Israeli Strike Hits Nasser Hospital in Gaza, Killing at Least Six and Wounding More Than 20 as Ceasefire Holds on Paper

Early on Thursday morning, November 12, 2026, a single missile fired from an Israeli warplane struck a building inside Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, in the south of Gaza. The building housed the hospital’s surgical wards and its intensive care units. By the time the morning was over, Gaza’s Civil Defence agency and the territory’s health ministry were reporting at least six people dead and more than twenty wounded, among them a surgeon who worked in the hospital’s general surgery department and a child. Most of the dead and injured, according to reporters on the ground, were patients — people who had come to the hospital for treatment, including some who had been scheduled for surgery the following day.

The strike landed thirteen months into a ceasefire that took effect in October 2025 and that, on paper, still holds. In practice, the truce has not stopped the killing. Gaza’s health ministry says more than 1,600 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since the agreement began, and the strike on Nasser Hospital was the seventh on the complex in the past couple of years. The Israeli military said it had targeted a senior Hamas member and other militants who, it claimed, were using the hospital as a command centre. It offered no evidence with its first statement, and the claim could not be independently verified.

Nasser Hospital is the only hospital still standing in Khan Younis and one of the largest medical facilities in the whole of Gaza. It serves at least half a million people across the south of the territory. Its director said on Thursday that the building that was hit had been put entirely out of service, with extensive damage to the intensive care and surgical departments for both men and women. For a health system already stretched close to breaking point, the loss of those wards is not a footnote to the casualty figures. It is the second wound of the morning, and it will be felt by every patient who needed an operating theatre or an intensive care bed in the days that follow. This is what happened at Nasser Hospital, what each side says about it, and what remains unconfirmed in the Nasser Hospital strike Gaza November 2026.

1. What Happened at Nasser Hospital on Thursday Morning

1.1 A Single Missile on the Surgical Building

The strike came in the early hours of Thursday, November 12, 2026, while the hospital was quiet and most of its patients were asleep. Witnesses who spoke to the BBC described a warplane flying briefly over the area before a single missile struck the building that holds the surgical wards and the intensive care units. The missile hit the second floor of the Al-Yasin building inside the complex, in the western part of Khan Younis, according to reports gathered by several news agencies. There was no warning described in the early accounts, and there was no suggestion in any of them that the hospital had been told to evacuate the building before the strike.

The first reports of the attack were confused, as first reports of a strike on a hospital usually are. Some early bulletins put the death toll at four. Within hours it had risen, first to five and then to six, as rescue workers pulled more bodies from the damaged wards and as the hospital confirmed its own count. Gaza’s Civil Defence spokesman, Mahmoud Basal, told the Reuters news agency that the strike had hit the hospital’s surgery department and caused extensive damage. He told the AFP news agency that six people had been killed. The figures moved through the night, and the movement itself is part of the story: in a territory where communications are unreliable and where the counting is done by the same exhausted rescue workers who are pulling the wounded from the rubble, the first number is rarely the last.

What is not in doubt, across every account, is the target. The missile struck a working hospital building. It struck the part of the hospital where operations are carried out and where the most seriously ill patients are kept. The director of the complex, Ahmed al-Farra, said the strike caused extensive damage to the intensive care and surgical departments. Al Jazeera reported damage to recovery areas and to internal medicine departments on the building’s second floor as well. By mid-morning, the building had been declared out of service altogether.

1.2 The Toll as Reported Through the Night

The casualty figures reported on Thursday differed from outlet to outlet, and the differences are worth setting out plainly rather than smoothing over. Gaza’s Civil Defence agency and Gaza’s health ministry, as reported by Al Jazeera, put the number of dead at six. The BBC, citing a Civil Defence official, reported at least five dead. The Associated Press, citing Gaza’s health ministry, also reported six deaths and said at least a dozen people had been wounded. The Straits Times reported at least five dead, including a surgeon, and twenty wounded. One later Al Jazeera report put the number of injured at fifty-two, saying thirty people had been taken to hospital departments for treatment and twenty-two had been treated at the scene.

