In yet another devastating blow to Gaza’s crumbling healthcare system, Al-Ma’amoudiya Hospital in Gaza City was struck at dawn by an Israeli airstrike, leaving the facility in ruins and its patients scattered in the streets. Among the dead was a child. The hospital, one of the last functioning centres in northern Gaza, has been rendered completely inoperable.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) described the assault as a “public execution of patients”, accusing Israel of waging a war not just against fighters, but against the sick, the wounded, and those who care for them. The targeted building housed critical services—emergency care, reception, a pharmacy, and laboratories. In the aftermath, dozens of patients, some barely clinging to life, were seen lying in the rubble and on the pavements, unable to receive care.

This attack is not an isolated incident. Al-Ma’amoudiya Hospital, also known as Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, was the site of a massacre in October 2023 that killed nearly 500 people, many of them displaced women and children seeking shelter. Each successive strike not only kills, but dismantles the possibility of survival for thousands more. Gaza’s health sector, strangled by siege and bombing, now exists in name only.

International humanitarian law is clear: hospitals are not battlefields. Yet the silence of global powers in the face of repeated violations has emboldened further destruction. The targeting of medical infrastructure is not just a tactic—it is part of a broader pattern of erasure, where civilian life is systematically devalued.

As the war enters its 17th month, Gaza's people are left abandoned—no safe place to flee to, no hospitals to treat the wounded, no shelter for the sick. In the absence of accountability, impunity reigns, and with it, the deliberate devastation of life itself.