Israel Bombed a Journalist in His Hospital Bed and Executed a Child Witness

The future of humanity depends on holding the powerful to account—before impunity becomes the world's default setting.

This morning, as the world scrolled through yet another headline written to justify another Israeli war crime, Israel assassinated a journalist recovering in a hospital bed.

Hassan Eslayeh, a reporter who has been documenting the struggle for liberation in Gaza since 2009, was bombed inside the burn unit of Nasser Hospital—where he was being treated for injuries sustained during a previous Israeli assassination attempt on April 7. He survived the drone strike suffering from skull fractures, shrapnel wounds, severe burns, and two amputated fingers.

“It would not be difficult for the occupation to assassinate me again, especially with the increasing incitement I hear and see against me. They may target me inside the hospital, in this room of mine. What can I do?” Hassan told Mondoweiss from his hospital bed just week ago.

Today, Israel did just that. A missile tore through the ward in the early hours, extinguishing one more voice in yet another obscene experiment in impunity. Israel wasn’t testing weapons; it was testing the world’s limits. And apparently, we have none.

Remember when Israel bombed the first hospital in Gaza and the world refused to believe it? When Israel and Biden insisted it was a misfired Hamas rocket? Now, Israel has destroyed nearly every single hospital in Gaza. It has repeatedly attacked dozens of them. Every hospital is in rubble: Nasser, Al-Shifa, Kamal Adwan, European—destroyed. Bombed courtyards. Crumbled wards.

In the latest strike on the European Hospital’s courtyard, At least 28 people have been killed and around 70 wounded as a result of Israeli strikes on and around Gaza’s European Hospital, including journalists like Abdel Raouf Shaat, Mohammed Al‑Amour, and Abro Tabash, each wounded by shrapnel.

British surgeon Tom Potokar who was inside Gaza’s European Hospital during the Israeli strike, says the facility is now too damaged to take patients to surgery and that this was supposed to be a deconflict zone where children with cancer were waiting to be evacuated.

This is not collateral damage. It’s methodical erasure. This isn't war and “self-defense” — It’s a deliberate and public test of how far impunity can go.

57 Palestinian children have starved to death in Gaza, according to the World Health Organization. If this blockade continues, nearly 71,000 children under five will slip into acute malnutrition over the next eleven months. In Geneva, Dr. Rik Peeperkorn—the World Health Organization’s voice in the Occupied Palestinian Territory—made the grim calculation: Israel’s total aid embargo has drained WHO’s supplies to feed 500 malnourished kids—a cruel fraction of what’s desperately needed.

“People are trapped in this cycle,” he warned, “where lack of diverse food, malnutrition, and disease feed on each other.” And make no mistake: the damage of this hunger isn’t measured in weeks or months, but in lifetimes—stunted bodies, dulled minds, shattered health that echo across generations. While aid convoys remain parked at border crossings, Netanyahu is now saying there’s “no way” Israel will halt its war on the besieged Gaza Strip even if a deal is reached to release more captives.

“We’ve set up an administration that will allow them [Gazans] to leave, but our problem is one thing — we need countries willing to take them. That’s what we’re working on now. If you give them the opportunity to leave, I’m telling you that more than 50% will go — and in my opinion, many more. But Hamas will not be there,” Netanyahu said.

How twisted that Benjamin Netanyahu can stand before the world and brag about having rendered Gaza “unlivable,” as if the ashes of a ravaged people are mere collateral in his grand strategy. He speaks of “evacuations” with the cold detachment of a bureaucrat tallying spreadsheets, laying bare the true aim: ethnic cleansing by any means necessary. In his own words, he admits that their goal is to push Palestinians out—starved, bombed, and silenced—until there is no one left to resist. And he dares to call this a victory.

Mohammed Bardawil, who is just 12 years old, was shot and killed by Israeli forces on Saturday in the Mawasi area of Gaza today. He was one of only four surviving eyewitnesses to the March 2024 execution of 15 paramedics, rescue workers, and UN staff in Rafah—a massacre carried out by the Israeli military.

Mohammed had bravely testified that some of the medics were shot at point-blank range—“from one meter away.” He was also interviewed by The New York Times for their investigation into the killings, though the most incriminating parts of his account were ultimately left out of the published report.

He and his father, Saeed Bardawil, had been abducted during the massacre by Israeli officer Major Nikolai Ashurov and his unit. They were later forced to assist in the evacuation of Tal al-Sultan, a role the Israeli military would later point to as "evidence" that civilians weren't being deliberately targeted—conveniently omitting that Mohammed and his father were spared only to serve operational purposes.

Mohammed was due to give further testimony to investigators—this time with pediatric psychologists present, but Israel erased him before he could bear witness.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces shot a Palestinian man in the legs, then kicked him while he’s on the ground, stomping on his head.

If 215 journalists can be killed in Gaza, if journalists can be slaughtered in their hospital beds, and Western newsrooms still frame these as “targeted operations” that fit under some sort of make believe “self-defense” justification, when the facts consistently defy this narrative, then journalism, like accountability, is also dead.

Meanwhile in Washington, over 550 retired Israeli security officials—former heads of Mossad, Shin Bet, IDF generals—have urged President Trump to reject Netanyahu’s war, secure hostages, end the killings, and oppose West Bank annexation. Their call is clear: this path leads only to destruction.

And in the UK, as the government tries to defend its decision to supply F-35 parts to Israel in court, activists have dropped an 80-foot banner over Waterloo bridge demanding an end to arms sales to Israel.

Even some editorial boards are slowly starting to state the obvious:

• Financial Times: “The West’s shameful silence on Gaza.”

• The Economist: “The war in Gaza must end.”

• The Guardian: “What is this, if not genocidal?”

• The Independent: “End the deafening silence on Gaza.”

Nothing we say will stop the next missile from tearing through a hospital ward, nor will it rebuild the classrooms and clinics reduced to dust—or revive the 100,000 lives erased in Gaza’s rubble. Yet silence is complicity. Only real pressure—arms embargoes, diplomatic isolation, ICC indictments—can crack the fortress of impunity. That means the very governments that shield Israel today must choose between business as usual and the rule of law. And it means each of us must be louder, more insistent: justice is not an option, it is an obligation.

If we allow unchecked atrocity to pass without consequence, we forfeit the principle that makes any of us safe. The future of humanity depends on holding the powerful to account—before impunity becomes the world’s default setting.