The most widely reported figures by the end of the morning were six killed and at least twenty wounded. The health ministry also reported that eight people had been killed and twenty-nine injured across Gaza in the past twenty-four hours, a figure that covers the Nasser Hospital dead and others killed in separate strikes on the same day. At least thirteen Palestinians were reported killed across Gaza in the latest wave of attacks, according to Al Jazeera. The toll at Nasser Hospital itself rose from four in the earliest reports to six by the time the hospital issued its own statement, and the hospital’s confirmation is the figure on which most reporting settled.

No independent count of the dead exists. The BBC has said it is prevented by Israel from reporting independently from inside Gaza, and it could not verify the details of the strike. Reuters said it could not independently verify the Israeli military’s claims about the target. The casualty figures therefore come from Gaza’s Civil Defence, a rescue agency operating under the Hamas-run administration, and from the hospital itself, with the health ministry’s figures described by the United Nations as reliable. That is the honest basis on which the numbers rest, and it should be stated rather than hidden.

2. The People Killed and Wounded

2.1 A Surgeon Among the Dead

Among the six people killed at Nasser Hospital was a surgeon. Medics identified him as Dr Rizq Abu Shaeira, who worked in the hospital’s general surgery department. Al Jazeera reported that six people, including a child and a doctor, had been killed. The Associated Press and the Straits Times both reported that a surgeon was among the dead. His death was confirmed by the hospital, and his name was carried in reporting from several outlets within hours of the strike.

The killing of a surgeon inside the hospital where he worked carries a weight beyond the casualty count. Nasser Hospital, like every hospital in Gaza, operates with far fewer doctors than it needs. Surgeons are among the scarcest of all, and the loss of one does not only add a name to the list of the dead. It removes, permanently, a pair of hands from an operating theatre that was already short of them. The general surgery department where Dr Abu Shaeira worked was the same department the missile hit. The building that housed his work is now out of service, and the colleague who might have treated the wounded from the strike is himself among the dead.

There is no fuller account yet of the other five people who were killed. Their names had not been published in the reporting available by Thursday morning, and the hospital had not released a complete list. What the reporting does establish is that a child was among the dead, and that most of those killed and wounded were patients rather than staff or fighters. That detail, reported by Al Jazeera’s correspondent Hind Khoudary from the scene, is the one that has drawn the most attention, because it speaks directly to the question of who was inside the building when the missile arrived.

2.2 Patients, Including People Awaiting Surgery

Most of the dead and injured were patients receiving treatment at the hospital, according to Al Jazeera, including people who had been scheduled for surgery the following day. They were not people who had come to the hospital that morning. They were people already admitted, already in beds, already waiting for operations that had been planned in advance. The surgical wards and the intensive care units are where the most vulnerable patients in any hospital are kept: people recovering from operations, people whose conditions are too serious for an ordinary ward, people who cannot be moved quickly when a building is hit.

The wounded numbered at least twenty by the most conservative count, and later reports put the figure higher. Thirty people were taken to other departments of the hospital for treatment, according to the later Al Jazeera report, and twenty-two were treated at the scene. Seven of the wounded were reported to be in a critical condition. The Associated Press put the number of wounded at a dozen or more. The range between the figures is wide, but the direction is not: whatever the final count, the strike wounded far more people than it killed, and many of the wounded were already patients when the missile struck.

The hospital’s own statement, and the accounts of its director, make clear that the attack did not only injure people. It injured the hospital itself. A patient who was scheduled for surgery the following day now has no operating theatre to go to, because the building that held the surgical wards has been declared out of service. A patient in intensive care has been moved, or will have to be moved, to whatever capacity remains elsewhere in a complex that has now lost one of its key buildings. The human cost of the strike is measured in the dead and the wounded, but it is also measured in the operations that will not happen and the intensive care beds that no longer exist.

3. The Damage to the Hospital

3.1 The Surgery and Intensive Care Wards Out of Service

The director of Nasser Medical Complex, Ahmed al-Farra, said on Thursday that the building struck by the missile had been put entirely out of service. The strike caused extensive damage to the intensive care and surgical departments for both men and women, he said, and the damage was severe enough that the building could not continue to function. The hospital was forced to halt work in its surgical ward, according to the Times of Israel, citing Al Jazeera. For a hospital that serves at least half a million people, the loss of its surgical and intensive care capacity in a single strike is a blow that will be felt far beyond the morning of the attack.

