On 16 April, a team from the Islamic Health Association drove towards an Israeli strike site in Mayfadoun, a village in Nabatieh province in southern Lebanon. A subsequent Israeli airstrike struck the paramedics immediately.
A pair of further ambulances, despatched by the Risala Scout Association and the Nabatieh Ambulance Service, drew additional strikes in rapid succession.Â
Fadel Serhan, a 43-year-old Risala Scout paramedic, had already lost his station in the village to an earlier Israeli strike and had been working from a tent near Nabih Berri Hospital at which point the final volley killed him.
His colleague Ali Nasreddine described Serhan as “generous,” a man with “a very high sense of humanity and a great sense of humour.” A minimum of three paramedics perished and six more sustained injuries.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry condemned the Mayfadoun strikes as “a heinous crime,” accusing Israel of calculated interference with life-saving operations.
Mohammed Suleiman, chief paramedic for Nabatiyeh Emergency Services, said with the directness of someone who had run out of diplomatic language: “This war is different than all the other wars.”
A Precedent Built in Gaza’s Ruins
The strategy predates the current Lebanese campaign. In March 2024, an Israeli airstrike killed three paramedics at an ambulance centre in the southern town of Odaisseh. Six months later, three Lebanese civil defence workers died under Israeli fire in Faroun as they extinguished blazes ignited by earlier strikes.
Human Rights Watch depicted the repeated targeting of medical workers during the 2023–2024 Lebanese conflict as likely war crimes.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry logged a minimum of a hundred healthcare workers killed since 2 March alone.
The Israeli military has itself defined the offensive using its established regional template, with warplanes dropping leaflets over Beirut warning of “great success in Gaza, a new reality is coming to Lebanon, too.”
That boast carried a grim credibility: the United Nations humanitarian agency logged over 1,700 health workers killed in Gaza as of October 2023. Amnesty International, responding to the Lebanese toll, concluded in March that “Israel is deploying the same deadly playbook it used in 2024” to devastate medical services.
Sacrosanct Spaces, Repeated Destruction
What the data documents, surviving physicians attest with visceral precision. Dr Mohammed Ziara, a Gaza surgeon who fled al-Shifa Hospital and later found himself operating in Sidon, caught the repetition with weary concision: “I’ve lived this before. I cannot go back to Gaza now. But I can be here, in Lebanon.”
Dr Seema Jilani, a paediatric physician and Council on Foreign Relations member who treated patients at Rafik Hariri University Hospital in Beirut in 2020, published a Guardian piece whose headline named what most official institutions had so far avoided stating: “Israel got away with targeting healthcare in Gaza. It’s no surprise it is doing it in Lebanon too.”
Easter weekend saw Israeli strikes hit a densely populated residential area near the hospital, killing a minimum of five individuals and wounding fifty. The attacks, Dr Jilani wrote, were consistent with a broader Israeli strategy, with medical workers and human rights groups reporting that the Israeli military was “crippling healthcare infrastructure, targeting hospitals and medics.”
A distinct Guardian inquiry found Lebanese healthcare workers describing Israeli bombings as “a systematic effort to make the area unlivable,” executed through consecutive strikes on responders.
Lebanon’s Health Minister Firas Al-Abiad told reporters Israel was “deliberately and systematically” targeting medical teams, with 13 hospitals no longer operational, over a hundred medical centres struck, and more than 130 ambulances destroyed.
Why Europe Has Skin in Lebanon
For Europe, Lebanon has long held an extensive geopolitical presence, and the healthcare dimension now adds a concrete aspect to an already fractious set of disagreements. France and Italy both contribute troops to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). On 19 April, a French UNIFIL soldier perished in an attack in southern Lebanon.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced that Italy would decline to renew the long-standing defence cooperation agreement with Israel, after Israeli forces fired on an Italian peacekeeping convoy. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani summoned Israel’s ambassador and labelled the strikes “unacceptable.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot told France Inter radio that Lebanon had been made “the scapegoat” for a government angry at a ceasefire it had no hand in brokering.
France and Lebanon formalised a healthcare cooperation framework encompassing primary care, cancer treatment, and mental health capacity. European states have spent years constructing Lebanese hospital infrastructure. Israeli strikes have now targeted the very facilities and personnel receiving referrals from the south.
The European Council on Foreign Relations observed that Israeli strikes in Lebanon had become unconstrained, hitting humanitarian workers and UNIFIL peacekeepers with European troops among the personnel in the line of fire – and that France stood as the sole European actor pressing for diplomacy.
The Toll of Permitting Impunity to Spread
European diplomatic calendars now catch up with European military facts. EU foreign ministers are scheduled to discuss the Middle East in Luxembourg on 21 April. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s proposed measures centre on suspending the EU–Israel Association Agreement, worth some €1bn a year in trade preferences.
Over sixty humanitarian and human rightsorganisations demanded on 16 April that the EU adopt the measures.Â
Dr Jilani’s headline situated the mechanism with precision: impunity in one theatre certifies the practice for the next. European capitals have watched the migration of such tactics through the spreading conflict in near-real time, with each incident better documented than the last.
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Read also:
Italy’s Mediterranean Strategy: Why Troops Stay in Lebanon
Lebanon Teeters on Default: Europe Opts Out of Pushing Disarmament
A Story to Fit the Narrative: IDF Admits Gaza Mistakes
