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nasser hospital
As Press Freedom Groups Decry Latest 'Murder' of Journalists by Israel, Fury Grows Over Impunity
"Israel's broadcasted killing of journalists in Gaza continues while the world watches and fails to act firmly on the most horrific attacks the press has ever faced in recent history," said one press freedom advocate.
Aug 25, 2025
Israel is drawing harsh criticism after it launched a pair of strikes at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza on Monday that left at least 20 people dead, including journalists and healthcare workers.
As reported by CNN, Israel launched "back-to-back strikes on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis" that were "separated by only a matter of minutes." The second strike killed some emergency crew members who had rushed to the scene in the wake of the first strike.
The strikes drew immediate condemnation from press freedom groups who accused Israel of intentionally attacking reporters in Gaza and dismissed claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the strikes were a "tragic mishap."
Thibaut Bruttin, the director general of Reporters Without Borders, said Israel attacked the journalists in an attempt to prevent them from delivering news about the famine in Gaza.
"How far will the Israeli armed forces go in their gradual effort to eliminate information coming from Gaza?" he asked. "How long will they continue to defy international humanitarian law? The protection of journalists is guaranteed by international law, yet more than 200 of them have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza over the past two years."
He then called upon the United Nations Security Council to set an emergency meeting to enact "concrete measures... to end impunity for crimes against journalists, protect Palestinian journalists, and open access to the Gaza Strip to all reporters."
Sara Qudah, regional director at the Committee to Protect Journalists, called out the international community for letting Israel get away with launching military strikes against reporters.
"Israel's broadcasted killing of journalists in Gaza continues while the world watches and fails to act firmly on the most horrific attacks the press has ever faced in recent history," she said. "These murders must end now. The perpetrators must no longer be allowed to act with impunity."
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) accused Israel of "silencing the last remaining voices reporting about children dying silently amid famine" in Gaza, while charging the international community with reacting with "indifference and inaction."
"This cannot be our future new norm," said UNRWA. "Compassion must prevail. Let us undo this man-made famine by opening the gates without restrictions [and] protecting journalists, humanitarian and health workers. Time for political will. Not tomorrow, now."
Former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan said that her fellow journalists needed to hold the Israeli government to account for its actions.
"Journalists everywhere need to stand in solidarity on this killing spree and resulting news blackout," she wrote on Bluesky.
And Drop Site News' Ryan Grim ripped into Netanyahu's claim that his government "deeply regrets the tragic mishap" that occurred at the hospital.
"Israel deeply regrets the tragic mishap of striking a hospital and then waiting 17 minutes until rescue workers gathered and striking it again," Grim commented sarcastically on X.
Israel has previously claimed that attacks on so-called "safe zones" and on aid workers were mistakes.
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The Face of the Other in Gaza
I found faces, hundreds of them, of children, mothers, teachers, tired men with empty pockets and broken sandals. Each looked directly into my eyes and asked, without accusation or anger: Are you still human?
Aug 18, 2025
Nothing prepared me for Gaza.
As a US physician trained in emergency medicine, I’ve spent decades in trauma bays across the United States, watching lives come undone. I’ve worked in rural hospitals where people arrived too late and urban trauma centers where they came too often. I’ve seen the machinery of US healthcare grind the spirit out of caregivers and patients alike.
But nothing prepared me for the weeks I spent volunteering at a hospital in Gaza. Nothing prepared me for the faces.
Not the statistics. Not the headlines. Not even 40 years of watching the Israeli occupation strangle Palestinian life with checkpoints, silence, and administrative cruelty.
No one should need more proof to feel the inhuman precision with which children are being targeted in Gaza, crushed not by chance, but by design.
When I arrived at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, I thought I might be helpful. I had skills, experience, knowledge. But I found something else entirely: a theology of suffering, a human Blue Mosque, a Hagia Sophia built of tarps and rebar and ash. A sacred geometry laid down in grief.
A place where stones have been replaced by the soft bones of children, and the call to prayer is now the wail of a mother whose baby was just wrapped in a death shroud. Gaza is not rubble; it is a broken house of God, a mosque of flesh and resilience, where every injured child is a mihrab pointing them back to their humanity.
I found faces, hundreds of them, of children, mothers, teachers, tired men with empty pockets and broken sandals. Each looked directly into my eyes and asked, without accusation or anger: Are you still human?
The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that “the face of the Other” is the foundation of ethics. Not a metaphorical face, but the literal presence of another human, staring at you in their radical vulnerability. Not asking for anything. Just being, and in that being, commanding you: Thou shalt not kill. And thou art responsible.
That’s Gaza. It is the face of the Other turned toward us. We, the West, armchair allies, media skeptics, Israel Defense Forces apologists, and progressive handwringers alike, are being looked at.
