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KILLING MEDICS AND JOURNALISTS: WHAT IMPUNITY FOR GENOCIDE LOOKS LIKE
 
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Yousef Munayyer
August 25, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Israel’s Monday morning strike on a Gaza hospital—a so-called
“double-tap” assault—was designed for maximum killing. When is
enough? _

A funeral ceremony was held Monday for four journalists killed in an
Israeli attack on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza., Abed Rahim
Khatib/Anadolu/Getty Images

 

It should be outrageous enough when the Israeli military, or any
military for that matter, launches strikes on a hospital. The world
has allowed that to become routine in Gaza, however, to our great
shame. But what the Israeli military did Monday morning before the
rolling cameras of Gaza’s heroic journalists somehow managed to
reach a new depth of evil for the entire world to see
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Moments after the Israeli military struck the Nasser Medical Complex
in southern Gaza, itself a war crime, heroic Palestinian first
responders rushed to the scene as they have done day in and day out
for two years of genocide to try to rescue victims of the strike and
dig survivors out of the rubble. Heroic Palestinian journalists,
putting their life on the line day in and day out as well, documented
the scene, broadcasting the rescue operation live.

That is precisely when the second Israeli missile hit the same spot,
killing the journalists, the medics, and others who may have survived
the first strike. “Double-tap” strikes are designed for maximum
killing and specifically aimed at wiping out not just those targeted
by the first missile, but those that come to the rescue like medics
and those who come to document it like journalists. Israel is no
longer just carrying out war crimes in Gaza, but layers and layers of
war crimes at a time.

The World Health Organization reported
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that there have been “735 attacks on health care in Gaza from 7
October 2023 to 11 June 2025, that have killed 917 persons and injured
1,411, affected 125 health facilities, and damaged 34 hospitals.”
Earlier this month, when an Israeli strike killed Pulitzer-winning Al
Jazeera journalists Anas al-Sharif and five of his colleagues, the
Committee to Protect Journalists reported
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that “192 journalists have been killed since the start of the
Israeli-Gaza war on October 7, 2023. At least 184 of those journalists
were Palestinians killed by Israel.” With the Israeli military’s
murderous double-tap strike on the hospital complex this morning,
these numbers would have to be revised upwards again. Several
journalists were killed in the strike, which was caught on camera.
Journalists Mohamad Salama, Mariam Abu Daqqa, Hussam al-Masri, and
Moaz Abu Taha were killed.

This is, of course, not the first time that medics or journalists were
killed in Gaza. In so many cases they have been targeted directly, as
was the case with al-Sharif recently. In other cases, medics who have
rushed to the rescue scene have been gunned down as well, like those
dispatched to save the murdered child Hind Rajab only to face a
similar fate at the hands of the Israeli military
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Or the medics who were gunned down late at night and buried along with
their ambulances by the Israeli military earlier this year
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who dumped them in a mass grave.

Something about this strike seems different, though. The calculated
and brazen nature of it all, to deliberately seek to murder first
responders in broad daylight and on camera after striking a hospital,
is the gruesome behavior of a military that simply fears no
repercussions or limitations. Two years into this genocidal violence,
the war crimes of the Israeli military only seem to be getting uglier,
with even less regard for what the world might think about them.

This didn’t happen overnight, and there are many reasons why the
Israeli military has become more brazen over time. There was a time
when Israel swore it would never strike hospitals. Many will remember
the al-Ahli Baptist hospital bloodbath in the fall of 2023. But as it
found little pushback after hitting medical facilities, Israel began
to shift toward attempting to justify such strikes by claiming
hospitals were actually military command centers. Such claims rarely
held up to scrutiny, but too few voices that actually mattered to
Israel, especially here in the United States, were actually willing to
scrutinize them. Seeing this, the Israelis realized that even attempts
at justification weren’t really necessary.

With its most recent announcement to conquer Gaza city
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a place that is largely decimated already, functioning mostly as a
collection of tents for the forcibly displaced and starved who now
live amid rubble of their former homes, the criminal intent has never
been more clear. Israel has long passed the time when it could argue
it was required to degrade its adversaries for self-defense.

Who could possibly believe this when the Israeli government has
repeatedly obstructed exchange deals
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to buy more time to destroy Gaza and displace and kill its residents?
Regardless of what the stated intent of the Israeli government is, its
actions speak the loudest about what it seeks to do in Gaza:
ethnically cleanse and kill the Palestinian population. It’s very
hard to see how any objective observer can come to any other
conclusion, given all we have seen the Israeli military do to not only
destroy life in Gaza, but to, in the words of the Genocide Convention,
“deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction.”

The international watchdog for food crises declared famine in Gaza
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last week, the vast majority of Gaza structures are destroyed, aid
seekers are routinely shot and killed, the water is undrinkable;
hospitals, medics, aid workers, and journalists are routinely
targeted, all in a besieged territory where hundreds of thousands have
already been killed or wounded. What other than the destruction of the
Palestinian population could such conditions be calculated to produce?

Despite this painfully obvious reality, the world has done nothing to
stop it and many governments, especially the one in Washington, are
making sure it can continue unabated. For most people alive today,
Israel’s genocide in Gaza will likely be the worse atrocity they
have seen or will see in their lifetimes. Our children and
grandchildren will ask us why we did not speak up at this moment. What
will we tell them?

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Yousef Munayyer is head of the Palestine/Israel program at Arab Center
Washington, D.C.

* Mohamad Salama; Mariam Abu Daqqa; Hussam al-Masri; Moaz Abu Taha;
Israel; Gaza War;
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