- More than 560 aid workers have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, according to UN figure
- Staff from UN agencies and other local and international organizations have been targeted in Israeli strikes
- Victims include more than 360 UNRWA personnel, along with Palestinian and international staff from Doctors Without Borders, World Central Kitchen and other groups
- UN experts say Israeli is committing ‘medicide’ to create ‘conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza’
ISTANBUL
Two years into Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, the toll on the humanitarian community is staggering, with the enclave becoming a graveyard for those who sought to ease suffering.
Latest figures from the UN show Israeli forces have killed at least 562 humanitarian workers, including 376 UN staff members – men and women who delivered food, treated the wounded, ran schools and managed shelters.
This report documents the scale of those losses and traces how Israeli attacks – on convoys, hospitals and residential homes – have systematically dismantled Gaza’s humanitarian response.
Aid groups under fire
The losses have not been evenly spread across the humanitarian field, but have fallen most heavily on organizations with deep roots and wide networks inside Gaza.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which operates schools, shelters and health services across the enclave, has paid the highest price. More than 360 of its staff members have been killed, often alongside their families in strikes on homes and shelters.
Previous UNRWA reports showed 102 staff members had been killed by November 2023, rising to 171 by March 2024, 182 in April 2024, and 202 by July 2024.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), a backbone of Gaza’s emergency response, has lost 54 staff and volunteers.
On March 23, 2024, Israeli troops opened fire on a convoy of 15 Palestinian emergency responders, including from the UN and the Palestinian Red Crescent, traveling in clearly marked vehicles on a mission to help wounded colleagues. All were killed. Soldiers then bulldozed the vehicles and buried the bodies in shallow graves.
“They were here to save lives. Instead, they ended up in a mass grave,” said Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Palestine.
Global charities targeted
International charities have also been targeted in Israeli attacks.
Just days after the massacre of the emergency responders, on April 1, 2024, Israeli drones struck a three-car convoy belonging to World Central Kitchen (WCK) as it left a warehouse in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza carrying aid.
The convoy, clearly marked with WCK’s logo and pre-coordinated with the Israeli army, was nonetheless hit, killing seven aid workers from Australia, Canada, the US, Gaza, Poland and the UK. The attack drew international outrage and forced WCK to suspend operations in Gaza, worsening food shortages in a territory already facing famine.
The charity, which runs community kitchens in crisis zones around the world, resumed work but continued to face attacks. In the summer of 2024, shrapnel from an Israeli airstrike killed 37-year-old Nadi Salem Awad Salout, a Palestinian father of four who had been instrumental in establishing WCK’s operations in Rafah. Later that year, in November, another Israeli strike in Khan Younis claimed the lives of two more WCK staff members.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has also seen repeated staff deaths over the past two years.
Earlier this week, it reported that an Israeli strike in Deir al-Balah killed one staff member – the 14th since October 2023 – and seriously wounded four others.
“All staff were wearing MSF vests, clearly identifying them as medical humanitarian workers,” read an MSF statement.
Save the Children confirmed two colleagues were killed in separate incidents. One died in an Oct. 30, 2024, airstrike in Khan Younis while walking home from a mosque. Another was killed in December 2023 along with his wife and four children when their residential building was hit.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has reported four deaths among its personnel, while the World Health Organization (WHO) lost a staff member, Dima Abdullatif Mohammed Alhaj, when her parents’ home in southern Gaza was bombed in November 2023.
Others in Israeli crosshairs
Smaller community-based organizations have not been spared.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) condemned the killing of three partners from Palestinian organizations Ard el-Insan and Juzoor in October 2024.
On Sept. 7, 2025, an airstrike on the Aisha Association for Women and Child Protection in Gaza City killed a staff member, while that same day a supervisor at the Tamer Institute for Community Education died with her child when their home was hit.
Hospitals, too, have been repeatedly struck by Israeli bombardment.
In a particularly brutal incident on Aug. 25, 2025, Israel bombed Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. As rescuers and journalists rushed to tend to the wounded and report the story, Israel struck again. At least 20 people, among them four health workers and five journalists, were killed.
Continuous bombardment of UNRWA facilities and hospitals such as Al-Awda has claimed more lives, eroding what little remains of Gaza’s health system.
The killings have drawn sharp international condemnation. UN officials and human rights groups argue that deliberate strikes on convoys and hospitals violate international humanitarian law and could amount to war crimes.
Over the past two years, Israel has killed more than 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, and wounded nearly 170,000, according to figures from Palestinian authorities confirmed by the UN and other international organizations.
A UN independent international commission of inquiry concluded last month that Israel is committing genocide in the enclave, where its siege and blockade on aid has also triggered a famine that has killed more than 450 Palestinians, including over 150 children.
Earlier in August, UN experts warned that Israel’s targeted destruction of Gaza’s health system amounts to “medicide.”
In a statement, UN special rapporteurs Tlaleng Mofokeng and Francesca Albanese accused Israel of “deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics and hospitals to wipe out medical care in the besieged enclave.”
“In addition to bearing witness to an ongoing genocide we are also bearing witness to a ‘medicide,’ a sinister component of the intentional creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza which constitutes an act of genocide,” the experts said.