The building that was hit was not a peripheral structure. It held the surgical wards, the intensive care units, the recovery areas and, on its second floor, internal medicine departments. These are the core functions of a hospital: the place where operations happen, where patients recover from them, and where the most seriously ill are watched around the clock. When a hospital loses those functions, it does not simply lose a building. It loses the ability to do the work that makes it a hospital, and the patients who depend on that work must go elsewhere or go without.

The strike was described by the hospital’s director as a vertical strike, hitting the building from above and causing damage through its floors. The second floor, where the missile struck, took the worst of it, but the effects ran through the building. Recovery areas were damaged. Internal medicine departments were damaged. The intensive care units, which house patients who cannot breathe or whose organs cannot function without machines, were damaged. The full extent of the structural damage had not been assessed by Thursday morning, and it was not clear how long the building would remain out of service or whether it could be repaired at all in the current conditions.

3.2 What the Second Floor Held

The second floor of the Al-Yasin building, where the missile struck, held the parts of the hospital that matter most in an emergency. The surgical wards were there. The intensive care units were there. The recovery areas, where patients are brought after operations, were there. Internal medicine departments were there. It is difficult to think of a floor in a hospital whose loss would matter more, because it held, in one place, the chain of care that runs from the operating theatre through recovery to intensive monitoring.

The strike’s effect on that chain is immediate and practical. Operations that were planned for the coming days cannot take place in a building that is out of service. Patients who need intensive care must be moved to whatever intensive care capacity remains in the complex, if any remains, or to other hospitals that are themselves overstretched. Patients recovering from surgery must be moved as well, and moving a patient who has just had an operation is itself a risk. The hospital has not said where its surgical and intensive care patients have gone, or whether there is anywhere for them to go.

This is the seventh time the complex has been struck in the past couple of years, according to Al Jazeera’s reporting. The most serious previous attack was a double strike in August 2025 that killed at least twenty people, including journalists and health workers. Each strike has taken something from the hospital. This one took the building where operations and intensive care happened. The pattern is what makes the damage more than an incident: a hospital that is struck repeatedly loses not only buildings but the ability to plan, to stock, to staff and to promise its patients that the care they need will still be there tomorrow.

4. What Israel Says About the Strike

4.1 The Command-Centre Claim

The Israeli military, together with the Israel Security Agency, said on Thursday that the strike had targeted a senior Hamas member and other militants who, it said, were using the hospital as a command centre for military and terrorist activities. The military said Hamas had established itself in and around Nasser Hospital and used the site as a command centre to carry out military activity against Israeli forces, according to Al Jazeera’s account of the statement. The claim, in other words, is that the building was not only a hospital but also a military facility, and that the people targeted were not patients but fighters.

The statement was the military’s first account of the strike, and it was issued as the casualty figures were still being reported. It named no individual target. It did not say who the senior Hamas member was supposed to be, or how many militants were supposed to have been in the building, or what evidence supported the claim that the hospital was being used as a command centre. The military said the results of the strike were still under review. The claim is, at this stage, an assertion rather than a demonstrated fact, and it should be reported as one.

The use of hospitals as a justification for strikes has been a recurring feature of the war in Gaza. Israel has made similar claims about other hospitals, and those claims have been contested by hospital staff, by international organisations and by journalists who have visited the sites. The claim in this case follows the same pattern: a strike on a medical facility, followed by a statement that the facility was being used for military purposes. Whether the claim is true in this instance cannot be determined from the statement alone, and no independent party has yet been able to examine the site.

4.2 What Has Not Been Shown

The Israeli military provided no evidence with its initial statement, according to the Associated Press. No photographs, no documents, no intercepted communications and no other material were published alongside the claim that the hospital was being used as a command centre. Reuters said it could not independently verify the Israeli allegations. The BBC, which is prevented by Israel from reporting independently from inside Gaza, could not verify the details of the strike or the claim about the target.