And we are failing.
There is no universe, no scripture, no coda, no strand of human DNA where it is natural to shoot children in the back of the head as they carry sacks of flour. There is no ethical system, no wartime doctrine, no security calculus in which a mother killed while reaching for fava beans can be explained away without doing violence to language itself.
What is happening in Gaza is not war or strategy or self-defense. It is the ritualized and systematic destruction of the most vulnerable, performed in broad daylight under the collapsing architecture of international law.
It is unnatural. Not just wrong, not just cruel, but a rupture in the moral biology of our species. It offends the fundamental contract of being alive. It is a humiliation of biology and a heresy against physics. It is unnatural, like fission: a tearing apart of what was never meant to be touched. It belongs to the stars, to the great incomprehensibility, to cataclysm, to apocalypse. It does not belong on Earth, and never in the body of a child.
There is a room in the emergency department at Nasser Hospital with six trauma bays. As in any hospital, there are monitors and equipment. But what defines the room is the floor: a mosaic of congealed, scrubbed, and recongealed blood. Every 20 minutes, a crew enters the stage, they pick up debris, tissue, IV tubing, and gauze, then throw water across the floor. With long squeegees, they push the red tide into the drain. It is mechanical, but also meticulous and highly orchestrated. Still, it cannot erase the smell. Or the taste of blood in the air. Or the faces.
A 14-year-old child came in while I was there. She was brought from Mawasi, where the “safe zone” is nothing but coordinates agreed upon by artillery software. My fellow US physician had passed a tent school in Mawasi earlier, likely the same kind of school where my patient studied: a school that had been turned inside out by a drone toting a high-velocity rifle.
The girl’s shoulder was gone. Not dislocated. Not fractured. Gone. Replaced by shredded muscle and smoke and dirt. Her dark eyes were open. She was conscious. Her mouth moved, but she did not speak. That is Levinas’ face: the face that makes no demand but reveals everything.
The children killed while retrieving food were not on a battlefield. They were in the ruins of a society that has been deliberately starved. This is not collateral damage. This is intentional. It is the predictable outcome of a siege that has weaponized hunger and then punished the hungry for trying to survive it.
What makes it more obscene is the silence following each killing. The Western governments that mouth the words “civilian casualties” like they are a clerical error. The media that speak of “complexities” and “context,” as if complexity justifies targeting starving people and context renders a dead toddler’s face invisible. The theological contortionists who try to fit this into some redemptive historical arc, as if a baby’s flesh split open by shrapnel is somehow part of prophecy.
It is not. It is a desecration of everything sacred. And it is being done with the money, silence, and diplomatic cover of the so-called civilized world.
I did not go to Gaza to be a hero. I went because I’ve watched the slow, humiliating collapse of US medicine, where we document more than we listen, discharge patients without follow-up, fight insurance companies harder than sepsis. I went to remember what it means to be a physician, not a provider or a billing unit. Someone who kneels by a body and stays.
And here’s what I found. In Gaza, where there are no electronic medical records, no scribes, no Joint Commission audits, no Press Ganey scores to measure patients’ experience, I found something we have lost: time. Not time in the capitalist sense of billable hours or productivity, but sacred time, shared time, human time. In Gaza, physicians sit with people. They bear witness. Sometimes they fix them. Sometimes they just keep the face of the human being before them from being alone.
I also found a clarity of purpose. In Gaza, the distance between patient and physician collapses. There is no buffer, no euphemism, no illusion. Physicians get their hands bloody and hold patients as they die. And they do it without glory, recognition, or compensation.
They do it, and I did it, because the face is looking at us. Because it is not a child from Gaza. It is a child. Period.
For reasons rooted in privilege, the words of white US witnesses seem to carry more weight. But some truths are self-evident. No one should need more proof to feel the inhuman precision with which children are being targeted in Gaza, crushed not by chance, but by design.
During my stay, I thought often of my children back home. Although they are adults, I missed them with an ache that broke open every time I heard a child cry.
Before I went, I recorded a video in case I didn’t return. I wasn’t trying to inspire them or ask them to follow; I just needed to say the truth. The world is on fire in some places, and sometimes I feel I have to move toward it. Because if I don’t, something in me goes quiet and stays quiet. Silence doesn’t belong in Gaza. Not now.
So I say clearly: It is unnatural to kill children for being hungry. It is unnatural to shoot a girl in the spine because she walked near a food truck. It is unnatural to erase a family for the crime of standing in line for aid.
And if we allow that to become natural, if we flinch and say nothing, we are no longer witnesses; we are participants. And we will deserve the severity of history’s judgment.
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Worse Than Fiction: Responding to a Mass Casualty Event in Gaza
On the television show The Pitt, the fictional “never-ending” mass casualty scene featured 112 patients. We saw nearly four times that number in a single afternoon.
