Beirut, Lebanon – Israel’s attacks on Lebanon are putting a huge strain on the Lebanese healthcare system, with experts and analysts saying it is part of an effort to get people out of the south of the country.
A month after the latest intensification of attacks on Lebanon, Israel has killed 53 medical workers, destroyed 87 ambulances or medical centers and forced five hospitals to close, according to Lebanon’s public health ministry.
“The Israeli attacks and widespread evacuation orders are driving people away from care and reducing space for health services,” Luna Hammad, Lebanon medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), told Al Jazeera.
Destruction of health care spurs displacement
On March 2, Israel again escalated its war on Lebanon after Hezbollah responded to Israeli attacks for the first time in more than a year.
The Iran-backed group Hezbollah claimed the attack was retaliation for the US-Israeli assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei two days earlier. Despite more than 10,000 recorded Israeli ceasefire violations by the UN and the killing of hundreds of Lebanese people, the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was apparently in effect from November 27, 2024.
Israel used the Hezbollah attack as justification to expand its attacks across Lebanon and issue mass forced evacuation orders to the south of the country and the southern suburbs of Beirut, traditionally areas where Hezbollah enjoys strong support. Now, 1.2 million people have been displaced from their homes, while Israeli forces have launched an offensive into the south, with Israeli officials declaring their intention to annex the area, establish a so-called security zone and destroy more villages across the border.
The destruction in southern Lebanon comes amid the devastation of the region’s healthcare infrastructure, including attacks on medical personnel, ambulances, civil protection centers and hospitals.
“We have seen direct attacks on some health facilities,” Dr. Abdinasir Abubakar, the World Health Organization (WHO) representative in Lebanon, told Al Jazeera. He also cited the displacement of health workers as part of the degradation of Lebanon’s healthcare sector.
On Tuesday, Jabal Amel University Hospital in Tyre, on the southern Lebanese coast, was attacked for the fifth time. Five hospitals have been forced to evacuate in the last month.
Even before the war with Israel, Lebanon’s healthcare system was in poor shape due to complex crises including the 2019 financial crisis and the 2023–2024 war. But since March 2, 2026, tensions have increased due to Israeli attacks and large-scale displacement. Amid the month-long United States-Israel war over Iran, there have also been Iranian attacks on Gulf countries, disrupting shipping routes for vital medicine and supplies.
The destruction of health care infrastructure has also led to mass displacement, health care professionals say. It’s all part of what they consider a broader strategy: to make South Lebanon uninhabitable.
“You can’t live in a place where there is no basic medical care, and of course it has now created a strain on the health facilities here with people displaced because you now have over a million additional people who will need the health system here,” a doctor treating displaced people in Beirut told Al Jazeera.
trend of killing medical workers
The large number of displaced people also means that health facilities are under greater pressure than before. According to Abubakar, emergency room admissions have increased sharply.
Dr. Hassan Wazni is the director general of the Nabih Berri government hospital in Nabatieh in southern Lebanon. Israeli attacks on Nabatieh and surrounding villages have been intense. Wazni told Al Jazeera by phone that many patients requiring treatment such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy and dialysis have been transferred to the north.
And then there are direct attacks on the health care system, including physicians. Some of those attacks include reports of double-tap attacks, where an initial attack occurs and a second attack occurs after first responders have gathered.
On March 28 alone, WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, counted nine paramedics killed and seven injured in five separate attacks. And while such attacks have increased in recent times, the pattern is precedential, with Israel killing more than 107 first responders in Lebanon between late 2023 and 2024.
Attacks on Lebanon’s healthcare infrastructure and medical personnel have been documented by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which noted “repeated, apparently deliberate attacks on medical personnel in Lebanon”, according to Ramzi Qais, HRW’s Lebanon researcher. “This trend, the killing of medical personnel, has not stopped despite more than 270 health workers and paramedics being killed as a result of Israeli attacks in Lebanon,” he said.
Medical personnel and health care facilities are protected under international humanitarian law. Israel’s attacks on physicians in 2024 were described by HRW as an outright war crime.
Attacks on health care infrastructure in times of war are not new. Forensic Architecture, a research group that investigates state violence and human rights violations, said Israel had carried out “systematic targeting of hospitals and health care workers” in Gaza. And Israel is not unique in targeting health facilities.
Omar Devachi, author of Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq, told Al Jazeera, “As attacks on healthcare have intensified over the last two decades, especially after the (United States-led) War on Terror, and then from Iraq to Syria to Gaza and then now to Lebanon, it has become clear that hospitals are no longer treated as consistently protected spaces.” “When these hospitals face various conflicts over and over again with little accountability, it creates a feeling that this is increasingly becoming the norm.”
Devachi said such attacks have a compounding effect. Treatable injuries get worse, battle wounds don’t heal properly, and there are other “more long-term consequences,” he said, adding, “Many patients who survive these blasts develop chronic infections that last for years and sometimes require multiple surgeries.”
impunity continues
Experts and analysts say the attacks are unlikely to stop as long as impunity continues.
“There is continued impunity for such acts and no accountability of any kind,” said HRW’s Cass. “The Government of Lebanon has a responsibility to ensure accountability, grant jurisdiction to the ICC (International Criminal Court) and allow it to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed in the country, including repeated apparently deliberate attacks on medical personnel and health facilities.”
Meanwhile, medical professionals have called for international support to strengthen and protect Lebanon’s health care.
“It should be protected under international law,” Abubakar said. He said there was a need for de-escalation and a ceasefire “as soon as possible”.
Wazni, director of the hospital in Nabatieh, told Al Jazeera: “I don’t know how beneficial it will be, but we call for respecting international law and international agreements and respecting the safety of medical staff.”
