An Israeli air strike early on Monday hit the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, killing at least 14 people according to local health officials. The Gaza health ministry said four Palestinian journalists were among the dead, alongside civilians and rescue workers. The first missile struck the hospital’s upper floors on Monday morning, and a second blast hit moments later as ambulance crews and civil defence teams arrived to tend the wounded. Blood and smoke filled the hospital corridors in the aftermath, and footage from the scene showed panicked medics fleeing a damaged staircase during the second explosion.

Among the confirmed casualties were cameraman Mohammad Salama of Al Jazeera and Hussam al-Masri, a cameraman for Palestine TV, both fatally wounded on site. Gaza’s Civil Defence said that a fire-engine driver, identified as Imad Abdel Hakim al-Shaar, was killed while trying to recover bodies, and seven other rescue workers were injured in the strikes. In all, at least seven people were wounded, including doctors, paramedics and civil defenders. A hospital spokesman, Dr Mohammad Saqer, was seen on video holding a bloodied cloth in shock as thick plumes of smoke billowed after the attack. By midday the complex’s corridors were strewn with rubble and shattered glass; doctors later confirmed the hospital’s intensive care unit and emergency ward had been badly damaged.

The strike closed Gaza’s largest remaining hospital in the south at a time of desperate need. Since the Israel–Gaza war began in October 2023, the Nasser complex had been operating well above capacity with fuel and medicine running dangerously low. In June the World Health Organization warned that Gaza’s health system was collapsing and urged protection for Nasser and the nearby Al-Amal hospital, as north Gaza’s hospitals had already been rendered non-functional. More than 500,000 Gazans are now considered to be facing famine, aid agencies report, underlining the broader humanitarian catastrophe in which this hospital strike occurred. With no other major hospital open in Khan Younis, doctors say the loss of Nasser will leave the wounded and sick with almost no care available.

Humanitarian and health officials decried the attack on the medical facility as unconscionable. Gaza’s health ministry condemned the strike as a flagrant violation of international law, noting that patients and medical staff were sheltering in the complex’s wards. International aid agencies have repeatedly urged an end to attacks on hospitals in Gaza, but the bombardment of Nasser, Gaza’s largest southern hospital, is the latest in a pattern of strikes that have left medical services on the brink of collapse. The Israeli military has not offered an immediate explanation for the strike.