ICSPR Condemns the Massacres Against Civilians in Tel Al-Sultan Neighborhood in Rafah and the Israeli Airstrike on Nasser Medical Complex

Reference Number: 31/ 2025
Date: March 23, 2025
Original Language: Arabic

Press Release
ICSPR Condemns the Massacres Against Civilians in Tel Al-Sultan Neighborhood in Rafah and the Israeli Airstrike on Nasser Medical Complex

The International Commission to Support Palestinian Rights (ICSPR) strongly condemns the crime committed by the Israeli occupation forces in targeting Nasser Medical Complex this evening, coinciding with the continuation of the aggression for the seventh consecutive day.

According to ICSPR’s monitoring, the Israeli occupation forces targeted the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, on the evening of Sunday, March 23, 2025. The attack struck the second floor of the second building in the emergency and reception department, causing a fire at the site. The attack resulted in the martyrdom and injury of five civilian patients, including Ismail Barhoum, a political bureau member of Hamas, who was receiving treatment at the hospital due to a previous injury. Additionally, several medical staff and patients sustained varying degrees of injuries, while a state of panic ensued, leading to the complete evacuation of the department after significant destruction. Notably, this is the fifth time the Israeli occupation has targeted Nasser Medical Complex since the beginning of the genocidal war and Israeli aggression against Gaza, amid a suffocating siege on hospitals, medical teams, humanitarian workers, and UNRWA staff, constituting a blatant violation of all international and humanitarian laws.

As a result, the death toll has risen to 680 martyrs and more than 1,233 wounded since the resumption of Israeli aggression on March 18, 2025.

ICSPR has also documented that the Israeli army launched a brutal attack on neighborhoods in Rafah, including Tel Al-Sultan, the Saudi neighborhood, and the Barracks area in the southern Gaza Strip. The attack trapped more than 50,000 unarmed civilians under aerial and artillery bombardment. According to eyewitnesses, Israeli occupation forces carried out field executions of more than 50 civilians in Tel Al-Sultan, some of whom were placed in large pits before being shot. The Israeli forces also deliberately fired at forcibly displaced persons and arrested a large number of civilians, including women in the Saudi neighborhood, some of whom were later released. Moreover, emergency medical teams from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society were surrounded, and contact with them was lost. Additionally, UNRWA employees remain besieged.

These horrific crimes occur amid electricity and water cuts, severe shortages of food and medicine, and a media blackout, intensifying fears of the genocide of the besieged civilians without any international intervention. This reflects a policy of collective punishment and genocide practiced by the occupation against the Palestinian people, aimed at imposing further ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Gaza’s residents.

The International Commission to Support Palestinian Rights (ICSPR) affirms that these crimes fall within the ongoing genocide for the eighteenth consecutive month, as part of Israel’s deliberate breach of the ceasefire agreement and its systematic escalation of war crimes against Palestinian civilians, including patients and the wounded who should be protected under the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law. The deliberate bombing of hospitals and targeting of medical teams, as seen in the recent attack on Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, along with the systematic destruction of numerous health facilities in Gaza—leaving only three operational hospitals in southern Gaza, which are being obstructed by the occupation—constitutes a clear war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Furthermore, attacks on medical personnel and obstruction of their work violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees the protection of doctors and paramedics during armed conflicts.

ICSPR stresses that the targeting of Gaza’s healthcare sector is an inhumane crime that cannot be ignored and calls on the international community to fulfill its legal and moral responsibilities, end its inaction and failure to protect civilians and civilian facilities, and immediately intervene to protect medical teams and ensure the continued operation of hospitals to save lives.

Accordingly, ICSPR:

• Calls on the international community to take immediate and concrete measures to halt the genocide and Israeli aggression, ensure the opening of humanitarian corridors, and confront the policy of forced displacement against Palestinian civilians. It also demands the immediate cessation of all attacks on medical facilities and healthcare teams, in compliance with international humanitarian law, which guarantees their protection.

• Urges the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to intervene urgently to protect hospitals, medical teams, and the wounded, and to secure urgent medical supplies.

• Demands an international investigation into Israeli crimes against healthcare institutions and the prosecution of those responsible before the International Criminal Court (ICC).

• Calls for the imposition of international sanctions on Israel to deter it from continuing its attacks on hospitals and humanitarian work and to hold Israeli soldiers and commanders accountable before international courts.

• Urges free nations, governments, and peoples worldwide to take all necessary measures and mobilize efforts to form an international humanitarian alliance to protect Palestinians from Israeli and American lawlessness.

End.
International Commission to Support Palestinian Rights (ICSPR)