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PALESTINIANS ARE STILL being denied access to basic healthcare in Gaza and the West Bank, even as the ceasefire agreement remains nominally in place between Israel and Hamas.

As well as preventing medical aid and personnel from accessing people in need, Israeli occupation forces have attacked, abducted, beaten, tortured and killed medical workers across the occupied Palestinian territories over the last two years. 

Dana Abu-Koash is the coordinator of the international humanitarian law unit at the Palestine Red Crescent Society. She spoke to The Journal earlier this year after attending the Irish Red Cross’ International Humanitarian Law Conference.

During that conference, Abu-Koash said: 

“Systematic attacks and violations against medical and humanitarian missions are a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions and disregard for international humanitarian law endangers everyone.”

The Palestine Red Crescent Society is a humanitarian organisation that serves people in occupied Palestine, including in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the Palestinian diaspora in other countries. 

In addition to giving legal advice to her leadership team, particularly international legal advice about human rights, Abu-Koash also works closely with the society’s medical teams to document incidents of obstruction of access to medical care by Israeli forces.

She described how Israel has targeted healthcare workers on a regular basis and obstructed their work.

Blocking ambulances from accessing wounded or sick people, especially in the West Bank, has become common practice for Israeli occupation forces. 

As Abu-Koash says, though: “It’s more than just that.” 

“Really, blocking ambulances from reaching patients is becoming a usual thing. 

“But with the war, since 7 October basically, you’ve had so many of our teams beaten on duty, arrested. We’ve had some really severe cases. 

“In Gaza, we have enforced disappearances, so our teams getting kidnapped from our facilities and taken to unknown whereabouts for many long months, even years, and when they’re released, they all reported terrible forms of torture.”

🚨 Video That Exposes the Israeli Occupation’s Lies

The Palestine Red Crescent Society has obtained a video from the family of a martyred EMT, found on his mobile phone after his body was recovered from a mass grave in Gaza. He was among 15 ambulance and relief team members… pic.twitter.com/8iWqULxijC

— PRCS (@PalestineRCS) April 5, 2025

One of the deadliest Israeli attacks on healthcare workers in Gaza was in March 2025, when soldiers opened fire on ambulances and killed 15 people, then buried the vehicles and bodies. 

The Israeli military claimed the vehicles had no lights identifying them as ambulances, and that its soldiers “did not randomly attack”, insisting they fired on “terrorists” approaching them in “suspicious vehicles”.

Video footage released by the Red Crescent disproved that and Israel later blamed the incident on “professional failures”.

The massacre was widely condemned at the time and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk described it as “deeply disturbing”. 

The Red Crescent is not the only organisation whose healthcare workers have been targeted by Israeli forces in Gaza. Medical NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has repeatedly condemned Israeli attacks on patients and medical staff. 

As of October 2025, 15 MSF healthcare workers had been killed in Gaza in the space of two years. This did not include the other non-medical staff and family members who had been killed. 

Overall, more than 1,700 health workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, an average of two per day. 

The Israeli government has also passed new laws restricting the work of NGOs in Palestine, including forcing staff members to register information about themselves and their families, which has been seen as another means through which Israel can increase its pervasive surveillance of people under its military occupation.  

The new regulations had yet to be fully implemented when Abu-Koash spoke to The Journal, but she said that they were already impacting some organisations. 

“The whole point of this is to obstruct the work of our organisations. For now, we’re still working. We’re still doing fine, and we haven’t been called to do this, but I think in the future, it’s going to get a lot more complicated. 

“So many organisations have lost a lot more staff because the Israelis, once they receive the names, they deport a lot of the staff, and it’s a bit of a mess.”

Israel has also legislated to ban the largest UN body that operates in Palestine, UNRWA, which provides medical care and humanitarian aid, but also education and other services. 

Propaganda 

The wider campaign against humanitarian and medical workers and organisations also comes with relentless propaganda from official Israeli government sources. 

“Oftentimes, the IDF (Israeli military) official pages on Twitter (X) would come up with videos showing what seem to be combatants hiding in our facilities and so on,” Abu-Koash says. 

“And we would always be really quick to send a public response, a rebuttal to show that this is not true. 

“So it was always like, ‘You’re hiding someone from Hamas, you might have a Hamas tunnel under your hospital, we think that you’re involved’. 

“And that was a real big part of them also kidnapping our teams. They would tell them, like, ‘You guys are definitely involved. You must know something’, and when they would find out that they really don’t know anything, they would release them.”

The Israeli claims of “terror tunnels” under hospitals have been used throughout the onslaught against Gaza to justify attacking and occupying healthcare facilities. 

Some of the claims have been outlandish, such as the one made in a video published by the Israeli military showing a computer-generated model of a multi-story underground “Hamas command and control centre” beneath Shifa Hospital.

Israeli forces occupied the hospital and no evidence of such a compound was ever presented. 

“They’ve spent months in each hospital in Gaza and they weren’t able to uncover anything,” Abu-Koash says of the Israeli military claims.  

Israel’s military assault on the healthcare system in Gaza is one of the key points in the argument made by South Africa in its case against Israel alleging genocide at the International Court of Justice.  

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