A Hospital Hit in the Middle of a Ceasefire: Six Killed at Nasser as Gaza's Fragile Truce Frays

An Israeli airstrike hit the surgery wing of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis shortly after midnight on Thursday, killing six people, including a surgeon and a 13-year-old boy, and wounding more than 20 others, in the deadliest attack on Gaza's health system since the ceasefire took effect more than a year ago. Two missiles struck the upper floors of the al-Yasin building at Nasser Medical Complex, the largest hospital in southern Gaza, wrecking its surgery department and intensive care units and forcing the hospital to suspend services in four departments — radiology, laboratories, surgical operations and inpatient surgical wards. One of the missiles failed to explode and remains inside the building, according to the hospital's director.

The dead included people who had come to the hospital to be healed, not to fight. Medics identified the surgeon killed as Dr Rizk Abu Shaira, a prominent general surgeon who colleagues said had never left his post, and the hospital named the 13-year-old boy killed as Jihad Naeem Muhammad Abu Tilikh, with relatives naming a 53-year-old man, Khaled Abu Anza, among the dead. Most of the dead and injured were patients, including people scheduled for surgery the following day, according to Al Jazeera, citing Gaza's health ministry and civil defence. The death toll rose through the night as rescue teams worked at the site: early reports put the number at four, then five, before the civil defence and the hospital confirmed six. A British volunteer surgeon, Goher Rahbour, was on the fourth floor of the surgical department when the missile hit, and a doctor who had just finished work at around 00:30 told the BBC his whole body had been trapped under rubble.

Israel's military and the Shin Bet security service said in a joint statement that the strike had targeted Muhammad Abu Ismail, the commander of Hamas's Khan Younis Brigade, along with other members of the group's military wing they said were hiding inside the complex, and accused Hamas of using the hospital as a command centre. Whether Abu Ismail was killed has not been confirmed. The military said it had issued advance warnings before the strike and released an audio recording of what it said was a warning given to a senior Gaza health official, while the hospital's director insisted the hospital had received no warning of an attack. Reuters said it could not independently verify the Israeli military's allegations, and a fact-check of the four images the military published found they did not establish that the hospital was functioning as a Hamas military headquarters.

Hamas condemned the strike as a war crime and called on mediators and the US administration to halt what it called ongoing violations and ensure adherence to the ceasefire. The United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Ramiz Alakbarov, said he was deeply alarmed and reminded all sides that under international humanitarian law hospitals cannot be attacked or used for military purposes, while the World Health Organization's director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said Gaza's health facilities must be protected and never militarised or attacked. Nasser is the only hospital still standing in Khan Younis, serving at least 500,000 people in southern Gaza, and this was the seventh Israeli strike on the complex since October 2023; a double strike in August 2025 killed at least 20 people there, including journalists and health workers.

The strike landed on a ceasefire that has never stopped the killing. The truce took effect on 10 October 2025, after two years of war that began with the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage. Since the ceasefire began, Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry says 1,622 Palestinians have been killed and 5,878 injured — figures the United Nations considers reliable — while Israel says six of its soldiers have been killed in Gaza over the same period, according to the BBC. Both sides accuse each other of breaking the truce: Israel says Hamas is trying to regroup and rebuild its arsenal, while Hamas says it remains committed to the ceasefire and accuses Israel of trying to undermine it. AFP counted 11 people killed across all of Gaza on Thursday, six of them at Nasser.

Online, the strike drew anger and grief in equal measure. A thread on r/Palestine about the strike passed 2,400 upvotes, with the top comment calling it "a blatant war crime" and asking how Israel "justifies this and keeps getting away with it", while another commenter wrote of putting themselves in the shoes of those inside the hospital and feeling "the sadness and helplessness". What happens next depends on whether the mediators — Egypt, Qatar and the United States — treat the strike as a violation to be answered or as another incident to be absorbed. For the patients of southern Gaza, the question is more immediate: with Nasser's surgery wards wrecked, there is now nowhere in Khan Younis left to take the wounded.