Aug 07, 2025
On Tuesday, June 17, the staff at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, experienced a mass casualty event that began at around 9:00 am in the morning and didn’t stop until nearly 6 in the afternoon. It wasn’t one incident. It was a continuous flood of broken, bleeding, dying human beings.
By the end of the day, we had seen over 400 patients. Around 250 were critically injured. Ninety died in the resuscitation room, many on the floor.
I’m a doctor and I was in Gaza as a volunteer with an organization called Rahma Worldwide. Before Gaza, I had never worked a true mass casualty. The only ones I’d ever experienced were at Nasser itself in the days leading up to this one, trauma surges that already felt unbearable. But this was different. This was so much more. This wasn’t a surge. This was a human tide.
To put it into perspective, on the television show The Pitt, the fictional “never-ending” mass casualty scene featured 112 patients. We saw nearly four times that number in a single afternoon. And every one of them was real. Every injury was real. Every death was real.
It wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of war. It was the logical outcome of a system that has decided some lives are worth less than others.
Moreover, these weren’t random wartime injuries. This was the result of deliberate, targeted violence. People were shot while waiting for food at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution points. Tanks opened fire on crowds. Families just trying to survive were torn apart by weapons never meant for civilians. Some of the bodies came to us in pieces. Many had no names.
Inside Nasser’s emergency department, the conditions were beyond description. Patients were laid on top of each other, not because of neglect or lack of care, but because there was simply no space left. The floor became our only option. Blood from multiple patients pooled across the tile, thick and dark, mixing with dust and sand and bits of shrapnel. I remember crouching over one patient while reaching to clamp another’s bleeding artery. There was nowhere to move without stepping in blood.
At one point, I swung around quickly trying not to slip, and my elbow struck one of the nurses directly in the face. She took two steps back, lifted her head, and just smiled at me and moved on. That was the kind of day it was. That’s the kind of people I worked with.
The injuries were horrific. Gunshots to the chest, neck, and face. Limbs blasted off. Pregnant women with abdominal wounds and no fetal heart tones. Toddlers with missing eyes, fractured skulls, or no pulse at all. We intubated and transfused nonstop. Massive transfusion protocols ran dry. Every resource was pushed past its limit.
And still, the staff kept working.
Local emergency physicians, residents, and medical students. International volunteers like me, working through organizations like Rahma Worldwide and Glia. And above all, the nurses. These nurses, many unpaid and all overworked, showed up anyway. They stood in the blood and fire and brought order to hell. They triaged, charted, held hands, cleaned wounds, comforted children, and kept going long after the rest of us were spent.
The surgical teams on the floor above us moved at a nearly impossible pace. One after another, they attended to the worst of the worst casualties and tried to save them. When the day finally slowed, many of the doctors rinsed off what they could, stepped over rubble, and walked back to their tents to sleep for a few hours. Then they came back a few hours later to do it again.
This is not medicine. This is something entirely different. It is not war in the way most people think of war. It is something colder. It is targeted, purposeful, mechanized human erasure.
What happened at Nasser Hospital that day in June was not an accident. It wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of war. It was the logical outcome of a system that has decided some lives are worth less than others. The world needs to stop pretending this is too complicated to understand.
The Pitt is fictional. Gaza is not.
Let’s stop the genocide. Let’s stop the funding to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) using the only recognized and well established U.S. law designed to do this: the Leahy Law. To sign the petition go to https://sign.moveon.org/p/LeahyReviewNow. For more background information go to www.LeahyReviewNow.org.
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'The Never-Ending Hunger Games of Gaza': IDF Kills 70+ Palestinians Trying to Get Food Aid
"It was a massacre," said one witness, adding that Israeli troops continued firing on people as they fled.
Jun 17, 2025
With the world's eyes on the escalating Israel-Iran conflict, the Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday killed at least dozens of people waiting for food trucks in the Gaza Strip, yet another IDF massacre of starving Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid.
Eyewitnesses told journalists that while Palestinians were gathered on a route used by humanitarian assistance trucks in Khan Younis, Israeli forces conducted an airstrike on a nearby home and then targeted the crowd with gun and tank fire.
The Gaza Health Ministry and Nasser Hospital initially confirmed that more than 50 people were dead and over 200 others were wounded. Al Jazeera later reported that the ministry said the death toll had risen beyond 70.
People in the crowd were "blown to pieces, body parts were scattered all over the place," witness Saeed Abu Lebda told the outlet. "The number of victims is way more than those brought to the hospital. But no one could reach them to provide help."
At Nasser Hospital, a witness named Alaa recalled to Reuters that "all of a sudden, they let us move forward and made everyone gather, and then shells started falling, tank shells."
