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Sky News
11 hours ago
- Health
- Sky News
Why Iranian strike that damaged Israeli hospital could have big impact on the conflict
Why you can trust Sky News As I approached Soroka Medical Centre in Beersheba, Israel, I could still see the smoke rising in the heart of the city after an Iranian missile strike. At the gates, stunned-looking patients were still emerging. Among them, Jummah Abu Kush, who was inside the building when it was hit. "Suddenly we heard an enormous explosion," he told me. "We knew it was close. All sorts of things fell from the roof. The doctor was injured and others in the room were hit by the debris too. "The building opposite was on fire. It was very dangerous, very worrying and very scary." Shai Nunu, a doctor at the hospital, said he felt a huge force after the warning sound rang out. "The siren stopped and then we heard a huge explosion. We were thrown backwards from the blast," he said. Around the back of the hospital, I saw the roof of one building had collapsed. In another, windows were blown out - bits of metal and plastic hanging precariously from rooms. Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said they hit a military site nearby and the Soroka Medical Centre was not a direct target. Despite the extent of the blast, there were only minor injuries reported. But the impact on this war could be great. The Israeli leadership was quick to attend the site. First came President Isaac Herzog, then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who declared, "We love Donald Trump", as he called for the annihilation of Iran. The Israeli government is framing what happened at the medical centre as a "war crime", vowing Iran would "pay a heavy price" and saying they were in the "process of achieving a tremendous victory". What that victory could look like is very uncertain and Iran shows no sign of backing down. Three days ago, Farabi Hospital in Kermanshah in Iran was also damaged by the shockwaves of a missile strike. The Israel Defence Forces claimed it wasn't a target. Whether intentional or not, healthcare facilities are once again at the centre of the story. At least 24 people have been killed in Israel by Iranian strikes. The number of civilian fatalities remains far higher in Iran. More than 600 people have died so far across the nation, according to the Washington-based group Human Rights Activists. But an internet blackout has made it very difficult to get images or information out of the country. The last 24 hours have felt like a sea change in rhetoric and potential action. The drumbeat of war is sounding louder, with Israel using the attack on the medical centre to frame the argument for more intense attacks to come. The question is whether America will buy that argument enough to join the fight.
Sky News
13 hours ago
- Health
- Sky News
Why Iranian strike that damaged Israeli hospital could have big impact on the war
As I approached Soroka Medical Centre in Beersheba, Israel, I could still see the smoke rising in the heart of the city after an Iranian missile strike. At the gates, stunned-looking patients were still emerging. Among them, Jummah Abu Kush, who was inside the building when it was hit. "Suddenly we heard an enormous explosion," he told me. "We knew it was close. All sorts of things fell from the roof. The doctor was injured and others in the room were hit by the debris too. "The building opposite was on fire. It was very dangerous, very worrying and very scary." Shai Nunu, a doctor at the hospital, said he felt a huge force after the warning sound rang out. "The siren stopped and then we heard a huge explosion. We were thrown backwards from the blast," he said. Around the back of the hospital, I saw the roof of one building had collapsed. In another, windows were blown out - bits of metal and plastic hanging precariously from rooms. Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said they hit a military site nearby and the Soroka Medical Centre was not a direct target. Despite the extent of the blast, there were only minor injuries reported. But the impact on this war could be great. The Israeli leadership was quick to attend the site. First came President Isaac Herzog, then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who declared, "We love Donald Trump", as he called for the annihilation of Iran. The Israeli government is framing what happened at the medical centre as a "war crime", vowing Iran would "pay a heavy price" and saying they were in the "process of achieving a tremendous victory". What that victory could look like is very uncertain and Iran shows no sign of backing down. Three days ago, Farabi Hospital in Kermanshah in Iran was also damaged by the shockwaves of a missile strike. The Israel Defence Forces claimed it wasn't a target. Whether intentional or not, healthcare facilities are once again at the centre of the story. The civilian number of fatalities remains far higher in Iran than Israel. More than 600 people have died so far, according to the Washington-based group Human Rights Activists. But an internet blackout has made it very difficult to get images or information out of the country. The last 24 hours have felt like a sea change in rhetoric and potential action. The drumbeat of war is sounding louder, with Israel using the attack on the medical centre to frame the argument for more intense attacks to come. The question is whether America will buy that argument enough to join the fight.
