By Humaira Ahad / PRESS TV
The unbridled Israeli aggression against Iran has extended to the healthcare system as well, with airstrikes targeting at least three hospitals and six ambulances in one week.
These attacks have killed many medical professionals, including a female gynaecologist and a paediatrician with her 3-year-old child, while injuring many other healthcare workers.
The indiscriminate assault on Iran’s medical community is part of a broader pattern of violence that echoes the systematic destruction of hospitals and clinics in Gaza amid the genocide that completed 600 days recently.
It lays bare, yet again, the Israeli regime’s flagrant disregard for international humanitarian law and the West’s glaring double standards in reacting to such atrocities.
“We are facing a regime that does not recognize any boundary, any law, or any humanitarian principles,” Iran’s health minister Dr. Mohammad Reza Zafarqandi said earlier this week, condemning the Israeli strikes. “Even medical workers and patients are not spared.”
One of the latest attacks occurred in the early hours of June 20, when Israeli rockets struck a hospital in Tehran. According to health ministry spokesman Dr. Hossein Kermanpour, it marked the third hospital in the capital to be targeted within a week, as part of a wave of aggression that began with the Zionist regime’s terrorist assault on Iran on June 13th.
“Six ambulances and a comprehensive health service center have also been brutally attacked by the Zionist enemy,” Kermanpour said. “There have been at least six violations of international conventions in the past seven days.”
Despite the gravity of these attacks, Western governments have been mute spectators, offering no condemnation of Israel’s assault on Iran’s healthcare community. “If healthcare workers in any Western nation were attacked in this way, the outrage would be immediate and global,” said Zafarqandi. “But when it is Iran—or Palestine—it seems no law applies.”
Israel has targeted three hospitals and six ambulances so far, Iran’s Health Minister Mohammadreza Zafarghandi said.
Despite repeated acts of aggression against Iranian medical facilities, Western media outlets have largely ignored the Zionist regime’s deliberate strikes on hospitals and ambulances.
Instead, they have amplified a false Israeli claim that Iran attacked Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, located in the occupied territories. While the hospital was not directly hit—as Iran targeted a nearby Israeli military site—Israeli President Isaac Herzog shared images of doctors and infants in intensive care, while the regime’s health minister Uriel Buso condemned the strike as a “war crime.”
Global analysts and observers have described Israel’s response as a clear example of deliberate double standards.
Regime officials were quick to criticize Iran for a strike near a military target, yet have been leveling hospitals across Gaza since October 7, 2023. While entire medical complexes were reduced to rubble and patients buried beneath the debris in the besieged Strip, the Zionist entity continued to justify the bombardment under false pretexts.
Photos show victims of the Israeli airstrikes on Tehran being treated at Rasool Akram Hospital.
Gaza’s healthcare system: Facing a catastrophe
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 94 percent of hospitals in Gaza have been either destroyed or rendered non-functional by Israeli bombing campaigns. Since the launch of Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged strip on October 7, 2023, the Zionist regime has destroyed all Palestinian hospitals, including Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, and the Gaza European Hospital.
Other hospitals in Rafah, northern Gaza, and central Gaza City have been completely flattened. Ambulance convoys and mobile clinics have been bombed mid-transit in targeted attacks, killing scores.
Last month, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based human rights organization, declared that the “pattern of attacks (on medical facilities) showed intent beyond battlefield necessity.”
“These attacks are not merely aimed at physical infrastructure or health facilities alone. They are designed to engineer slow death, pushing Gaza toward total collapse by depriving civilians of even the most basic means of survival,” Euro-Med reported.
A report by the United Nations found that Israel’s pattern of deadly attacks on and near hospitals in Gaza “pushed the healthcare system to the brink of total collapse, with catastrophic effect on Palestinians’ access to health and medical care.”
Speaking to Press TV, head of Iran’s Red Crescent Society, Pirhossein Koulivand, condemned Israeli attacks on Iranian hospitals, describing the attacks as war crimes.
The silence that kills
Analysts warn that if global criminal silence persists, the impunity that led to the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals may become a dangerous precedent for further acts of devastation by the Israeli regime in other places.
The absence of international condemnation following attacks on Iranian and Palestinian medical facilities has exposed a disturbing breakdown in the global commitment to human rights and the protection of civilians, as per experts.
In both Gaza and Tehran, hospitals have come under deliberate attack, which constitutes a clear violation of international law. Yet, global institutions remain conspicuously silent, failing to hold the regime accountable for its war crimes.
Israel has repeatedly breached the Geneva Conventions, which are designed to protect civilians and medical personnel during armed conflict.
In Gaza, entire healthcare systems have been reduced to rubble. Now, in Iran, doctors and paramedics are being directly targeted. In both instances, Israel is systematically assaulting healthcare infrastructure and personnel in blatant defiance of international legal norms.
