An Israeli airstrike hit Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, overnight into Thursday 12 November. Medics said at least six Palestinians were killed, among them the surgeon Rezik Abushira and a 13-year-old boy, the latter according to Gaza’s education ministry.

The strike hit a five-storey building that housed the surgery wards. Medics and witnesses said two missiles came through the roof and badly damaged the rooms. The department, which serves about half of Gaza’s roughly two million people, was put out of service. France 24 cited about 20 wounded; a UN note later put the number of injured at 27 and described extensive damage.

Ayman Abu Obeid, a doctor wounded in the strike, was on an overnight shift. He said the blast tore through the room where staff were sleeping and that the place went dark at once.

Israel’s military said the target was Muhammad Abu Ismail, whom it described as the commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade, and accused militants of hiding inside the hospital and using it as a base. Hamas denied that it had used the medical complex and did not immediately say whether any of its leaders had been hit. The Associated Press reported that the man named by the military was not among the dead.

Later that day medics reported three more deaths in separate incidents: two in an airstrike on a car in Gaza City and one person shot in the Bureij camp in central Gaza. The military said the car strike hit a Hamas militant and gave no further detail; it did not comment on Bureij. The day’s toll rose to at least nine dead.

Israel and Hamas announced a ceasefire on 10 October 2025, but Israeli strikes have continued. The hospital’s leadership says Nasser has been hit at least seven times since the war began. The Board of Peace, the body US President Donald Trump put in charge of the Gaza plan, called for the plan to be carried out at once, pointing to the deaths at Nasser.

The same day, also in Khan Younis, nine-month-old Kinan Ahmed Raqiq died of hypothermia in his displaced family’s tent, his father Ahmed Raqiq and a doctor told AFP. The father said he woke to find the boy’s skin blue and rushed him to Nasser, where doctors found he had already died of the cold.

Rain the previous week had flooded tens of thousands of tents. Five people, including three children, had died when a sandy embankment collapsed onto shelters. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that, as of 8 November, storms had affected 26,000 households and that about 65 percent of Gaza’s people were still living in tents or makeshift shelter. UNICEF spokesman for Gaza James Elder warned that winter had not even started.

Image: Wikimedia Commons — a street in Khan Yunis, 9 July 2023 (ahmedmuheisen / Mapillary, CC BY-SA 4.0).

Sources consulted: Israel kills six in Gaza hospital strike as 9-month-old baby freezes to death — France 24; Six killed in Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital — UN News; Israeli strike on Gaza hospital kills 6 people, including a doctor and a child, Health Ministry says — AP.