Israel has killed over 700 medical workers and injured nearly 1,000 since October 7

According to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO), Israeli forces have injured and killed hundreds of health workers in Gaza since October.

Israel has attacked health facilities at least 450 times since October 7, the UN agency said. In these and other attacks, at least 723 health workers were killed and another 924 injured, according to the WHO report.

The attacks have severely hampered the ability of health workers to treat people in urgent need of medical attention, while Israel bombards Gaza, tearing limbs off children, burning displaced people alive and destroying virtually all of Gaza’s health and sanitation infrastructure. At the same time, Israel has imposed a brutal blockade on humanitarian aid in the region, forcing millions of Palestinians to face the threat of starvation and the rapid spread of disease in dangerously overcrowded and unsanitary refugee camps.

No hospital in Gaza is currently at full capacity, the WHO reported. The Kuwait Hospital in Rafah, for example, was completely closed on Monday after an Israeli airstrike killed at least two health workers near its entrance.

Israeli attacks on Rafah on Sunday also killed at least 45 Palestinians – many of them children – who had sought refuge in a refugee camp in Rafah. Another 249 were injured, many seriously, including people with severed limbs and severe burns. The attack took place less than a mile from a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) medical facility.

“We are appalled by this deadly event, which once again shows that nowhere is safe,” the organization said in a social media post.

Witnesses described gruesome scenes from the weekend’s attacks, including charred corpses, a child decapitated by the blast and a paramedic carrying a man whose brain had been blown out.

“We had to recover severed limbs and dead children,” said Layan al-Fayoum, a young Palestinian teenager who survived the massacre.

Abo Sebah, a refugee camp resident who fled central Gaza in January after Israeli forces killed three of his children and his grandchild, said the attack was aimed at furthering Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign, noting:

We have never seen resistance fighters here. The fighters are in the fighting zones in eastern Rafah. The Israelis only say that to justify their actions. They want to kill the Palestinian people, forcibly expel them and destroy their homes.

Despite international outrage over the massacre, Israeli forces appear to be intensifying their attacks on Rafah, with reports saying tanks have entered the city and are approaching the centre.

Israel’s bloody siege of Rafah, which began earlier this month, forced nearly a million Palestinians to flee again after Israel lured them into the city under the pretext that it was a “security zone”.

“There are many attacks, smoke and dust,” said a resident Reuters“It is the death of God… They (Israelis) are striking everywhere. We are tired.”

Israeli forces have continued their attacks even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to halt its assault on the city. Although the order is legally binding, the ICJ has no enforcement mechanisms to compel countries to comply with its orders. Before Friday’s ruling, Israeli politicians had said they would defy any order from the international body.

Since Israel began its genocidal bombing and starvation campaign in October, Israeli forces in Gaza have killed more than 36,000 Palestinians – 15,000 of them children – and injured over 80,000 others. The death toll is likely to be much higher than previously recorded, as thousands of people are missing and believed to be buried under the rubble.