Introduction
On May 8, 2025, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) documented that 1,400 healthcare workers had been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. By October 6, 2025, that number had risen to 1,722—an average of more than two healthcare professionals killed every single day. These are not collateral casualties in a conventional war. They are doctors, nurses, paramedics, orthopedic surgeons, pediatricians, and anesthesiologists, systematically erased from a society already brutalized by bombardment, siege, and starvation.
Behind each number lies a deliberate strategy. International humanitarian law—embodied in the Geneva Conventions—explicitly protects medical personnel, hospitals, and ambulances. Violations constitute war crimes. Yet the scale, consistency, and pattern of Israeli attacks on Palestinian healthcare workers transcend even that grim categorization. This essay will argue that Israel is engaged in a campaign of negative euthanasia—a calculated, methodical elimination of Palestinian medical talent for the express purpose of depriving Palestinian society of its most essential intellectual and professional resources. This is not merely the destruction of a health system; it is the wilful impoverishment of a people’s capacity for survival, resilience, and self-determination. It is scholasticide focused with lethal precision on the medical profession.
The Numbers as a Weapon
The statistics defy historical precedent. Between October 2023 and July 2025, Israel killed at least 1,580 healthcare workers in Gaza—approximately five every two days, or 16 per week. The World Health Organization recorded 735 attacks on healthcare during the same period, killing 917 people and injuring 1,411, affecting 125 health facilities and damaging 34 hospitals. By October 2025, MAP reported that following the collapse of a temporary ceasefire in March, the killing rate had accelerated to three healthcare workers per day. A UN Commission of Inquiry has concluded that these attacks constitute “medicide,” a sinister component of genocide.
Crucially, these killings are not random. They target individuals who are not merely civilians but protected persons under international law, often while they are visibly identified as medical workers. In May 2024, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society reported that 48 of its staff had been killed, 30 of them “while performing their humanitarian duty wearing the Red Crescent emblem.” That emblem—a protective symbol recognized globally—offers no sanctuary when a military force has decided that medicine itself is a threat.
The pattern extends to detention and torture. Human Rights Watch documented that Israeli forces have arbitrarily detained at least 310 healthcare workers from Gaza since October 2023. Released medical personnel described beatings, medical neglect, forced stress positions, threats of sexual violence, and what they believed to be forced administration of psychoactive drugs during interrogations. At least four healthcare workers have died while in Israeli custody. One of them was Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, a senior orthopedic surgeon who died following torture in Israel’s Ofer prison. As the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem wrote in a recent report, Israeli prisons “have effectively become torture camps for thousands of Palestinians held without trial.”
“Negative Euthanasia”—Killing to Impoverish
The term “euthanasia” traditionally evokes a mercy killing, an act of compassionate release from suffering. Negative euthanasia inverts this completely. It is the deliberate elimination of skilled individuals not to relieve their pain but to deprive their community of their knowledge, their labor, and their future contributions. It is killing as social amputation.
Palestinian healthcare workers are not merely medics; they are the apex of Palestinian intellectual achievement. In a society systematically deprived of resources, under siege, and subjected to decades of military occupation, medical professionals represent one of the few sectors in which Palestinians have developed world-class expertise. They train under impossible conditions, innovate with scarce supplies, and serve a population of over two million. Killing them is not only a military act but an epistemic one: it removes from the collective memory decades of accumulated clinical experience, medical teaching, and institutional knowledge.
Consider the details of who has been killed. On May 23, 2024, Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar, a physician at Nasser Hospital, died when his home in Khan Younis was bombed—along with nine of his children. On June 6, a strike on the Khader family’s residential building in North Gaza killed five physicians and one nurse from the same family. On July 5, Dr. Khalooq Musa Khafaja was killed in his tent in Al Qarara along with his two daughters and son. On July 14, nurse Majed Salah was killed in a strike on his tent in Khan Younis along with his three young daughters. In each case, these medical professionals were killed alongside their families—a further strategic dimension, eliminating not only the practitioner but also the next generation’s familial and pedagogical lineage.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, was detained during an Israeli raid on December 27, 2024, and has since been held for over 500 days without charge or trial. A pediatrician known for his tireless work caring for children amid bombardment, he has been subjected to torture, systematic denial of medical care, and severe food restrictions. His own son was killed in an Israeli airstrike, yet he refused to abandon his patients until his abduction. Amnesty International has described his continued imprisonment as “500 days of injustice,” noting that “healthcare workers are being punished for saving lives.”
Scholasticide—The Intellectual Annihilation of Palestine
The term scholasticide was introduced by the Palestinian legal scholar Karma Nabulsi to describe the systematic destruction of Palestinian intellectual capacity through the killing of academics, scientists, and educators. In Gaza, scholasticide has been documented with appalling precision: universities bombed to rubble, professors assassinated in targeted strikes, archives and libraries incinerated. What has received less attention—and what this essay seeks to foreground—is the specifically medical dimension of scholasticide.
