After Obliterating Gaza's Healthcare System, Israeli Leaders Call Iran Hospital Attack a 'War Crime'

Israeli leaders who have overseen what one United Nations expert described as an "unrelenting war" on Gaza's healthcare system—including countless direct hits on dozens of hospitals—furiously condemned Iran on Thursday over a single missile attack that damaged a hospital in the city of Beersheba, injuring more than 70 people.

"This is a war crime!" Israeli President Isaac Herzog—who in November 2023 denied that Israel's military attacked Gaza's now-destroyed Al-Shifa Hospital—wrote on social media after visiting the Soroka Medical Center Thursday morning. The majority of those harmed by Thursday's attack were lightly wounded, according to the hospital's director.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also visited the damaged facility on Thursday and warned that Iran would pay "a heavy price" for the attack.

Iran, which is responding to deadly Israeli strikes that began last week, said it was targeting Israeli "military and intelligence headquarters" near the hospital—a claim that resembled Israeli officials' justifications for attacks on Gaza healthcare facilities over the past 20 months.

"Very glad to see the widespread recognition that bombing hospitals is a war crime."

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said Thursday that "Iran's attack on an Israeli hospital is no more permissible than Israeli attacks on hospitals in Gaza."

"It is a war crime to attack hospitals absent military activity of sufficient importance that it justifies depriving people of healthcare amid a war," Roth added.

Other critics of Israel's war on Gaza sardonically welcomed Israeli officials' acknowledgment that bombing hospitals is unacceptable and illegal.

"Yes, agree that attacking hospitals is despicable," Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, wrote in response to Herzog. "Do you really think we haven't been watching the last 20 months in Gaza?"

Drop Site reporter Ryan Grim wrote that he was "very glad to see the widespread recognition that bombing hospitals is a war crime."

"We should halt military support to any country engaging in such crimes and prosecute all involved," he added, a reference to ongoing U.S. military and political support for Israel during its genocidal military campaign in Gaza.

Since October 2023, U.S.-backed Israeli forces have relentlessly attacked hospitals across the Gaza Strip, leaving the Palestinian enclave's healthcare system in tatters and unable to provide sufficient treatment to an unending influx of Israeli airstrike victims. Late last year, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said that Israel's "destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza" shows "blatant disregard for international humanitarian and human rights law."

The World Health Organization warned earlier this month that just 17 of Gaza's 36 hospitals are partially functional and only five are "major referral facilities." One of those five, Nasser Hospital, is operating at 180% of bed capacity, the WHO said.

Doctors Without Borders stressed in a June 5 statement that Israel's "attacks on healthcare in Gaza are not only carried out through military action."

"They also occur through limitations imposed on the importation of medical supplies, forcing doctors to ration pain relief medicine," the humanitarian group said. "They happen through displacement orders, leading to entire hospitals having to shut down at short notice. They occur through harassment and confusing orders issued by Israeli authorities, making it more and more difficult to provide lifesaving care."