Crimes Against Humanity

Physicians accuse Israeli Medical Association of remaining silent as Palestinian healthcare is systematically destroyed.

Hundreds of doctors have gathered outside the World Medical Association (WMA) summit in the Netherlands, calling for the suspension of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) from the grouping of physicians.

On Saturday, 81 healthcare workers removed their scrubs and hung them in a line facing the WMA assembly in Rotterdam, each bearing the name of a Palestinian healthcare worker currently held in illegal Israeli detention.

It was part of a protest against the continued membership of the Israeli association in the WMA, “despite them breaching almost every ethical principle in the WMA’s Code of Medical Ethics”, the IMA Out! coalition that organised the demonstration said in a statement.

“These scrubs should not be empty. Our colleagues belong with their patients, not in Israeli prisons. Today, we literally placed their names at the WMA’s doorstep,” said Mejrem Ahmetaj, a general practitioner and member of IMA Out!.

Since October 2023, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed more than 1,700 Palestinian healthcare workers and destroyed nearly all the hospitals and healthcare facilities in the enclave.

The campaign accused the Israeli medical association of remaining silent as Palestinian healthcare has been systematically destroyed.

“The IMA is not a bystander. It defends these attacks and blocks international condemnation while Palestinian healthcare is being destroyed. That is not medical neutrality. That is complicity,” added Ahmetaj.

At a meeting of international doctors, medical leaders and human rights activists during the WMA summit on Thursday, the destruction of Palestinian healthcare and the responsibility of the international medical community were discussed, the campaign said.

“Our Palestinian colleagues are being killed and imprisoned, where they are starved and tortured. Their hospitals have been destroyed and patients driven out or murdered. The IMA has said and done nothing about these war crimes against health workers, patients and hospitals,” said a statement by Jonathan Fluxman on behalf of IMA OUT!.

“Thirty years of WMA dialogue with the IMA has done nothing but give the IMA a sense of impunity … It is time for national medical associations and the WMA to speak out and take action. Break your ties with the IMA and suspend the IMA from the WMA now,” he added.

The IMA OUT! campaign said it delivered a petition calling for the IMA’s suspension, signed by more than 6,500 health workers from around the world.

They also demanded accountability for the complicity of Israeli doctors in the starvation, torture and medical neglect of Palestinian prisoners.

Among those held by Israel is Dr Hussam Abu Safia, head of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, whose unlawful detention has prompted an international outcry.

He was briefly held at the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp and has been subject to torture and medical neglect. Doctors protesting in Rotterdam held up placards demanding his release.

Abu Safia’s son Elyas, addressing a meeting organised by the campaign, said, “My father and all Palestinian detainees must be treated in accordance with medical ethics, and doctors must abide by the Hippocratic oath they have taken. Care cannot be given based on whose life is deemed worthy.”

Gaza City – More than 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed since Israel launched its war on the besieged enclave in October 2023, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, turning whole neighbourhoods into rubble and wiping out much of its infrastructure.

For generations, Gaza’s streets, markets, schools, hospitals and public spaces formed the backdrop to everyday life. They were places where people worked, studied, shopped, met friends and family, and built memories.

Many of the city’s familiar landmarks also carried a much longer history, reflecting Gaza’s thousands of years as a crossroads of different civilisations.

The war has also changed the face of Gaza by damaging or destroying many of those historic and recognisable landmarks.

UNESCO has verified damage to 164 cultural sites since October 2023, including 128 buildings of historical or artistic interest, 14 religious sites, nine monuments, eight archaeological sites, two museums and three depositories of movable cultural property.

Among them are the Great Omari Mosque, Gaza’s oldest mosque, Qasr al-Basha, the ancient Samaritan Bathhouse, al-Qissariya Market and the Church of Saint Porphyrius complex.

Some of these places have been reduced to ruins, while others remain standing but heavily damaged. The destruction has altered not only individual buildings but the streets and neighbourhoods around them, removing landmarks that once helped people recognise and navigate their city.