Middle East Eye
14 hours ago
- Health
- Middle East Eye
Bombing hospitals is a red line - unless Israel is doing it
On Thursday morning, Iranian missiles struck Soroka hospital in Beersheba, triggering expressions of outrage from Israeli officials. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir likened the Iranian regime to 'Nazis who fire missiles at hospitals, the elderly and children'. President Isaac Herzog evoked imagery of a baby in intensive care and a doctor rushing between beds. Culture Minister Miki Zohar declared on social media that 'only the scum of the earth fires missiles at hospitalized children and elderly people in their sick beds'. The chair of Israel's medical association, Zion Hagay, decried the strike as a war crime and urged the international medical community to condemn it. This swift and unified condemnation by Israeli political and medical leadership underscores a striking contradiction: these same actors not only ignored but openly justified the destruction of Gaza's hospitals over the past two years. Since 7 October 2023, Israeli air strikes and ground invasions have decimated Gaza's healthcare infrastructure. The World Health Organisation has recorded around 700 attacks on healthcare facilities. Major hospitals - al-Shifa, Nasser and the Indonesian hospital, among others - have been besieged, bombed and dismantled. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Israeli officials frame these hospitals as military targets and Hamas 'shields'. Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, was placed under siege and then invaded, with the attack hailed by Israeli media as a victory. Meanwhile, the Israeli Medical Association remained silent. In one of its rare statements after a year and a half of Israel's repeated and targeted attacks on hospitals and civilian infrastructure, the association echoed the state's narrative, stating that health facilities and personnel must not be targeted 'unless these are being used as a base for terrorist activities'. Selective moral outrage What is especially striking about this moment is the selective moral outrage from Israeli officials. The same ministers who justified the systematic dismantling of Gaza's healthcare system now describe an attack on an Israeli hospital as a red line, a war crime. Herzog's sentimental imagery of doctors rushing between beds evokes the stark reality in Gaza, where health workers have been shot and shelled in operating rooms, imprisoned, or forced to abandon their patients under fire. International medical voices have played along. While many doctors and health workers have spoken out, many others have remained silent, with no real actions taken to hold Israel accountable. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war It would be a mistake to treat these official statements as being detached from the public mood in Israel. Most Israelis have defended the destruction of Gaza's healthcare infrastructure. Public discourse has normalised the idea that Palestinian hospitals are legitimate military targets, even celebrating their destruction in some cases. This normalisation is not incidental. It is part of a broader dehumanisation of Palestinians, where even a child under anaesthesia in a Gaza operating room is not seen as a victim, but as collateral damage or a 'shield'. The outrage over Soroka thus reveals a deeper truth: in the eyes of many institutions and audiences, some lives are inherently more valuable than others. When Israeli hospitals are struck, the world responds with empathy and urgency. When Palestinian hospitals are dismantled - patients killed in their beds, doctors arrested mid-surgery - the world hesitates, rationalises or remains silent. How can Palestinian medics 'cooperate' with Israeli health bodies during a genocide? Read More » This is not simply a double standard; it reflects an entrenched hierarchy of whose suffering matters. Israeli leaders speak today of moral lines, of civilians and children, of hospitals as sanctuaries. Yet for nearly two years, those very values have been systematically violated in Gaza, with hardly a whisper of regret. This situation reveals not only hypocrisy but also the cynical confidence that comes with impunity. It reflects how the boundaries of Israeli grief and outrage are drawn narrowly around Jewish Israeli lives, grounded in the certainty that Israel will face no consequences. This moment puts the international system to the test. While some medical and humanitarian groups have expressed concern, most international stakeholders have remained silent in the face of the destruction of Gaza's entire health system. Will medical journals, international associations and UN bodies respond to the attack on an Israeli hospital with the kind of swift condemnation and concrete actions they failed to take when hospitals in Gaza were bombed? The world should have acted when the first operating room was hit in Gaza. It should not take an Israeli facility being targeted for them to remember that hospitals are meant to be protected spaces. If an attack on a hospital is a red line, this must be true for all hospitals, not just those serving Israelis. If international law is to mean anything, it must protect everyone, with the same standards applied to every violation. Anything less is not only hypocrisy; it is complicity. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
