Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City has been forced out of service following a devastating Israeli airstrike early Sunday morning, amid what UN agencies describe as an escalating humanitarian catastrophe.
Until the strike, Al Ahli had been one of Gaza’s few partially functioning hospitals, treating casualties from Israel’s renewed military campaign. Forty patients who were too critical to move remain inside, receiving emergency care. Fifty others were evacuated to nearby medical centers just before the attack began, though one child died during the process.
The attack follows the collapse of a fragile ceasefire on March 18, which was accompanied by a major Israeli military escalation. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, over 1,613 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,233 injured in the weeks since. In total, more than 50,983 Palestinians have reportedly been killed and 116,274 injured since the conflict began in October 2023.
The World Health Organization (WHO) reported in January that only half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remained partially operational, many of them severely damaged and lacking essential supplies. Al Ahli’s closure has placed an immense additional strain on other struggling health centers like Al Shifa Hospital, already overwhelmed by mass casualty events and acute shortages of trauma care items, fuel, and water.
The wider humanitarian situation has deteriorated sharply. Aid convoys have been blocked for seven weeks, while hundreds of thousands of civilians face new displacement orders. According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, more than 390,000 people have been displaced since Israel resumed its bombardment in March, bringing the total number of internally displaced persons in Gaza to over 1.5 million.
The UN also condemned the recent killing of humanitarian workers in southern Gaza. Since the beginning of the war, at least 408 aid personnel have died. “Deliberate obstruction of aid operations is costing lives,” said Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher, who insisted that assertions by Israeli authorities that sufficient aid is available “are far from the reality on the ground.”
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk has previously expressed grave concern over Israel’s military conduct and its impact on civilians. “Hospitals have special protection under international humanitarian law,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reiterated. “Attacks on health care must stop. Patients, health workers, and hospitals must be protected. The aid blockade must be lifted.”
The UN warned that the crisis in Gaza is quickly moving beyond catastrophic. “Gaza has become a death trap,” said the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Jonathan Whittall, describing it as “a war without limits” where 2.1 million people are “trapped, bombed and starved.” He added that civilians have been killed at food lines, hospitals are overwhelmed, and aid workers targeted.