The absence of evidence does not prove the claim false, and it would be wrong to present it as proof of anything. But the absence matters, because the claim is the only justification offered for a strike that killed at least six people, including a surgeon and a child, and wounded more than twenty others, most of them patients. A claim of that consequence, offered without supporting material, leaves the central question of the strike unanswered: who, exactly, was the target, and what made a hospital building a legitimate one?

There is also the question of proportionality, which no statement from either side has yet addressed. Even if the claim about a command centre were true, the strike hit a building full of patients, including people in intensive care who could not be moved. The military has not said what precautions were taken, what intelligence was relied on, or whether the expected civilian harm was weighed against the military value of the target. Those are the questions that international humanitarian law asks about any strike on a protected facility, and they remain unanswered. Until evidence is produced or an independent examination becomes possible, the claim stands as an assertion by one party to the conflict, and the dead and wounded stand as facts reported by the other.

5. Nasser Hospital’s Place in Southern Gaza

5.1 The Only Hospital Still Standing in Khan Younis

Nasser Medical Complex is one of Gaza’s largest hospitals and the only hospital still standing in Khan Younis, according to Al Jazeera’s correspondent Hind Khoudary. It serves at least 500,000 people across southern Gaza, providing essential medical services in a territory whose health system has been devastated by two years of war. For the population of Khan Younis and the surrounding areas, there is no alternative of comparable size. When Nasser Hospital loses a building, the people of the south lose a part of the only major hospital they have left.

The scale of what the hospital serves is difficult to overstate. Half a million people depend on it, directly or indirectly, for surgery, for intensive care, for the treatment of chronic illness and for emergency care. The territory’s hospitals have been struck repeatedly, and many have closed altogether. Nasser has survived as a functioning hospital through strikes that have damaged it before, and its survival has made it more, not less, important: as other facilities have closed, more patients have been funnelled into the ones that remain. The loss of its surgical and intensive care building therefore falls on a population that has nowhere else to go in anything like the same numbers.

The hospital’s role is also a regional one. Khan Younis is the largest city in the south of Gaza, and Nasser is its main hospital. Patients from across the southern governorates are referred there, and its specialist departments serve people who cannot be treated in smaller clinics. The destruction of its surgical and intensive care capacity does not only affect Khan Younis. It affects the whole of southern Gaza, and it affects it at a moment when the health system is already operating far beyond its capacity, with shortages of medicine, of fuel, of staff and of beds that long predate Thursday’s strike.

5.2 A Facility Struck Before

Thursday’s strike was the seventh on Nasser Hospital in the past couple of years, according to Al Jazeera. The complex has been hit repeatedly since the war began, and the most serious previous attack was a double strike in August 2025 that killed at least twenty people, including journalists and health workers. That attack drew international condemnation at the time, and it is still cited as one of the deadliest strikes on a medical facility in the war. The fact that the same hospital has now been struck again, thirteen months into a ceasefire, is a measure of how little protection the truce has offered to Gaza’s hospitals.

The repeated strikes on Nasser raise a question that goes beyond any single attack. A hospital that is struck seven times is not a hospital that has been hit by accident. It is a hospital that has been treated, repeatedly, as a legitimate target, or at least as a place where the risk of striking is accepted. The Israeli military’s claim that the hospital was being used as a command centre is, in this context, not a new argument but a familiar one, and it has been made about Nasser before. Each time, the hospital has continued to function, and each time, the people who depend on it have had to absorb the loss.

The history matters because it shapes what happens next. A hospital that has been struck seven times cannot plan as other hospitals plan. It cannot invest in equipment that may be destroyed, or recruit staff who may be killed, or promise patients that the treatment they need will be available when they need it. The damage from Thursday’s strike is therefore cumulative as well as immediate. It adds to the damage of the six strikes before it, and it deepens a pattern in which Gaza’s largest hospital in the south is treated as a place that can be hit, again and again, without consequence.

6. The Ceasefire, Thirteen Months On

6.1 A Truce That Has Not Stopped the Strikes

The ceasefire in Gaza took effect on October 10, 2025, and it has now been in place for thirteen months. On paper, it ended the large-scale fighting. In practice, it has not stopped the strikes. Gaza’s health ministry says more than 1,600 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since the agreement began, and the ministry’s figures are considered reliable by the United Nations. The strike on Nasser Hospital is the latest in a long series of attacks that have continued throughout the ceasefire, and it is not an exception to the pattern but an example of it.