The Independent
15 hours ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Rhetoric heats up and modern missiles evade defences as the conditions are set for yet more violence in the Middle East
Israel 's politicians have increased their threats against the lives of Iran 's leaders and compared Tehran's rulers to Nazis after a rocket hit a hospital in southern Israel. The growing campaign to stigmatize a regime, which has threatened genocide against Israel, is being matched by popular support for the mass removal of Palestinians from their lands. Itamar Ben Gvir, an Israeli minister and extreme rightist said: 'If the Nazis [in Iran] who launch missiles at hospitals, at the elderly and at children had atomic weapons, they would fire them in a heartbeat without even thinking. This is the most just campaign that Israel has ever embarked on in history." The same minister is an open advocate of driving Palestinians out of Gaza, where the IDF has conducted relentless waves of air strikes against medical facilities often claiming they have been used as military bases by Hamas. He is under sanctions imposed by the UK recently. Once seen as a dangerous extremist who drew much of his ideology from the philosophy of the banned Kach terrorist movement, Ben Gvir has seen an explosion of support for his demands that Gaza's 2.5 million people be driven out of the enclave. Some 82 per cent of Israeli Jews support the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. Fifty four percent strongly support this. The poll asked about 1,000 Jewish Israelis if they supported the idea that all the people in towns conquered by Israel should be killed - in the same way that Jericho was flattened in the bible. Forty seven per cent backed the idea of mass slaughter. This latest poll, by Pennsylvania State University, shows a higher level of support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza than some others. Israel's leading polls analyst Dahlia Sheindlin noted that the aChord polling organization found 60 per cent backing for the idea of mass expulsions from Gaza. Pen State's poll was conducted in March – long before the Israeli attacks on Iran and the retaliation missile strikes across the Jewish State. About a week into the Israeli campaign the IDF says that it has destroyed two thirds of Iran's missile sites, dominates the air space over Iran, and continues to smash its capacity to build nuclear weapons. But on Wednesday and Thursday Israelis were surprised, and terrified, to learn that Iran's Fatah-1 missile had been in action and some had evaded Israel's air defences. This may be because some have multiple warheads, or that the warheads themselves have the capacity to weave and jink through the air to avoid Israel's Arrow 2 and 3 air defence systems. Israel Katz, the Israeli defence minister, said that Iran's supreme leader ayatollah Ali Khamenei "is the modern-day Hitler' after an Iranian missile struck the Soroka Hospital in Beersheba. There is an IDF installation close by and the hospital is known to be an important medical facility for treating Israeli soldiers who have been wounded in Gaza. Katz said Kamenei is 'a man who has led a major power for decades, yet openly calls for the destruction of Israel and uses all resources at the expense of his own people." Israel has frequently accused Hamas of using hospitals and schools as human shields to explain the spiraling casualty figures from air strikes in Gaza, where at least 69 people were killed in the last 24 hours. Central Tel Aviv, where the IDF headquarters sits across a city block, has been targeted by Iran and is surrounded by schools. Just as the UK's own MoD is in central London, near schools and parliament itself. But Iran's leaders have repeatedly called for Israel's annihilation. And, allegedly, Tehran is getting close to producing a nuclear bomb inside a year. The Iranian civilian death toll is no longer released officially after it rose above 220. Meanwhile in Israel, 24 people are reported to have been killed. But as Israelis are frequently called a 'cancer' by Iranian leaders and Israelis call those leaders Nazis, the rhetorical space for more bloodletting and even atrocities grows.
Middle East Eye
20 hours ago
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Far-right Israeli minister calls for the arrest of anyone watching Al Jazeera
Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has once again demanded a crackdown on Al Jazeera's presence in Israel, claiming the network poses a 'threat' to national security. Speaking in a brief televised statement, carried live by Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera Mubasher, Ben-Gvir also urged police to take action against individuals found watching the channel inside the country. His remarks come weeks after Israel formally banned Al Jazeera's journalists and staff from operating within its borders in early May 2024. The Palestinian Authority imposed a similar ban months earlier, in January, effectively blocking the network's coverage from the occupied West Bank. Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (AFP)