Medical training is among the most intellectually demanding and institutionally complex forms of higher education. It requires decades of investment: undergraduate science education, medical school, residency, specialisation, and continuing education. It depends on libraries, laboratories, teaching hospitals, and senior practitioners who mentor the next generation. When Israel kills senior physicians and destroys hospitals, it does not merely remove current service providers; it severs the chain of pedagogical transmission. A dead surgeon cannot train the next cohort of residents. A destroyed hospital library cannot be digitized or rebuilt quickly. A medical school that has lost half its faculty cannot simply recruit replacements from a population that has itself been decimated, displaced, and starved.
UN experts have explicitly framed Israel’s attacks on healthcare as part of a genocidal strategy. “The targeted destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system by the Israel Defense Forces amounts to ‘medicide,’” the Special Rapporteurs on the right to health and on the situation of human rights in Palestine stated in August 2025, accusing Israel of “deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics and hospitals to wipe out medical care in the besieged enclave.” The experts further warned that “the system of apartheid targeting Palestinians in the occupied territory and the continuous attacks on the healthcare system in Gaza are straining the last remaining resources.”
Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization, submitted evidence to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health arguing that Israel’s actions constitute genocide under the Genocide Convention. The report details how Israel has “systematically destroy[ed] the healthcare system in Gaza and willfully den[ied] critically ill and injured Palestinians access to lifesaving medical care, acts carried out with an intent to destroy Palestinians.” The evidence includes documented statements by Israeli officials: an IDF spokesperson calling ambulances and hospitals “terrorist infrastructure” and “legitimate military targets.” When official military discourse reclassifies hospitals as military targets and medical workers as combatants, the systematic killing of those workers is not a bug—it is the operating system.
The Medical Brain Drain as a Weapon of War
Beyond killing, Israel has systematically prevented the evacuation of sick and injured Palestinians and their medical attendants. The WHO reported in November 2025 that more than 900 Palestinians from Gaza died while waiting for medical evacuation permits from Israel—a staggering number of preventable deaths. Critically ill patients, including newborns, have died before evacuators could reach them because of bureaucratic obstruction and military restrictions.
This denial of medical evacuation serves the same strategic purpose as the killings: it ensures that even those who survive physically will be deprived of life-saving treatment, and that Palestinian medical professionals who could potentially leave Gaza to study, teach, or practice elsewhere are either killed or trapped. The combination of active targeting and passive obstruction creates a closed loop of destruction. Those who stay are killed; those who try to leave are blocked; those who remain alive are denied the resources to practice medicine effectively. The outcome is the same: the inexorable depletion of Palestinian medical capability.
Legal Frameworks and the Failure of Accountability
International humanitarian law is unambiguous. The Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 20, provides that “persons regularly and solely engaged in the operation and administration of hospitals shall be respected and protected.” Additional Protocol I, Article 12, states that “medical units shall be respected and protected at all times and shall not be the object of attack.” The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court classifies “intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping missions” as a war crime.
Yet impunity prevails. Despite overwhelming documentation—from UN agencies, the WHO, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Palestinian civil society—no senior Israeli official has been held accountable. The International Criminal Court’s investigation into alleged war crimes in Palestine proceeds at glacial pace. Western allies continue to provide military, diplomatic, and financial support to Israel. The UN Security Council remains paralyzed by the veto power of a permanent member.
As UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese stated in August 2025: “The disregard towards the crimes Israel continues to commit in Gaza sends a stark message to the world that the people of Gaza do not count and their life does not matter. Palestinians in Gaza are being denied their right to dignity, to existence, and to food.” And, one might add, their right to be healed.
Conclusion
Between May 8 and October 6, 2025, 322 additional healthcare workers were added to MAP’s death toll. In less than five months, the number rose by nearly 23 percent. At that rate, without a fundamental change in the conduct of hostilities, the number of Palestinian medical workers killed could exceed two thousand before the end of the year—a figure unprecedented in modern conflict.
This is not warfare. It is a systematic campaign of negative euthanasia: the deliberate elimination of a population’s most essential caregivers and knowledge-holders for the purpose of impoverishing that population’s capacity to survive, reproduce, and flourish. It is scholasticide with a scalpel, targeting not only what Palestinians know but who they are.
The international community has a choice. It can continue to document, to condemn, to issue press releases and UN reports that gather dust in archives. Or it can act: to impose sanctions, to refer Israeli officials to the International Criminal Court, to halt arms transfers, and to demand immediate, unconditional protection for Palestinian healthcare workers. Every day of inaction is a day in which another doctor is killed, another nurse detained, another hospital bombed, and another generation of Palestinians deprived of the medical care that is their right under international law. Silence in the face of negative euthanasia is complicity in the slow death of a people.