The numbers tell the story of a truce that holds in name but not in effect. In the past twenty-four hours alone, the health ministry reported eight people killed and twenty-nine injured across Gaza. At least thirteen Palestinians were reported killed in the latest wave of attacks, according to Al Jazeera. The total since the ceasefire began stands at 1,622 killed and 5,878 injured, according to the health ministry’s count. These are not the figures of a war that has ended. They are the figures of a war that has changed shape, from large-scale bombardment to a steady drumbeat of strikes that continue to kill and wound, day after day, month after month.

The ceasefire’s failure to protect hospitals is the sharpest measure of its limits. A truce that cannot keep a missile from a hospital’s surgical wards is a truce that is not protecting the people it was meant to protect. The strike on Nasser Hospital was not a border incident or a clash in a disputed area. It was a strike on a known, named, major hospital in the middle of a city, on a building whose function was visible and whose patients were known. If a ceasefire cannot prevent that, then the question is not whether the ceasefire has been violated but whether it has any meaning left at all for the people living under it.

6.2 The Wider Toll Since October 2025

The toll since the ceasefire began is not only a matter of the dead and the wounded. It is also a matter of what has been destroyed. Israel has destroyed 90 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure, according to Al Jazeera, citing a United Nations estimate that puts the cost of reconstruction at 71.4 billion dollars. The figure is almost too large to grasp, but its meaning is simple: the territory that the ceasefire was supposed to allow to rebuild has instead continued to be dismantled, building by building, hospital by hospital, month after month.

The destruction of infrastructure and the killing of people are connected. A hospital that loses its surgical building cannot treat the wounded from the next strike. A territory that loses 90 percent of its infrastructure cannot house, feed or employ the people who survive. The reconstruction estimate of 71.4 billion dollars is a measure of what has been lost, but it is also a measure of what would be needed to restore even the basic conditions of life in Gaza, and there is no plan in place to provide it. The ceasefire was supposed to create the space for that rebuilding. Thirteen months on, the space has not appeared.

The strike on Nasser Hospital fits into this wider picture in a way that should not be missed. It is not only an attack on a hospital. It is an attack on the infrastructure of survival itself, on the place where the wounded from every other strike are taken. When the hospital that treats the victims of the ceasefire’s violations is itself struck, the cycle becomes self-reinforcing: each strike creates more wounded, and each strike on a hospital reduces the capacity to treat them. The toll since October 2025 is therefore not a static figure. It is a figure that grows, and the strike on Nasser Hospital is a reason why it will keep growing.

7. How the Reports Differ — and What Cannot Be Verified

7.1 Casualty Figures That Moved During the Night

The casualty figures from Nasser Hospital moved through the night, and the movement is worth understanding rather than ignoring. The earliest reports put the death toll at four. It rose to five, and then to six, as the hospital confirmed its own count and as rescue workers completed their search of the damaged building. The number of wounded was reported as at least twenty by Reuters and the Civil Defence, as at least a dozen by the Associated Press, and as fifty-two by a later Al Jazeera report. The differences are not the result of error or exaggeration. They are the result of different counting at different times, by different organisations, in a place where the counting is done under fire and in the dark.

The most reliable figure for the dead, on the reporting available by Thursday morning, is six. That is the figure given by Gaza’s health ministry and by the Civil Defence, and it is the figure the hospital itself confirmed. The most conservative figure for the wounded is at least twenty, and the later report of fifty-two injured suggests the true number may be higher. The range should be reported as a range, because presenting a single figure as certain would be dishonest. The honest statement is that six people were killed and at least twenty were wounded, with some reports putting the number of injured substantially higher.