"No one is looking at these people with mercy," Alaa added. "The people are dying, they are being torn apart, to get food for their children. Look at these people, all these people are torn to get flour to feed their children."
As The Associated Press reported:
Yousef Nofal, an eyewitness, said he saw many people motionless and bleeding on the ground after Israeli forces opened fire. "It was a massacre," he said, adding that the soldiers continued firing on people as they fled from the area.
Mohammed Abu Qeshfa said he heard a loud explosion followed by heavy gunfire and tank shelling. "I survived by a miracle," he said.
"A witness who spoke with Haaretz said that the Palestinians were hit in an area that the army considers an active combat zone, and they were not in the vicinity of an established distribution center nearby," according to the Israeli newspaper.
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that "earlier today, a gathering was identified adjacent to an aid distribution truck that got stuck in the area of Khan Younis, and in proximity to IDF troops operating in the area."
"The IDF is aware of reports regarding a number of injured individuals from IDF fire following the crowd's approach. The details of the incident are under review," the Israeli military continued. "The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimize harm as much as possible to them while maintaining the safety of our troops."
The Gaza Health Ministry said Monday that since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack, the Israeli assault on the Palestinian enclave had killed at least 55,432 people, with thousands more missing in rubble and presumed dead.
Over the past 20 months, the IDF has repeatedly slaughtered Palestinians trying to access food assistance, including at hubs recently set up by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) following an Israeli blockade on aid.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said in a lengthy Tuesday statement that GHF "is directly responsible for the escalating Israeli crimes against starved Palestinian civilians near aid distribution points in central and southern Gaza."
"The foundation's operational model involves luring civilians to specific locations coordinated with the Israeli army, where they are subjected to killing, injury, and cruel and degrading treatment," Euro-Med Monitor said. "These points have effectively become death traps used as tools in Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population for over 20 months."
The monitor called for independent international investigations into the Tuesday killings and GHF's role "in facilitating and executing serious crimes committed against Palestinian civilians," as well as a halt on all financial or logistical support to the foundation, criminal probes against all individuals affiliated with it, and civil lawsuits for implicated entities and individuals.
"Euro-Med Monitor also calls on all states, individually and collectively, to uphold their legal obligations and take urgent action to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza in all its forms," the group added. "Finally, Euro-Med Monitor urges the international community to impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel in response to its systematic and grave violations of international law."
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Doctors Without Borders Warns Newborn Babies at Dire Risk as Israel Assails Gaza Hospitals
"It's an impossible situation, because even if we prioritize the little fuel that is left to the most urgent departments, we know that they won't last more than 36 to 48 hours," said Julie Faucon, MSF medical team leader in Gaza.
Jan 09, 2025
The international humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders or MSF, warned in a Wednesday statement that newborn babies and other patients are at dire risk as southern Gaza's Nasser Hospital runs out of fuel.
The group warned that electricity for the MSF-supported Nasser Hospital, where MSF members are providing emergency, maternity, pediatric, burn, and trauma care, may be cut off for some hospital departments leaving patients without "lifesaving care." The hospital's neonatal intensive care unit is currently treating children and newborns who are reliant on mechanical ventilation and incubators. All of these young patients are dependent on electricity from fuel generators, MSF wrote.
Nasser Hospital, as well as two other facilities in the Gaza Strip, Al-Aqsa Hospital and European Gaza Hospital, are nearing the need to close due to lack of fuel, the group reported Wednesday.
"It's an impossible situation, because even if we prioritize the little fuel that is left to the most urgent departments, we know that they won't last more than 36 to 48 hours," said Julie Faucon, MSF medical team leader in Gaza, according to the statement. "While some patients are hanging on by a thread, the lack of sustained electricity is impacting the level of care we can provide to those with burns and trauma."
Pascale Coissard, MSF emergency coordinator, said that the situation is "a consequence of Israel's ongoing blockade and continuous criminal looting of lifesaving supplies."
In mid-July, the United Nations reported that "Israeli authorities continue to tightly control allocations of incoming fuel, thereby limiting humanitarian operations, especially by local partners," and just last week the body noted that only 16 of the region's 36 hospitals remained partially in operation.
Pointing to lack of medical supplies, equipment, and personnel, Rik Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization representative for the West Bank and Gaza, told a recent U.N. Security Council meeting that "the health sector is being systematically dismantled."
Attacks by the Israeli military have left northern Gaza's three hospitals—the Kamal Adwan Hospital, al-Awda Hospital, and the Indonesian Hospital—either entirely out of service or barely functioning.
Hussam Abu Safia, the head of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, was detained by Israeli forces during their raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in late December.
Human rights defenders and the medical community have called for his release, it's believed that he is being held in an Israeli detention center, though the Israeli officials had given news media and human rights groups conflicting messages about his whereabouts.