This photo series contrasts archive images of some of Gaza’s most recognisable streets, markets and public buildings with new photographs taken three years into the war, showing how these familiar places have changed after years of bombardment and destruction.

Islamic Relief calls for international action as Gaza endures deadly Israeli attacks and worsening humanitarian conditions.

Israeli attacks have killed or wounded a Palestinian in Gaza every 90 minutes on average since the ceasefire was announced in October last year, the aid group Islamic Relief says.

Islamic Relief, a United Kingdom-based charity, said on Thursday that at least 1,454 Palestinians were killed and more than 5,000 wounded over the year. At least 320 of those killed were children, close to one a day.

Gaza’s Health Ministry reported that 1,471 Palestinians have been killed and 5,189 wounded since the ceasefire, including four killed and 28 wounded in the past 24 hours.

Israel has killed at least 74,254 people since October 2023, the ministry added.

On Thursday, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian southeast of Deir el-Balah, in central Gaza, and an Israeli air strike on a house in central Khan Younis wounded several people, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

In the occupied West Bank, a 13-year-old boy was shot in the foot during an Israeli raid on Yamoun, west of Jenin, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.

Islamic Relief said Israel has used the so-called Yellow Line, which marks the area under Israeli military control, to push Palestinians out of 65 percent of Gaza, crowding its nearly 2.1 million people into the remaining 35 percent.

According to the report, an Islamic Relief aid worker in Gaza whose name is withheld for their safety said: “There is no ceasefire in reality. They target displacement camps and crowded areas, so there is still a lot of fear.”

Israel continues to block shelter materials, fuel and medical supplies, the group said.

About 82 percent of Gaza’s structures are damaged or destroyed, more than half of health services have shut down and more than 20,000 severely ill patients are denied permission to leave for treatment.

The charity urged world leaders to increase pressure to protect civilians and uphold international law.

“A ceasefire in name only cannot be an excuse for international inaction,” it said.

When Huda Helassa, 20, left her home in Tal al-Hawa, southern Gaza city, in the first hours of the war, she took a signed T-shirt from the Access Microscholarship Program, a United States-funded programme that provides English-language and cultural education to young people.

Her classmates had signed the shirt on September 15, 2023, during their final class, two years before she graduated on September 27.

“When we left our home on the first day of the war, the T-shirt was one of the first things that came to my mind,” Huda says.

She put it in her bag almost instinctively, wanting to hold on to something from a part of her life that had ended just days earlier.

Huda and her family first moved to her grandmother’s house in Gaza City, then were displaced south, walking part of the way, and eventually reached Rafah in the south of the Palestinian territory.

In May 2024, they were displaced again, this time to Khan Younis. When they returned to Gaza in January 2025, they found their home completely burned.

“There was nothing left of the life we had there,” she says. “No belongings, no photographs, no memories we could hold onto, just the blackened walls.”

They were displaced again in April 2025, moving to Remal and then Tal al-Hawa, before moving to az-Zawayda in September and returning to Gaza in October. They are currently in Tal al-Hawa.

For Huda, the T-shirt remains a link to the life she had before the war, a period of learning, friendships and experiences that shaped her.

Israel’s bitter political divisions are particularly sharp before the country’s October elections. But the furious response to a new documentary about the military’s actions in the genocidal war on Gaza has revealed an issue that much of Israel’s political and media establishment appears united on.

Few of the central allegations in NAZA, made by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, are new. Reports that the Israeli military was relying on artificial intelligence systems to generate targets in Gaza, often killing the inhabitants of entire buildings to kill just one individual identified by the system, were reported in April 2024.

Other accusations against Israel, such as committing genocide, deliberately causing a famine, and unlawfully killing children, have also not received much attention in Israel.

In contrast, NAZA has unleashed a litany of abuse from across Israel, and brought the allegations to the centre of Israel’s political debate.