There is a reason the figures move, and it is not a reason to distrust them. In the first hours after a strike, the count is of bodies found and wounded seen. As the search continues, more are found. As the wounded are counted in different departments, the totals change. As hospitals report, the figures are revised. This is how casualty counting works in every conflict, and it is how it has worked throughout the war in Gaza. The health ministry’s figures, which the United Nations considers reliable, have been revised in the same way throughout the war, and they have generally been borne out by later checking. The movement of the figures on Thursday is normal. What would be abnormal is a figure that did not move at all.

7.2 The Limits on Independent Reporting

There is no independent verification of the strike on Nasser Hospital, and the reasons for that are structural rather than accidental. The BBC has said it is prevented by Israel from reporting independently from inside Gaza, and it could not verify the details of the strike. Reuters said it could not independently verify the Israeli military’s claims about the target. No international organisation has yet examined the site. No independent party has counted the dead or inspected the damage. The reporting that exists comes from Gaza’s Civil Defence and health ministry, from the hospital itself, from Al Jazeera’s correspondent on the ground, and from the Israeli military’s own statement.

These limits matter for both sides of the story. The casualty figures cannot be independently confirmed, and the Israeli claim about a command centre cannot be independently confirmed either. Both rest on the word of the parties involved, and both should be reported as such. The temptation, in a story like this, is to treat one side’s account as verified and the other’s as a claim. The honest approach is to treat both as reported, to attribute each to its source, and to be clear about what has not been established.

The limits on reporting also matter for what happens next. If no independent party can enter Gaza to examine the site, then the question of whether the hospital was being used as a command centre may never be answered. If no independent count of the dead is possible, then the figure of six will stand as the reported figure, and the argument about it will continue without resolution. The strike on Nasser Hospital is therefore not only an event. It is an event that will be argued about, and the argument will be shaped by the fact that the people who could settle it are not allowed to see the place where it happened.

8. What Happens Next

8.1 The Questions Facing the Hospital

The immediate question facing Nasser Hospital is a practical one: where do its surgical and intensive care patients go now? The building that held those wards is out of service, and the hospital has not said how its patients have been moved or where they have been taken. The complex has other buildings, but it is not clear whether any of them can absorb the surgical and intensive care load, or whether patients will have to be transferred to other hospitals that are themselves overstretched. For the patients who were scheduled for surgery in the coming days, the question is whether their operations will happen at all, and if so, where and when.

The longer question is whether the hospital can continue to function as a hospital at all. It has been struck seven times. Its surgical and intensive care building is now out of service. Its staff have lost a colleague. Its patients have been killed in their beds. A hospital can absorb a great deal, and Nasser has absorbed more than most, but there is a point at which the accumulation of damage makes the institution itself unviable. Whether that point has been reached is not yet clear, and it will not be clear until the hospital says what capacity it still has and what it has lost.

There are also questions for the parties to the ceasefire, and for the governments that brokered it. The strike was the latest in a series of attacks that have killed more than 1,600 people since the truce began. At what point does a ceasefire that permits this level of killing cease to be a ceasefire? What, if anything, will be done to enforce it? And what protection, if any, will be offered to the hospitals that have been struck repeatedly throughout it? These are not questions that can be answered by the hospital, and they are not questions that have been answered by anyone else. They will be asked, in the days that follow, by the people who depend on the answers.

8.2 The Bottom Line

The strike on Nasser Hospital killed at least six people, including a surgeon and a child, and wounded more than twenty others, most of them patients. It destroyed the surgical and intensive care building of the only hospital still standing in Khan Younis, a hospital that serves at least half a million people in southern Gaza. It was the seventh strike on the complex in the past couple of years, and it came thirteen months into a ceasefire that has not stopped the killing. The Israeli military says it targeted militants using the hospital as a command centre, and it has offered no evidence for that claim. The casualty figures come from Gaza’s Civil Defence and health ministry, and they have not been independently verified.

Those are the facts as they stand on Thursday morning. What is not yet known is whether the hospital can continue to function without its surgical and intensive care wards, whether the patients who were scheduled for surgery will receive it, whether the claim about a command centre will ever be supported by evidence, and whether the ceasefire that was supposed to protect Gaza’s people will be enforced or allowed to fade into a fiction. The strike on Nasser Hospital is not the end of a story. It is the latest chapter in a war that was supposed to have stopped, and the coming days will provide the answers.

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