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'Horrific Massacre': IDF Kills 200+ Palestinians Rescuing 4 Hostages
"It's a nightmare at Al-Aqsa," said Samuel Johann, MSF coordinator in Gaza. "How many more men, women, and children have to be killed before world leaders decide to put an end to this massacre?"
Jun 08, 2024
Palestinian officials said at least 210 people were killed and more than 400 injured as the Israel Defense Forces conducted an operation in the central Gaza Strip on Saturday to rescue four of over 240 hostages taken by Hamas militants last year.
Israeli forces rescued Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv—all attendees or security guards at a music festival that Palestinian militants attacked on October 7—from two locations in Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp, according to the IDF. There are 116 hostages still being held in the Hamas-governed enclave, and at least 41 are believed to be dead.
Abu Obaida, a spokesperson for Hamas' military wing, said Saturday that "the enemy succeeded in releasing some of its hostages by committing horrific massacres, but at the same time, killed some of them during the operation."
CNN reported that spokespeople for Israel's police and military said an Israeli policeman from a counterterrorism unit was killed and estimated casualties from the operation at "under 100." The outlet also noted the higher death toll cited by Gaza officials and spoke with witnesses—including Abu Abdallah, who said that "dogs were eating people's remains. We pulled out six martyrs, all torn-up children and women, we risked our lives to get them to the hospital."
As The Associated Press detailed:
The bodies of 109 Palestinians including 23 children and 11 women were taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where spokesperson Khalil Degran told The Associated Press more than 100 wounded also arrived. He said that overall, 210 dead had been taken there and to Al-Awda Hospital, saying he had spoken to the director there. Al-Awda's numbers couldn't immediately be confirmed.
AP reporters saw dozens of bodies brought from the Nuseirat and Deir al-Balah areas, as smoke rose in the distance and armored vehicles rolled by.
A baby was among the dead. Small children wailed, covered in blood. Bodies were placed on the ground outside, their feet bare, as more wounded were rushed in.
"It's a nightmare at Al-Aqsa," said Samuel Johann, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) coordinator in Gaza, in a statement. "There have been back-to-back mass casualties as densely populated areas are bombed. It's way beyond what anyone could deal with in a functional hospital, let alone with the scarce resources we have here."
In addition to killing more than 36,800 Palestinians and wounding over 83,600—according to Gaza officials—the IDF's eight-month retaliation for the October 7 attack has devastated civilian infrastructure across the besieged coastal enclave, including hospitals.
"How many more men, women, and children have to be killed before world leaders decide to put an end to this massacre?" Johann asked amid cease-fire and hostage negotiations mediated by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States—which has provided weapons and diplomatic support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's war, despite nationwide protests, including on Saturday.
Karin Huster, an MSF medical referent, shared an audio recording about her experience at Al-Aqsa's emergency department Saturday afternoon: "Total chaos inside; the entire emergency room... was completely packed with patients on the floor coming from the bombings in Nuseirat. There were hundreds of patients, and we did whatever we could to stabilize them... And, thank God we were able to refer a bunch of patients to Nasser Hospital as well as IMC Field Hospital that is not far away from here."
"Despite the fact that the place was completely overwhelmed, it did an amazing job," Huster continued. "There is nothing, nothing at all that justifies what I saw today. Nothing. These children—the 3-month-old, the 7-year-old, the 12-year-old that died—the 25-year-old man, the 78-year-old woman, who all have horrendous injuries. Why did they deserve this? And why is the world looking on in silence? ...To what level of horror do we need to go before we finally do something, before we finally tell Israel that this is not acceptable?"
Chris Hook, MSF medical referent at Nasser Hospital, shared an audio update from there, saying that "we've received, coming close now to about 50 badly injured patients. There's people with multiple major open fractures of their limbs. We've got several unconscious children who are trying to be escorted through CT scan and on to intensive care."
"A few very bad burns have come through, and already four or five people who've required chest tube insertion, and things like this, for major injuries to the chest," he said, explaining that the hospital has a limited ability to perform CT scans, a shortage of pain killers, and a full intensive care unit. "More patients are arriving. It's a serious mass casualty incident that is occurring right now."
Council on American–Islamic Relations national executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement Saturday that "we strongly condemn the Israeli government's horrific massacre at Nuseirat refugee camp, where Israeli forces, some hidden in a humanitarian aid truck, reportedly slaughtered at least 200 Palestinian civilians while freeing four Israeli hostages who could have and should have been safely released months ago as part of a cease-fire agreement that Benjamin Netanyahu keeps torpedoing so that he can continue the genocide and stay in office."
