On November 5, 2023, just a few months after the start of this latest attack on Palestine, my dear friend and colleague Dr. Maysala Azmi Al Reyes, 28, was brutally killed along with most of his immediate family in an Israeli missile attack on his family home in Gaza City. Dr. Maisala, an excellent and talented young doctor specializing in women’s and children’s health, returned to serve her besieged and occupied homeland after completing her 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 medical care to his people under relentless Israeli attack.
Dr. Maisala is just one of more than 1,700 Palestinian health workers killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
As I write this, we receive news from Gaza that Hussein Hassan al-Samiri, 48, a paramedic with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, has been killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting clearly identified paramedics in the al-Mawasi area west of Khan Younis. The attack killed 21 people, including five children, on a rescue team trying to reach people injured in an attack on tents sheltering displaced people.
Al Samiri is the fourth medical worker to be killed in Gaza since the so-called “ceasefire” was declared in October 2025, and the second within 24 hours. He died from a double tap attack. It was the second deliberate attack after the first, targeting medical workers and rescue teams rushing to treat the injured. This war crime has been in Israel’s strategy for decades. I personally witnessed double-tap attacks on ambulances and rescue teams in Beirut during the brutal and bloody Israeli military invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and then in Gaza during countless Israeli attacks.
In the past two years, many Palestinian medical workers have also been executed by Israeli forces simply for doing their jobs.
For example, in March last year, Israeli forces executed a series of 15 Palestinian paramedics and civil defense rescue workers in the al-Hashasshin area as they rushed to the aid of injured people at the scene of a missile attack, then buried the bodies in shallow mass graves, apparently to cover up the crime. Video footage of the killing, recovered from the mobile phone of one of the deceased rescue workers, was later widely disseminated in international media.
The execution of a medical worker in al-Hashashin became one of the most extreme manifestations of Israeli targeting of medical workers.
This gruesome footage shocked many, but like the irrefutable evidence of the Double Tap attack, it was not enough to move Western governments supporting Israel into meaningful action. Several people issued heartbreaking statements and others issued stern warnings, but no action was taken to stop or effectively sanction Israel.
Would these governments have remained silent if the Palestinian resistance had similarly targeted Israeli medical and emergency workers? Did they simply pay lip service to human rights or were they quick to denounce, sanction and punish the perpetrators? we know the answer. The continuing genocide in Gaza reflects deep racist structural violence sustained by Western indifference. This indifference grants impunity to genocidal settler-colonial governments and poses a deadly threat to all of us, not only to the lives, health care, and human rights of Palestinians, but also to the credibility of what is called the rules-based international order.
The scale of destruction facing Gaza’s residents is staggering. At least 71,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, and tens of thousands more remain trapped under rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The civilian mortality rate is over 80 percent, with the overwhelming majority of victims being children, women, and the elderly. Life expectancy in Gaza has plummeted from approximately 74 years to approximately 35 years as a result of military violence, starvation, displacement, disease, and the systematic destruction of health infrastructure.
Even now, Palestinian medical workers continue to work under unimaginable conditions. Hospitals and clinics have been bombed, broken into, and set on fire, but often continue to operate at minimal capacity. The resilience and courage of Gaza’s medical professionals is extraordinary, but it cannot compensate for the systematic dismantling of the health system.
The so-called “ceasefire”, which came into force on October 10, 2025 and was presented internationally as a step towards ending hostilities, did nothing to extricate the Palestinians from this dire situation. Their suffering continues under this false mask of “peace”. Since the ceasefire, Israeli military attacks have killed at least 529 Palestinians and injured more than 1,400. Gaza authorities have reported more than 1,450 ceasefire violations due to Israeli airstrikes, artillery shelling, and direct fire between October 2025 and January 2026.
One of the promises attached to this ceasefire was to ensure safe evacuation routes for the sick and wounded. On January 26, the World Health Organization successfully evacuated just 24 children from Gaza to Jordan, along with 36 parents. On February 2, only five critically ill patients were allowed to be discharged. Meanwhile, nearly 20,000 patients remain trapped in the Gaza Strip, including 4,500 children in need of urgent treatment, who cannot receive treatment within the Strip. More than 1,200 patients have died while waiting for permission to leave Gaza for critical care.
Israel has not only destroyed Gaza’s medical system by destroying hospitals and killing doctors and nurses. They also confined the sick and injured in facilities that became post-apocalyptic open-air concentration camps.
The human catastrophe facing Gaza’s health system is not the result of any failure of Gaza’s medical professionals. This is the result of an 18-year siege, coupled with more than two years of continuous shelling, detention of medical personnel, torture, and targeted killings. The World Health Organization has recorded more than 1,800 attacks on medical facilities and personnel across the Occupied Palestinian Territories since October 2023, resulting in more than 1,000 deaths and nearly 2,000 injuries.
These attacks are part of a longer historical pattern. Over the past two decades, at least 3,254 Israeli medical attacks have been recorded across the Occupied Palestinian Territories, resulting in the deaths and injuries of more than 4,200 patients and medical staff. Repeated Israeli military attacks further erode Gaza’s already fragile health system, further weakening an already crippled medical infrastructure due to chronic shortages of medicines, equipment, maintenance, fuel, repair capacity, and international protection.
The humanitarian impact is visible everywhere. Gaza is currently experiencing its third consecutive winter under conditions of mass evacuation. More than 80% of buildings were damaged or destroyed. Families are living in overcrowded shelters, exposed to storms and sub-zero temperatures. Children are already dying from hypothermia. The disease outbreak is spreading rapidly, with more than 88,600 cases of acute respiratory infections and around 11,000 cases of acute watery diarrhea reported in recent weeks, with around 80% affecting children, according to the World Health Organization.
Humanitarian aid itself is under direct attack. Israel has refused to renew operating permits and banned at least 37 internationally recognized humanitarian organizations, including Médecins Sans Frontières and the Norwegian Refugee Council, from operating in Gaza. At the same time, Israel’s parliament passed a bill authorizing the suspension of electricity and water supplies to United Nations agencies that provide life-saving aid, medical care and education to more than 2.5 million Palestinian refugees. The consequences are clear and intentional: the collapse of humanitarianism, collective punishment, and ethnic cleansing as a policy.
What is being waged in Gaza is not only a war against the population, but also a direct assault on the principles of international law, including the obligation to protect civilians and health services in armed conflict. With consistent support 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 would lead to catastrophe, not stability. That warning is currently being ignored.
The genocide in Gaza represents one of the defining ethical tests of our time. Humanitarian aid, while essential, does not address the root causes of disease and premature death in Gaza and the West Bank. Their root cause lies in the structural realities of Israeli occupation and apartheid that shape every aspect of Palestinian life.
The new year brought no rebirth for Gaza, only a slow continuation of the genocide and the collapse of Western moral leadership. But hope remains in the resilience and resistance of the Palestinian people, and in the growing global solidarity demanding accountability.
(In 1945, the world proclaimed “Never Again.”) 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.
