It should be outrageous enough when the Israeli military, or any military for that matter, launches strikes on a hospital. The world has allowed that to become routine in Gaza, however, to our great shame. But what the Israeli military did Monday morning before the rolling cameras of Gaza’s heroic journalists somehow managed to reach a new depth of evil for the entire world to see.
Moments after the Israeli military struck the Nasser Medical Complex in southern Gaza, itself a war crime, heroic Palestinian first responders rushed to the scene as they have done day in and day out for two years of genocide to try to rescue victims of the strike and dig survivors out of the rubble. Heroic Palestinian journalists, putting their life on the line day in and day out as well, documented the scene, broadcasting the rescue operation live.
That is precisely when the second Israeli missile hit the same spot, killing the journalists, the medics, and others who may have survived the first strike. “Double-tap” strikes are designed for maximum killing and specifically aimed at wiping out not just those targeted by the first missile, but those that come to the rescue like medics and those who come to document it like journalists. Israel is no longer just carrying out war crimes in Gaza, but layers and layers of war crimes at a time.
The World Health Organization reported that there have been “735 attacks on health care in Gaza from 7 October 2023 to 11 June 2025, that have killed 917 persons and injured 1,411, affected 125 health facilities, and damaged 34 hospitals.” Earlier this month, when an Israeli strike killed Pulitzer-winning Al Jazeera journalists Anas al-Sharif and five of his colleagues, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that “192 journalists have been killed since the start of the Israeli-Gaza war on October 7, 2023. At least 184 of those journalists were Palestinians killed by Israel.” With the Israeli military’s murderous double-tap strike on the hospital complex this morning, these numbers would have to be revised upwards again. Several journalists were killed in the strike, which was caught on camera. Journalists Mohamad Salama, Mariam Abu Daqqa, Hussam al-Masri, and Moaz Abu Taha were killed.
This is, of course, not the first time that medics or journalists were killed in Gaza. In so many cases they have been targeted directly, as was the case with al-Sharif recently. In other cases, medics who have rushed to the rescue scene have been gunned down as well, like those dispatched to save the murdered child Hind Rajab only to face a similar fate at the hands of the Israeli military. Or the medics who were gunned down late at night and buried along with their ambulances by the Israeli military earlier this year, who dumped them in a mass grave.
Something about this strike seems different, though. The calculated and brazen nature of it all, to deliberately seek to murder first responders in broad daylight and on camera after striking a hospital, is the gruesome behavior of a military that simply fears no repercussions or limitations. Two years into this genocidal violence, the war crimes of the Israeli military only seem to be getting uglier, with even less regard for what the world might think about them.
This didn’t happen overnight, and there are many reasons why the Israeli military has become more brazen over time. There was a time when Israel swore it would never strike hospitals. Many will remember the al-Ahli Baptist hospital bloodbath in the fall of 2023. But as it found little pushback after hitting medical facilities, Israel began to shift toward attempting to justify such strikes by claiming hospitals were actually military command centers. Such claims rarely held up to scrutiny, but too few voices that actually mattered to Israel, especially here in the United States, were actually willing to scrutinize them. Seeing this, the Israelis realized that even attempts at justification weren’t really necessary.
With its most recent announcement to conquer Gaza city, a place that is largely decimated already, functioning mostly as a collection of tents for the forcibly displaced and starved who now live amid rubble of their former homes, the criminal intent has never been more clear. Israel has long passed the time when it could argue it was required to degrade its adversaries for self-defense.
Who could possibly believe this when the Israeli government has repeatedly obstructed exchange deals to buy more time to destroy Gaza and displace and kill its residents? Regardless of what the stated intent of the Israeli government is, its actions speak the loudest about what it seeks to do in Gaza: ethnically cleanse and kill the Palestinian population. It’s very hard to see how any objective observer can come to any other conclusion, given all we have seen the Israeli military do to not only destroy life in Gaza, but to, in the words of the Genocide Convention, “deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”
The international watchdog for food crises declared famine in Gaza last week, the vast majority of Gaza structures are destroyed, aid seekers are routinely shot and killed, the water is undrinkable; hospitals, medics, aid workers, and journalists are routinely targeted, all in a besieged territory where hundreds of thousands have already been killed or wounded. What other than the destruction of the Palestinian population could such conditions be calculated to produce?
Despite this painfully obvious reality, the world has done nothing to stop it and many governments, especially the one in Washington, are making sure it can continue unabated. For most people alive today, Israel’s genocide in Gaza will likely be the worse atrocity they have seen or will see in their lifetimes. Our children and grandchildren will ask us why we did not speak up at this moment. What will we tell them?