"The Biden administration must be transparent about any U.S. involvement in this massacre and whether any Americans were in the units that carried it out," Awad added. "The administration also must stop funding these daily incidents of mass slaughter and instead use American leverage to stop the genocide, free all hostages and political prisoners, and end the illegal occupation of Palestine that lies at the root of the violence."
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When Mass Graves Are Not Considered News
The discovery of these mass graves “horrified” UN rights chief Volker Turk. But it has yet to prompt so strong a reaction from several major US news outlets.
Apr 29, 2024
The bodies of over 300 people were discovered in a mass grave at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, a Gaza city besieged by Israeli forces. The discovery of these Palestinian bodies, many of which were reportedly bound and stripped, is more evidence of “plausible” genocide committed by Israel during its bombardment of Gaza. Over 34,000 Palestinians have died thus far, with more than two-thirds of the casualties being women and children (Al Jazeera, 4/21/24).
Yet this discovery prompted few US news headlines, despite outlets like the Guardian (4/23/24), Haaretz (4/23/24) and Reuters (4/23/24) covering the story. Instead, headlines relating to Palestine have predominantly focused on protests happening at university campuses across the country—an important story, but not one that ought to drown out coverage of the atrocities students are protesting against.
Israel’s Haaretz noted that
emergency workers in white hazmat suits had been seen digging near the ruins of Nasser Hospital. They reportedly dug corpses out of the ground with hand tools and a digger truck. The emergency services said 73 more bodies had been found at the site in the past day, raising the number found over the week to 283.
The bodies included people killed during the Israeli siege of Khan Yunis, as well as people killed after Israel occupied the medical complex in February (Guardian, 4/22/24). They were found under piles of waste, with several bodies having their hands tied and clothes stripped off (UN, 4/23/24; Democracy Now!, 4/25/24). Similar mass graves, containing at least 381 bodies, were found at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital after Israel withdrew from occupying that complex on April 1 (CNN, 4/9/24).
The discovery of these mass graves “horrified” UN rights chief Volker Turk (Reuters, 4/23/24). But it has yet to prompt so strong a reaction from several major US news outlets.
Limited response
In comparison to the widespread coverage from international outlets, the US response has been limited at best. Newsweek (4/23/24) published an article that included claims from the IDF that the deaths were a result of a “precise” operation against Hamas near Nasser Hospital:About 200 terrorists who were in the hospital were apprehended, medicines intended for Israeli hostages were found undelivered and unused, and a great deal of ammunition was confiscated.
The article centered on the US response to the reports of mass graves. Along with CNN (4/23/24), Newsweek included quotes from the IDF that called reports of mass burials of Palestinians by the Israeli army “baseless and unfounded.” Rather, the IDF said, they were merely exhuming the bodies to verify whether or not they were Israeli hostages.
The Washington Post (4/23/24) relegated the news to a small section of their live updates feed: “UN Calls for Investigation of Gaza Mass Grave; IDF Says It Excavated Bodies.”
CNN and PBS (4/22/24) both published relatively well-rounded reports of the discovery, noting reports of 400 missing people and allegations of IDF soldiers performing DNA tests on the bodies, along with accounts of people still searching for their loved ones amidst the rubble. CNN released an update April 24:
At least 381 bodies were recovered from the vicinity of the complex since Israeli forces withdrew on April 1, Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said, adding that the total figure did not include people buried within the grounds of the hospital.
The update was also released to CNN‘s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter.
As FAIR (11/17/23, 2/1/24, 4/17/24) has repeatedly noted, coverage of the war has widely been from an Israel-centered perspective. The CNN and PBS articles, however, along with an NBC video, prominently included quotes from Palestinians searching for family members.
The same cannot be said for outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times, who cited sources from the UN and the Palestinian Civil Defense—a governmental organization that operates under the Palestinian Security Services—but didn’t include additional first-hand accounts from Palestinian civilians
The Times said that “it was not clear where the people discovered in the mass grave were originally buried.” It didn’t mention that several family members of the deceased remembered where they buried them, but were no longer able to find them, they said, due to IDF interference (CNN, 4/23/24):
Another man, who said his brother Alaa was also killed in January, said: “I am here today looking for him. I have been coming here to the hospital for the last two weeks and trying to find him. Hopefully, I will be able to find him.”
Pointing to a fallen palm tree, the man said his brother had been temporarily buried in that spot.
“I had buried him there on the side, but I can’t find him. The Israelis have dug up the dead bodies, and switched them. They took DNA tests and misplaced all the dead bodies.”
Playing catch-up
As mentioned above, US news outlets have had considerable coverage of pro-Palestine university protests, particularly since April 18, when more than 100 demonstrators were arrested at New York’s Columbia University (FAIR.org, 4/19/24). News of these protests have dominated US headlines since (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 4/25/24; AP, 4/25/24; The Hill, 4/24/24); while the discovery of mass graves just a few days later has received next to no coverage in comparison. In the case of the New York Times, for instance, they published just two stories (4/23/24, 4/25/24) about the mass graves since the news broke on April 21, while publishing seven stories about the campus protests in the span of two days.
