18 States Demand Ceasefire Compliance After Israel Strikes Gaza Hospital

Foreign ministers from eighteen Arab and Islamic states issued a joint statement on Saturday demanding that Israel uphold the Gaza ceasefire, protect medical facilities and permit the safe, sustained and unrestricted delivery of humanitarian aid. The intervention followed Israel’s November 12 strike on the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, one of the Gaza Strip’s principal remaining hospitals.

Associated Press reported that the strike hit Nasser’s surgical wing shortly after midnight, killing six people, including general surgeon Dr. Rizk Abu Shaira and a 13-year-old boy, and wounding at least 28. Reuters had earlier reported at least five people killed and 20 wounded, citing Gaza’s civil defense. Both accounts described serious damage to the surgery department; hospital officials said services were suspended.

Israel’s military acknowledged carrying out the strike. It said it targeted a Hamas commander and other fighters who were using the hospital complex for military activity. AP reported that the commander named by Israel was not among those killed. Hospital officials and a British volunteer surgeon said no warning had been given, while Israel said it had repeatedly demanded an end to military activity at the site. The competing claims remain partly impossible to verify independently because international reporters lack free access to Gaza.

The November 14 statement was signed by the foreign ministers of Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Türkiye and the United Arab Emirates. It said attacks on medical sites and displaced people were undermining the ceasefire and called on Washington and the Board of Peace to press for full implementation of the agreement.

The statement matters because it converts outrage over one attack into a coordinated diplomatic demand about the ceasefire’s meaning. A ceasefire that leaves hospitals exposed, blocks shelter material or allows daily attacks to continue cannot deliver civilian security. The signatories are also insisting that urgent aid should not be held hostage to bargaining over later political phases.

That warning comes amid a worsening winter emergency. A United Nations humanitarian report published November 13 said flooding had affected about 46,000 Gaza households and damaged more than 40,000 family shelters. It also said aid operations were constrained by Israeli restrictions and funding shortages, while sewage-contaminated water, interrupted health services and medicine shortages increased public-health risks.

ARCHIVE — Residents walk along Jalal Street in Khan Younis on July 7, 2024. Photo: Rawanmurad2025 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0.

The regional statement places special pressure on the United States. Washington helped shape the ceasefire framework and remains Israel’s decisive military and diplomatic backer. By explicitly calling on the United States to secure compliance, the signatories reject the idea that American mediation can be separated from American leverage. If the agreement is to retain credibility, protection for hospitals and access for relief supplies have to be treated as enforceable obligations, not optional gestures.

That principle is especially urgent in Khan Younis, where Nasser serves a vast displaced population and a health system depleted by repeated attacks, shortages and staff losses. Pamphlets has documented how winter flooding is already driving respiratory illness through displacement camps. Destroying surgical capacity while shelter and sanitation conditions deteriorate compounds those pressures and transfers the cost of political failure onto patients, medical workers and families.

The economic consequences are inseparable from the humanitarian ones. Palestinian workers have endured mass job losses and the collapse of ordinary movement and production. The ILO-backed recovery plan discussed earlier this week depends on functioning institutions and predictable access. Hospitals are part of that social infrastructure; their destruction weakens any credible path from emergency relief to recovery.

The eighteen-state declaration does not itself enforce the ceasefire. But it sets a clear public test: Israel must protect civilians and medical facilities, lift obstacles to essential aid and allow United Nations agencies and humanitarian organizations to work. The United States, meanwhile, must decide whether its diplomacy will be measured by announcements or by compliance on the ground. Without those steps, the ceasefire risks becoming a label placed over continuing war.

Sources: Joint statement; Associated Press; Reuters; UN OCHA.

Cover: FILE — A Palestinian Ministry of Health ambulance outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis after an October 7, 2023 strike. Photo: Tasnim News Agency / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0; adapted by cropping for the V9 card.