Culture Minister Miki Zohar reacted to the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival – where it received a 25-minute standing ovation – by calling for the directors to be stripped of their citizenship and to be investigated by the internal intelligence service for treason.

Army chief Eyal Zamir has dismissed the film as being built on blood libel and ordered a legal probe to hunt down its military and intelligence sources.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also cited the film when advancing legislation to revoke citizenship from anyone deemed to be smearing the country’s soldiers, while in the coastal city of Ashdod, graffiti branding the directors “traitors” has appeared on the walls.

“You can’t really understand the extent of the madness from outside of the country,” Orly Noy, an editor at Local Call, which first carried many of the accusations contained in the film, said. “They’re attacking the friends and families of [the filmmakers] Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. They’re talking about revoking their citizenship. They’re asking the Shin Bet to investigate them – for making a film, and it isn’t just the politicians. Journalists, who you might expect to show some kind of solidarity with them, are competing to attack them. It’s scary.”

Denial

In late 2025, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported escalating censorship and harassment in Israel, with Israeli journalists telling the organisation that the media’s approach had become “part of the war effort” and, by extension, significantly shaped Israeli view of their war on Gaza.

In October 2025, a study by the Israeli think tank Molad found that only 3 percent of Channel 12’s coverage of the first six months of the war mentioned Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. Of 206 war-related images and video clips broadcast by the network, Israel’s most-watched channel, only two showed Palestinian civilian casualties.

Nevertheless, before the film’s release, polls found that most Israelis believed the coverage they were receiving of the military’s conduct in Gaza was balanced.

“I guess it was because the mainstream media outlets in Israel did not investigate the conduct of the army during the war in Gaza, and hardly covered the war from the Palestinian point of view,” Anat Saragusti, the Israeli jurist and journalist responsible for press freedom at the Union of Journalists in Israel, said of the shock that had accompanied the release of the film. “[The Israeli media] hardly reported on the human toll and the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

Compounding the gap, Saragusti said, was a deep-seated national narrative: that the war had been imposed on Israel, that Hamas had carried out a massacre on October 7, 2023, and that Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields made mass casualties in Gaza all but unavoidable.

Palestinian deaths, in this telling, were framed less as the product of Israeli conduct than as collateral damage forced on Israel by its enemy’s tactics, she said.

Lynch mobs

“Even journalists that usually support the anti-Netanyahu bloc have criticised the filmmakers,” Israeli political sociologist Daniel Bar-Tal said.

“Israeli Jews deny the genocide,” he continued, “Even all the opposition parties joined the vicious criticism of the filmmakers.”

The language used against the filmmakers has been echoed by some of Netanyahu’s most prominent political rivals.

On Monday, former military chief and one of Netanyahu’s principal rivals Gadi Eisenkot denounced the film for “moral blindness, a detachment from reality, and harm to the State of Israel in a difficult hour”.

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who is also running in October’s election, called the film a “horrific blood libel against our sons and daughters”.

“Everything gets heightened the closer to the election we get,” Noy said. “But I think only now, for those of us who live here, is the extent of the fascism becoming clear. Journalists, politicians and the media are forming some kind of incitement machine.”

“I’ve had anxieties over where Israel had been going for a long time,” she said, “but right now I’m genuinely worried for my friends and colleagues.”

The mission also said Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity during their crackdown on protests in late 2025 and early this year.

The United States likely committed “war crimes” in Iran when it launched a pair of air strikes that killed at least 178 civilians, including women and children, a United Nations fact-finding mission has found.

The report by the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran on Thursday also accused Iran of human rights violations and crimes against humanity during protests last year and in early 2026.

The mission referred to the US attack on Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, which killed over 150 people – including approximately 120 children – on February 28, when the US and Israel launched their war against Iran.

