In the pre-dawn hours of Thursday, an Israeli aerial bombardment struck the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, claiming the lives of at least six Palestinian people and injuring 20 more, according to on-site health and medical officials. The strike, which deployed two missiles that pierced the facility’s roof, passed through the third floor and detonated on the second, hit the hospital’s surgical blocks at approximately 1 a.m. local time. At the time of the attack, the overstretched, only partially operational complex stood as the final remaining major referral hospital serving the entire southern Gaza Strip, operating at maximum capacity to care for tens of thousands of displaced civilians and critical patients who had nowhere else to seek care. Among the confirmed fatalities was 53-year-old senior surgeon Dr. Rizq Abu Shaira, who was mid-treatment for patients inside the ward when the missiles hit, local Palestinian media confirmed. Additional victims included a young child, a disabled immobile patient, and other admitted patients, while the 20 wounded count includes other hospitalized people, female medical staff, and accompanying children present in the facility at the time. The blast inflicted catastrophic structural damage across the hospital’s intensive care unit and full surgical department, including separate male and female surgical wings, forcing the entire surgical service to cease all operations immediately following the strike. The Palestinian Ministry of Health issued a sharp, formal condemnation of the attack within hours, labeling it an unambiguous, flagrant breach of established international humanitarian law. “The unrelenting campaign of targeting hospitals and critical medical infrastructure deepens the agony of the sick and wounded across Gaza, and systematically erodes what little remaining capacity the already collapsed health sector has left to deliver life-saving care to civilians,” the ministry’s official statement read. The Israeli military publicly confirmed it carried out the strike, claiming it had targeted “a senior terrorist and additional Hamas terrorists who were hiding inside Nasser Hospital.” Israeli outlet Ynet later identified the purported target as Khaled Abu Anza, the named commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade, though independent news outlet Middle East Eye noted it could not corroborate these military claims independently. For months leading up to the airstrike, the Israeli military had circulated unsubstantiated assertions that Hamas was using the Nasser Medical Complex for covert military operations, a pattern that human rights observers note has consistently preceded Israeli assaults on Gaza medical facilities since the outbreak of hostilities in 2023. Hamas has repeatedly rejected all such allegations, and in its Thursday statement following the strike, the group labeled the Israeli military’s claims “repeated, baseless lies manufactured solely to provide diplomatic cover for the deliberate, systematic targeting of Gaza’s entire healthcare system.” The group also held the international community’s so-called peace oversight bodies accountable for the attack, arguing that continued global silence on Israeli violations has allowed the state to act with total impunity without facing any consequences for its actions. Data published by the World Health Organization confirms that 94% of all hospitals operating in the Gaza Strip prior to 2023 have now been either fully destroyed or rendered partially non-functional by sustained Israeli military operations. Hundreds of doctors, nurses, and frontline medical workers have been either killed or arbitrarily detained by Israeli forces across the enclave. Prior to the 2023 outbreak of the conflict, Nasser Medical Complex was the second-largest healthcare facility in the entire Gaza Strip; it has now been targeted at least seven separate times since October 2023. A previous Israeli double-tap strike on the facility in August 2025 killed 20 people on site, including two Middle East Eye contributing journalists, Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, alongside other medical staff and emergency first responders. Multiple independent international law analysts have assessed that this latest Thursday strike, and the broader pattern of attacks on Gaza medical facilities, may qualify as prosecutable war crimes under the statutes of the Geneva Conventions.