Gaza’s Health Ministry says the official death toll has topped 50,000 as Israel continues to bombard and blockade the territory, but it is widely believed the actual death toll is far higher. On Sunday, Israeli forces bombed a surgical unit at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis — the largest functioning hospital in Gaza. The attack killed two people, including Ismail Barhoum, a member of Hamas’s political bureau. Hamas said he was at the hospital for treatment for injuries suffered in an earlier Israeli strike. A 16-year-old boy was also killed in the hospital attack. The American trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa was at Nasser Hospital at the time of the attack and said the teenager killed was his patient.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa: “You know, I’ve certainly never had a patient injured in an explosion, brought to the hospital, taken care of, doing well, ready to go home, and then blown up in his hospital bed. That’s a first. And that should be what we call in medicine a 'never event.' That’s not really supposed to happen. I just — I can’t emphasize enough, it just doesn’t matter who is in the hospital. It’s not legal to blow it up. It’s not legal to kill people in here. It’s not legal to attack people in here. It’s not ethical. It’s completely crazy.”

Click here to see our interviews with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa.

In a separate strike, Israel blew up the Turkish Friendship Hospital, Gaza’s only specialized cancer hospital. The hospital had been closed since November 2023 due to Israeli attacks. At one point Israeli troops had turned the hospital into a military outpost. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the bombing, saying it was “part of Israel’s policy aimed at rendering Gaza uninhabitable and forcibly displacing the Palestinian people.”

In other news on Gaza, Israel’s security cabinet has approved forming what it calls a “Voluntary Emigration Bureau” in Gaza as Israel and the United States push for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.