Online Reporter
Ivan Zhakata
Herald Correspondent
PALESTINIAN Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Dr Tamer Almassri, has denounced a recent Israeli airstrike that killed nine children belonging to a prominent Gaza pediatrician, Dr Alaa al-Najjar.
The children were killed at the Nasser Medical Complex while their mother was on duty treating victims of bombings.
“This is not just an attack on one family—it is an assault on every Palestinian life, every home, every hope for peace,” Ambassador Almassri said in a statement.
The strike has ignited renewed outrage in Gaza and beyond as the death toll in the besieged enclave continues to rise.
According to Palestinian health officials, the ongoing Israeli assault has now claimed at least 53 939 lives, with nearly 122 000 injured, many of them women and children.
Dr Alaa al-Najjar, a respected figure in Gaza’s overstretched healthcare system, had left her home to save lives — only to return to a personal tragedy of unimaginable scale.
“She saved the children of others,” said a colleague at Nasser Hospital, “while her own were taken.”
Ambassador Almassri has called the targeting of medical personnel and their families a heinous war crime that demands global accountability.
“The world must no longer turn a blind eye,” Ambassador Almassri said.
“The killing of Dr al-Najjar’s children is not an isolated incident. It is part of a systematic campaign to terrorise our people into submission. This is a genocidal war on our children, our doctors, our future.”
Healthcare workers in Gaza have paid an especially heavy price in the 19-month-long war.
At least 1 400 doctors, nurses, paramedics and medical staff have been killed, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
Many have perished in clearly marked ambulances or while tending to the wounded inside hospitals now reduced to rubbles.
In a separate attack early Monday, 36 displaced civilians sheltering in a school were also killed in an Israeli airstrike—another grim chapter in which Palestinians describe as an unrelenting assault on every semblance of civilian life.
Humanitarian organisations report that emergency crews are unable to access many bombed-out areas due to constant bombardment, leaving countless victims buried beneath collapsed buildings.
“The silence of the international community is not neutrality—it is complicity,” Ambassador Almassri said.
“Every hour of inaction is another child buried, another mother broken, another hospital turned into a graveyard.”
The State of Palestine has called on the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and all nations with a conscience to take immediate action to halt the attacks and hold Israel accountable under international law.
As Gaza reels from one of the deadliest periods in its history, Dr Alaa al-Najjar continues to serve at the hospital that could not protect her children — her heartbreak now emblematic of a nation’s grief and defiance.