The mission also referred to the US air strike on a “clearly identifiable” sports complex and residential area in Lamerd the same day, where precision strike missiles dispersed clouds of tungsten pellets, killing 22 civilian men and women.

The findings, to be submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, examined the US’s conduct during the Iran war and the Iranian government’s response to nationwide unrest that began in late December.

US air strikes against civilians

The attack on the school in Minab was conducted with the use of Tomahawk missiles.

“The Mission concluded that when identifying and directing its attack against the primary school in Minab, whose civilian nature is apparent, the US failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify that it was a military objective,” the report stated.

The report’s authors said that photographs and videos depicting the school before and after the strike showed “readily identifiable features” that it was associated with an educational facility for young children.

“These included child-oriented murals painted on exterior walls, school signage, and playground areas,” said the UN report.

“According to public reporting, satellite imagery of the school before the strike also appears to show human figures, readily identifiable as children, gathered in its courtyard.”

Following the strike, state-affiliated media showed widespread destruction at the site, including parents holding the body parts of their children, and bloodied backpacks and schoolbooks.

“Several families lost more than one child, reflecting the devastating impact of the attack on families and the wider community,” the report said.

In June, US President Donald Trump said that “nobody” purposefully attacked a girls’ school in Iran in February, citing an investigation into the incident, for which the Pentagon has not yet published any findings.

Regarding the strike in Lamerd, the mission similarly found that the sports centre attacked was “visibly separate” from an adjacent compound belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The US Central Command said in a statement in March that US forces did not launch any strikes into the city of Lamerd on that day.

Iran protests

The UN mission additionally accused Iran of repressing demonstrators during the country’s 2025-2026 protests through an internet shutdown, unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and severe restrictions on freedom of expression.

It also stated that the number of deaths and injuries by state forces is much higher than the government’s reported toll – which says 3,038 people were killed and 25,000 people injured – but could not verify exact numbers.

Tehran claims the majority of deaths occurred due to “rioters” during the protests backed by exiled opponents and the US and Israel.

The UN fact-finding mission urged Iran and the US to immediately end hostilities, provide reparations to victims, and seek permanent peace through diplomatic means.

Prosecutors have requested a 45-year jail sentence for Thaci and three wartime commanders accused of war crimes.

The Kosovo war crimes tribunal will on Wednesday deliver its verdicts in the case of former President Hashim Thaci and several wartime commanders accused of murder and torture during the self-declared republic’s break from Serbia.

Thaci, 58, is facing several counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, torture and persecution, along with three former commanders from the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a separatist militia that fought Serbian troops.

Thaci and the other former high-ranking commanders, Jakup Krasniqi, Rexhep Selimi and Kadri Veseli, deny the charges.

Prosecutors have requested 45-year prison sentences for each of the men.

The case is extremely contentious within Kosovo, where Thaci remains a revered figure for many Kosovan Albanians due to his role in the 1998-99 independence war.

On Saturday, tens of thousands gathered in the capital, Pristina, to call for their acquittal in the latest of several rallies since the trial began. Portraits of the four former KLA fighters have been plastered across the city along with a huge digital clock counting down to the verdicts.

“In the name of the people, declare them innocent,” one banner read.

According to prosecutors, the men targeted political opponents and civilians perceived as collaborators and traitors during their time in the KLA.

Thaci’s lawyers argued in February there is no evidence that directly links him to any of the crimes.

“There are no orders in the record from Thaci to perpetrators of crimes. There are no reports from perpetrators of crimes to Thaci,” lawyer Luka Misetic told judges at the Kosovo tribunal in February.

Most of the 13,000 people who died in the war in Kosovo were ethnic Albanians. A 78-day campaign of NATO air attacks against Serbian forces ended the fighting. About one million ethnic Albanian Kosovars were driven from their homes.

In 2008, Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia, a move that Belgrade refuses to recognise. Ties between Kosovo and Serbia remain tense, despite years of negotiations mediated by the European Union.