The Electronic Intifada Podcast 21 May 2025
Since 2 March, Israel has plunged two million people into engineered starvation while it has systematically destroyed the medical infrastructure and prevented food, medications and basic supplies from entering the enclave.
On 13 May, Israel bombed the European Gaza Hospital and the Nasser Medical Complex, both in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.
Israel used bunker buster bombs and firebelts on the European Gaza Hospital, killing at least 28 Palestinians and wounding dozens in multiple strikes.
At Nasser, an Israeli drone strike targeted the burn unit and killed two patients in their beds, one of whom was the journalist Hassan Aslayeh, who was recovering from a previous assassination attempt.
Twelve people were injured in the attack, and 18 hospital beds in the surgical department, eight beds in the ICU and 10 inpatient beds were destroyed, according to medical sources.
Six days later, Israel attacked the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, destroying its power generators and forcing the entire medical facility out of operation.
Israeli tanks and bulldozers had also surrounded the hospital, threatening the safety of patients and medical staff, according to Munir al-Bursh, the director general of Gaza’s health ministry.
On 20 May, Israeli airstrikes targeted Nasser Medical Complex again, destroying its medical supplies warehouse.Dr. Majed Jaber, an emergency room physician, was working his shift at the European Gaza Hospital when it was bombed on 13 May.
“I’m really glad that we survived the firebombing of the European Gaza Hospital,” he tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast.
“It’s not the first time they bombed the hospital, but you know, sometimes just surviving is just a matter of sheer luck nowadays,” he says.
Jaber said that the bombing occurred just after the handover of Israeli American captive soldier Edan Alexander. The Israeli military immediately resumed bombardments, airstrikes and artillery shelling, he says, and people began flooding the emergency room with severe injuries.
“There were no breaks, [it was] nonstop violence,” he recalls.
That evening, “we heard these horrifying sounds – it felt like an earthquake – deafening explosions, and we did not really know what happened. It didn’t feel like anything else before, really – the glass was shattering, the doors were flying, we’re talking about tiles, electricity lines just falling out of the roof.”
When Jaber and his colleagues made it outside, he says the air was thick with dust, debris and the smells of gas and gunpowder.
“We were just trying to process – to come to the realization that the European Gaza Hospital had just got bombed, and keep in mind, the European Gaza Hospital was the last fully functioning hospital. It was the last stand for the Ministry of Health and healthcare in general in Gaza.”
Jaber noted that the hospital was the last – albeit partially-functioning – medical center for patients with cancer.
“The situation was bad already, because we lacked about 70 percent of the [pharmaceutical] stock needed to treat these cancer patients at least a little bit. We don’t have the radiation, we don’t have the surgeries, but we had some drugs to keep them barely alive until they get transferred abroad.”
The complete lack of all oncology care in Gaza, he says, is a death sentence for these cancer patients.
Afeef Nessouli, who is in Gaza as a healthcare logistics coordinator with Glia, a medical solidarity organization, says that much of his work is documenting doctors’ caseload and the care they are able to provide under the circumstances.
“You get stories like there’s not enough morphine for explosive injuries. There’s a baby who is beheaded. There’s just awful – I mean, everything that we have already had to understand this genocide has been like, they’re at the front lines seeing it. And we’re taking some footage of it, and it’s hard. But they’re such heroes,” Nessouli says of the medical workers.
“We’re just trying in any way to … assuage anything. And so sometimes that means literally driving food to people.”
Nessouli has also spoken to healthcare workers who have been abducted, detained and sexually tortured by Israeli forces.
“It’s a targeted sort of humiliation that will stay with people for a long time,” he says.
Palestinians, he says, “have been assigned an incredible test of humanity that they have to just sort of bear and understand and be patient – sabr. So it’s been really interesting and hard to be part of, but also hard to be separate from as well, because I am not a Palestinian Gazan. I’m a Lebanese American, and it’s just sort of a witnessing.”
Much of what he is doing, he says, is allowing doctors the space to talk about their experiences and process the unyielding trauma that they are encountering every day.
“A lot of times they want to say it out loud in one place so that it just is remembered for whatever it’s worth – that it happened, and that they stand by this awful experience, because it’s the only way … there’s no justice, but there is just some sort of record.”
Produced by Tamara Nassar
Photo by Moaz Abu Taha/APA Images
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