 1,400 others. Gaza authorities report more than 1,450 violations of the ceasefire between October 2025 and January 2026 through Israeli air strikes, artillery fire and direct shootings.
One of the promises attached to this ceasefire charade was safe evacuation routes for the sick and wounded. On January 26, the World Health Organization was able to facilitate the evacuation of just 24 children from Gaza to Jordan, accompanied by 36 caregivers. On February 2, only five critically ill patients were permitted to leave. Meanwhile, nearly 20,000 patients remain trapped inside Gaza, including 4,500 children in urgent need of treatment unavailable within the territory. More than 1,200 patients have died while waiting for permission to leave Gaza for life-saving medical care.
Israel has not only devastated Gaza’s healthcare system by destroying hospitals and killing doctors and nurses; it has also trapped the sick and wounded inside what has become an apocalyptic open-air concentration camp.
The man-made catastrophe facing Gaza’s healthcare system is not the result of any failure by Gaza’s medical professionals. It is the outcome of 18 years of siege, compounded by more than two years of sustained bombardment, and the detention, torture and targeted killing of medical personnel. The World Health Organization has recorded more than 1,800 attacks on healthcare facilities and staff across the occupied Palestinian territories since October 2023, killing more than 1,000 people and injuring nearly 2,000 others.
These attacks are part of a longer historical pattern. Over the past two decades, at least 3,254 Israeli attacks on healthcare have been documented by WHO across the occupied Palestinian territories, killing or injuring more than 4,200 patients and medical staff. Each cycle of Israeli military assault further erodes Gaza’s already fragile medical system, deepening the exhaustion of a healthcare infrastructure already crippled by chronic shortages of medicines, equipment, maintenance, fuel, repair capacity and international protection.
The humanitarian consequences are visible everywhere. Gaza is now enduring its third consecutive winter under conditions of mass displacement. More than 80 percent of buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Families are living in overcrowded shelters, exposed to storms and freezing temperatures. Children have already died from hypothermia. Disease outbreaks are spreading rapidly, with more than 88,600 acute respiratory infections and approximately 11,000 cases of acute watery diarrhoea reported in recent weeks, about 80 percent affecting children, according to the World Health Organization.
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Humanitarian assistance itself is under direct attack. Israel has refused to renew operating licences, banning at least 37 internationally recognised humanitarian organisations from working in Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council. At the same time, Israel’s parliament has passed legislation allowing the cutting of electricity and water supplies to United Nations agencies providing life-saving aid, healthcare and education to more than 2.5 million Palestinian refugees. The consequences are obvious and deliberate: humanitarian collapse, collective punishment and ethnic cleansing as policy.
What is unfolding in Gaza is not only a war on a population but a direct assault on the principles of international law, including the obligation to protect civilians and medical services during armed conflict. With consistent backing from the United States, Israel is replacing legal norms with raw power.
Europe once vowed “never again” after the Holocaust. That promise was meant to warn humanity that tolerating racist violence leads not to stability but to catastrophe. Today, that warning is being ignored.
The genocide in Gaza represents one of the defining ethical tests of our time. Humanitarian aid, while essential, cannot address the root causes of illness and premature death in Gaza and the West Bank. These root causes lie in the structural realities of the Israeli occupation and apartheid, shaping every aspect of Palestinian life.
The new year has brought no renewal for Gaza, only the continuation of a slow genocide and the collapse of Western moral leadership. Yet hope remains in the resilience and resistance of the Palestinian people and the growing global solidarity demanding accountability.
“Never again,” the world declared in 1945. For Palestinians, the urgency of those words has never been greater.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: aljazeera.com
