An overnight Israeli airstrike on Nasser Hospital, southern Gaza’s principal medical center, killed at least six Palestinians, including a surgeon and a teenage boy, medics said, in the latest attack to strain a ceasefire that began more than a year ago.
The missiles struck a five-storey building at the hospital in Khan Younis that housed surgical wards.
Israel’s military said the operation targeted a senior Hamas commander and alleged that militants were using the hospital compound to organize attacks. Hamas denied the accusation.
Medics and witnesses said two missiles tore through the building’s roof, heavily damaging the structure and wounding 20 people.
Citizens inspect the damage inflicted upon Nasser Medical Hospital
Ayman Abu Obeid, a doctor wounded in the strike, said he was working an overnight shift when an explosion ripped through the room where he and several others were sleeping.
“All of a sudden the world turned upside down. It went dark all at once,” he said from a hospital bed.
Nearby, dust covered heaps of shattered furniture and medical equipment, while severed wires dangled from the damaged ceiling.
The destruction turned part of the hospital into a scene of twisted debris even as medical staff continued treating the wounded.
Among those killed was Rezik Abushira, a surgeon who appeared in the 2026 documentary American Doctor. The film followed his work with three visiting US doctors providing medical care to Palestinians in Gaza.
Gaza’s education ministry said a 13-year-old boy was also among the dead.
Four more Palestinians killed by Israeli forces
Four additional Palestinians were killed later today in separate incidents, medics said.
Two people died and several others were wounded when an Israeli airstrike hit a car in Gaza City. Another person was killed by Israeli gunfire in Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, bringing the day’s reported death toll to at least ten.
The fourth victim was killed in an airstrike near a cemetery in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military said the vehicle strike targeted a Hamas militant but offered no further details. It did not comment on the other two incidents.
The Israeli military said he and other militants ‘were hiding inside the Nasser Hospital’
In a statement about the strike, Israel’s military identified the alleged target as Muhammad Abu Ismail, whom it described as “the commander of Hamas’ Khan Younis Brigade”.
The military said Abu Ismail and other militants “were hiding inside the Nasser Hospital”.
It also accused the group of “turning the Nasser Hospital compound into a headquarters and operating from there”.
Hamas rejected the allegation that it had converted the hospital into a base for military activity.
The group did not immediately say whether one of its leaders had been targeted, injured or killed in the attack.
Hospital officials say Israel’s military has struck the Nasser Hospital complex at least seven times since the Gaza war began.
In August 2025, a double-tap Israeli strike on the hospital killed at least 20 people, including journalists and medical workers.
International law designates hospitals as protected sites.
Attacking medical facilities, as well as using them for military purposes, is generally regarded as a violation of those protections.
Medical centers may lose their protected status in limited circumstances, but rights groups have said Israel has failed in many cases to provide enough evidence to justify attacks on hospitals during the war.
An October 2025 ceasefire brought an end to major fighting but has not stopped Israeli strikes or resulted in Hamas disarming.
More than 1,590 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire began, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run under Hamas authority and whose casualty figures the United Nations considers reliable.
Over the same period, Israel’s military has reported that seven soldiers and one civilian contractor were killed.
Infant dies of hypothermia in Gaza
A nine-month-old baby died of hypothermia today, his father and a doctor told AFP, after days of severe weather and flooding swept through Gaza, forcing thousands of Palestinians living in tents from their shelters.
A doctor who examined the child and spoke anonymously said nine-month-old Kinan Ahmed Raqiq “died from hypothermia inside his family’s displacement tent” in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza.
Ahmed Raqiq told AFP that his son Kinan died from the cold overnight inside their tent in southern Gaza.
“I woke up only to see his skin had turned blue so I rushed him to Nasser hospital, but he had already died from hypothermia and frozen to death,” he said outside the hospital while holding his son, who was wrapped in a white sheet.
Heavy rain last week inundated tens of thousands of tents across Gaza, where nearly the entire population has been displaced at least once during three years of Israeli strikes launched in response to Hamas’s 7 October, 2023 attack.
Five people, including three children, died the following day when a sandy embankment collapsed onto their tents.
Since then, hundreds of displaced families have fled camps in parts of Gaza City and in central and northern areas after rainwater flooded their shelters.