The New York Times has been telling writers not to use words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” to describe the violence in Gaza, a leaked internal memo revealed (Intercept, 4/15/24; FAIR.org, 4/18/24). Accordingly, the Times used the phrase “wartime chaos” to explain the mass graves, as if they were merely a side effect of war, not the result of intentional bombing campaigns.
While some prominent US media outlets are beginning to report on this discovery (ABC, 4/25/24; AP, 4/23/24; HuffPost, 4/24/24), they are playing catch-up with their international counterparts, whose reporting makes up a majority of search results on Google. Even articles that do appear on the first page rely heavily on reports from official spokespeople (e.g., Spectrum News, 4/23/24; The Hill, 4/23/24).
The UN’s Turk (4/23/24) has called for an independent investigation into the mass graves, saying “the intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are hors de combat is a war crime.” Corporate news outlets have been quick to note that the claims of bodies being found with their hands tied “cannot be substantiated,” despite consistent reports from both Palestinian officials and the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights about the condition of the bodies.
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No Outside Probe, US Reiterates as Gazans Reportedly Buried Alive in Mass Grave
"How does it ever make sense that the United States asks the accused party to examine itself?" asked one incredulous reporter.
Apr 25, 2024
A Biden administration spokesperson once again brushed off calls for an independent investigation into how hundreds of Palestinians found in mass graves near Gaza hospitals died when asked Thursday about new reports that many of the victims were tortured, summarily executed—and in some cases, buried alive by Israeli invaders.
During a Thursday U.S. State Department press conference in Washington, D.C., a reporter noted Gaza officials' claim that mass grave victims "including children were tortured before being killed" and that "some even showed signs of being buried alive, along with other crimes against humanity."
"What's wrong with an independent, scientific, forensic investigation?"
Noting calls by Palestinian officials and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk for an independent probe into mass graves, the reporter said that "this administration repeatedly said that it asks... the Israeli government to investigate itself."
"How does it ever make sense that the United States asks the accused party to examine itself and provide reports that you have previously said that you actually trust?" the reporter asked State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel. "What's wrong with an independent, scientific, forensic investigation?"
Patel replied: "We continue to find these reports incredibly troubling. And that's why yesterday you saw the national security adviser for this to be thoroughly investigated."
While National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on Wednesday called reports of mass grave atrocities "deeply disturbing" and said that "we want answers" from Israel, he did not call for an independent investigation.
When the reporter pressed Patel on the legitimacy of asking Israel to investigate itself, Patel said, "we believe that through a thorough investigation we can get some additional answers."
Thursday's exchange followed a similar back-and-forth on Tuesday between Patel and Said Arikat, a journalist for the Jerusalem-based
Palestinian news outlet al-Quds who asked about the mass graves.
At least 392 bodies—including numerous women and children—have been found in mass graves outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, where Palestinian Civil Defense and other workers have been exhuming victims for nearly a week. Officials believe there are as many as 700 bodies in three separate mass graves.
Based on more recent exhumations, local Civil Defense chief Yamen Abu Sulaiman said during a Wednesday press conference that "we believe that the occupation buried alive at least 20 people at the Nasser Medical Complex."
"There are cases of field execution of some patients while undergoing surgeries and wearing surgical gowns," he stated, adding that some victims showed signs of torture and 10 bodies had medical tubes attached to them.
Gaza Civil Defense official Mohammed Mughier told reporters that "we need forensic examination" to definitively determine the causes of death for the 20 people believed to have been buried alive.
Previous reporting on the mass graves quoted rescue workers who said they found people who were apparently executed while their hands were bound, with some victims missing heads, skin, and internal organs.
Other mass graves have been found in Gaza, most notably on the grounds of al-Shifa Hospital, where Israeli forces last month committed what the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor called "one of the largest massacres in Palestinian history."
It's also not the first time there have been reports of Israeli troops burying victims alive during the current war, in which Palestinian and international officials say Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 122,000 Gazans, including at least 11,000 people who are missing and feared dead. Israeli forces attacking Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia last December reportedly bulldozed and buried alive dozens of injured patients and displaced people.
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UN Rights Chief Demands International Probe of Mass Graves Near Gaza Hospitals
"Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law," said Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.
Apr 23, 2024
The United Nations' human rights chief on Tuesday called for an international investigation into mass graves discovered at two Gaza hospitals that Israeli forces recently assailed and destroyed, further imperiling the enclave's barely functioning healthcare system.
Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement that he was "horrified" by the discovery of mass graves at the Nasser and al-Shifa medical complexes, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reduced to ruins.
