On March 23, 2025, Feroze Sidhwa—a surgeon working in Gaza—posted an urgent update on the social media platform X:
“I was at Nasser Hospital in #Gaza when it was bombed today. One of my patients, a 17-year-old boy, was killed. He would have gone home tomorrow. If I had been changing his dressings, as I planned to this evening, I probably would have been killed too. Attacking hospitals is a war crime, and it needs to stop.”
The attack described by doctor Sidhwa killed at least 2 people, and injured others. And, as Shurafa and Magdy report, “like other medical facilities around Gaza, Nasser Hospital has been damaged by Israeli raids and strikes throughout the war.” Indeed, consider a few more recent headlines and stories that illustrate this harsh reality for Palestine’s medical practitioners and patients.
On March 21, 2025, Gaza Notifications posted a video announcement on X, with the caption “Breaking: The Israeli army blows up and destroys the Turkish Friendship Hospital, the only hospital in Gaza dedicated to cancer patients.”
The day before this, a Daily Brief headline from Human Rights Watch read as follows: “Israel’s Deadly Cruelty in Gaza Hospitals.” That same morning, journalist Hossam Shabat shared news that “The Israeli occupation is no longer allowing doctors and nurses to enter Gaza.” Four days later, Hossam himself was killed by the Israeli military.
A few days prior to those headlines, a doctor in Gaza reported his situation at Baptist Hospital in Gaza City. He said “It was just mostly women and children burned head to toe, limbs missing, heads missing.” Medical workers in Gaza face exceptionally challenging circumstances while trying to do their job—to make people better.
As horrendous as these stories are, they are not new. For instance, recall the lead-in story that started this essay, which detailed an attack on Nasser Hospital in March 2025. Eleven months earlier, an April 2024 story by Doctors Without Borders reads “How the Israeli army besieged Nasser Hospital: Evidence points to deliberate and repeated attacks by Israeli forces on Nasser Hospital, once the largest hospital in southern Gaza.”
One could rewind the clock back even farther, to the earlier months of what is now Israel’s 17-months-long-and-counting genocide in Gaza, and find similar stories (yes, it’s an amply documented genocide…and Dr., Nimer Sultany keeps an accessible list of research/reports outlining this reality). It is estimated that around 400 healthcare workers were abducted by the Israeli military by March 2025. During this year-and-a-half period, similar instances kidnappings and torture of medical workers, the targeting of medical vehicles (e.g. ambulances), and a full-scale annihilation of nearly all medical facilities in Gaza were amply documented
We should refer to these types of all-out-attacks on healthcare as acts of medelacide. In Latin, medela means health/healing/cure, while ‘cide refers to the deliberate killing of. So, the intentional and systematic destruction of healthcare infrastructure should be considered an act of medelacide. It is the destruction of the capacity for people to be healed, or receive remedy for their ailments in the short or long term.
This term should be thought of in relation to several other well-known socio-legal concepts. As I outline (see pages 4-5) in my research on Israel’s decimation of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure:
“Just as genocide refers to the intentional targeting of a people for systematic destruction (OHCHR, [1948] 2024), just as ecocide refers to the systematic and perhaps irreparable damage to a region’s ecology/ environment (Stop Ecocide Foundation, 2021), and just as scholasticide refers to the intentional and systematic destruction of a country or people’s institutions of learning (OHCHR, 2024), medelacide should now enter our vocabulary as a plausible framework for understanding the intentional and systematic destruction of a country or people’s healthcare and medical infrastructure.”
As healthcare workers in Gaza face nearly impossible circumstances to care for the tens of thousands of injured and dying, Drop Site News relayed information from Dr. Marwan Al-Hums, Director of Field Hospitals in Gaza. The March 20, 2025 report outlined:
➤ The majority of martyrs arriving at hospitals in Gaza suffer from severe burns and full-body amputations.
➤ Dismembered bodies and severe burns are the predominant injuries.
➤ Since March 18, the bombing has been unprecedented in intensity and weaponry.
➤ Israel is using new American weapons after replenishing stockpiles, causing complete cell disintegration.
➤ Many injuries involve “amputation without bleeding” due to burned limbs.
➤ Medical teams are trying to reconstruct limbs for future prosthetics despite limited resources.
➤ Gaza’s Health Ministry lacks labs to test chemical weapons but has evidence for international analysis.
➤ The only DNA lab was bombed by Israel, forcing families to identify loved ones through remains or clothing.
Just one week prior to this news, we saw the following headline from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: “‘More than a human can bear’: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023.” Included in this report were the following observations:
“The Commission found that Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare, amounting to two categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention, including deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians and imposing measures intended to prevent births”
The annihilation of hospitals. The annihilation of doctors. The annihilation of nurses. The annihilation of life-saving care. The annihilation of the chance to improve one’s lot in life. The annihilation of the ability to bring new life into this world. The annihilation of life. Medelacide…Genocide.
© Counter Punch