More than 300 bodies were reportedly discovered in the mass grave near the Nasser facility in Khan Younis, Gaza, and eyewitnesses said Israeli soldiers executed civilians during their two-week-long raid of al-Shifa last month.
Türk demanded an "independent, effective, and transparent" probe into the killings and mass graves, adding that "given the prevailing climate of impunity, this should include international investigators."
"Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law," he added. "And the intentional killing of civilians, detainees, and others who are hors de combat is a war crime."
"Every 10 minutes a child is killed or wounded. They are protected under the laws of war, and yet they are ones who are disproportionately paying the ultimate price."
The IDF's destructive attacks on Nasser and al-Shifa were part of a broader Israeli assault on Gaza's healthcare system. An analysis released Monday by Save the Children found that the rate of monthly Israeli attacks on healthcare in Gaza since October has exceeded that of any other conflict around the world since 2018.
The group estimated that Israel has launched an average of 73 attacks per month on healthcare in Gaza—and at least 435 attacks total since October.
"After six months of unimaginable horror, the healthcare system in Gaza has been brought to its knees," said Xavier Joubert, Save the Children's country director in the occupied Palestinian territory. "Healthcare workers are risking their lives daily to give Palestinian children a chance at survival. The constant attacks on healthcare are simply unjustifiable and must stop. Palestinian children must have unimpeded access to services, including healthcare and education."
Türk also used his statement Tuesday to condemn Israeli forces' killing of women and children in airstrikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah in recent days. The human rights official noted that Gaza doctors rescued a baby from the womb of her mother as the latter succumbed to head injuries from an Israeli strike.
"The latest images of a premature child taken from the womb of her dying mother, of the adjacent two houses where 15 children and five women were killed—this is beyond warfare," said Türk. "Every 10 minutes a child is killed or wounded. They are protected under the laws of war, and yet they are ones who are disproportionately paying the ultimate price in this war."
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'Obvious Evidence of Genocide': Mass Grave Discovered in Gaza's Nasser Hospital
Palestinian rescue workers said they found hundreds of bodies, some with their hands bound and others with their skin, organs, or heads removed.
Apr 21, 2024
Palestinian civil defense discovered hundreds of bodies buried by Israeli forces in a mass grave inside the complex of Khan Younis' Nasser Medical Complex on Saturday.
Rescue workers said they had removed at least 200 bodies as of 12:00 pm local time on Sunday, and they estimated that at least another 200 remained, Middle East Eye reported.
"We found corpses without heads, bodies without skins, and some had their organs stolen," the director-general of the Government Media Office said in a statement shared by Quds News Network.
"Following the mass graves at Al-Shifa hospital, it looks like Israel is a voracious death machine turning hospitals in Gaza into graveyards."
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdrew from Khan Younis on April 7. While they occupied the city, they stormed the Nasser Medical Complex in February, arresting several doctors, damaging the structure with shelling, and rendering it unable to function as a hospital.
Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud said the bodies found in the Nasser grave included children, young men, and older women. Rescues said that some of the bodies they found had been buried with their hands tied behind their backs, according to Middle East Eye.
"Our teams continue their search and retrieval operations for the remaining martyrs in the coming days as there are still a significant number of them," Palestinian emergency services said in a statement shared with Al Jazeera.
The news came as the U.S. House of Representatives voted on Saturday to send another $26 billion to Israel, including for military aid.
"These mass graves are obvious evidence of genocide and the most unthinkable war crimes. And yet, the House just signed off on $26 billion in weapons to fuel the genocidal Israeli military, while Israel threatens a full scale ground invasion to massacre Palestinians in Rafah," the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights said on social media.
This is not the first mass grave that has been discovered near a Gaza Strip hospital since Israel began its devastating bombardment and invasion following Hamas' deadly October 7 attack on southern Israel. When the IDF withdrew from the al-Shifa hospital earlier this month, Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat reported seeing hundreds of dead bodies outside the hospital, many that had had their hands and legs bound and their bodies run-over by bulldozers. Al Jazeera reported that several mass graves were found near al-Shifa.
"Following the mass graves at Al-Shifa hospital, it looks like Israel is a voracious death machine turning hospitals in Gaza into graveyards. Wake up world!" Palestinian politician and activist Hanan Ashrawi wrote on social media.
Muhammad Shehada, the communications chief for Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, expressed shock that there was not more media coverage of the Nasser grave.
"I CANNOT find a single headline in any mainstream media about this!" Shehada wrote on social media. "Imagine it was Ukraine? or Israel?"
Over the weekend, the the Gaza Health Ministry reported that the death toll from Israel's war on Gaza surpassed 34,000, though this is likely an undercount since several people remain trapped beneath rubble.
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