CT scanners, sieges, and a war without medical infrastructure: Gaza's healthcare collapse deepens

On 25 June 2026, the Electronic Intifada reported that Israel has destroyed sixteen CT scanners across the Gaza Strip during its ongoing military campaign, a figure that, if substantiated by independent clinical sources, would represent a near-total elimination of advanced diagnostic imaging capacity in the territory. The reporting, published at 12:42 UTC, frames the destruction as part of a wider collapse of medical infrastructure that aid agencies have documented piecemeal for months.

What is unusual about the claim is not the premise — hospitals and clinics in Gaza have been damaged, knocked offline, or put out of service repeatedly since late 2023 — but the specific instrument named. CT scanners are not symbolic targets. They are the gateway technology for diagnosing internal bleeding, traumatic brain injury, tumours, strokes, and the complications of malnutrition in a population that aid organisations describe as facing famine-level conditions. Removing sixteen of them does not merely degrade care; it removes the diagnostic floor underneath an entire health system.

The diagnostic question

A CT scanner is expensive, immobile, and difficult to replace under bombardment. Each unit weighs several tonnes, requires a shielded room, stable power, and trained radiology staff to operate. The claim that sixteen have been destroyed therefore raises immediate questions about which facilities have been hit, on which dates, and whether any remain operational in the north of the Strip where humanitarian organisations have consistently reported the most acute access restrictions.

The Electronic Intifada's framing — "two CT scanners, one million people, northern Gaza" — implies a population-to-machine ratio that, in any functioning health system, would be considered catastrophic. The reporting does not, in the version circulated through the channel on 25 June, specify whether the sixteen units are confined to the north or distributed across the Strip, nor does it identify the manufacturers or the importing agencies. Those details will need corroboration from clinical bodies, the World Health Organization, or Gaza's health ministry, the latter of which has historically produced casualty and infrastructure figures that Western and Israeli outlets treat with varying degrees of scepticism.

What can be said with less ambiguity is that Gaza entered this period with a small, finite inventory of advanced imaging equipment, and that the loss of any single unit is not easily reversed while crossings remain closed to heavy medical imports.

The political framing on both sides

Within hours of the imaging-infrastructure story circulating, statements attributed to Hamas by Iran's Al-Alam Arabic channel (at 12:15 UTC, 12:17 UTC, and 12:19 UTC on 25 June) framed the wider picture in maximalist terms: "the occupation continues its war of extermination in the Gaza Strip using the policy of siege, starvation and killing against children and defenseless civilians," and, separately, "saving the Gaza Strip will be achieved through practical measures that end the aggression and siege." The language is consistent with Hamas's longstanding framing of the conflict as a struggle against forced displacement, a charge echoed by Mehr News on the same day: "Israel is seeking forced resettlement of the people of Gaza, not peace."

The substantive dispute is whether this language describes what is actually happening on the ground. Israeli officials, in public statements since the resumption of hostilities, have framed military operations as targeted against Hamas infrastructure and have denied a policy of starvation, while acknowledging that aid flows have been sharply constrained. Western wire reporting has generally echoed the Israeli framing that humanitarian access is restricted for security reasons, while documenting — through UN OCHA, WFP, and WHO reporting — that the operational result is mass food insecurity.

The CT-scanner story sits awkwardly between those framings. Even readers who accept Israeli security concerns at face value have to ask what security objective is served by destroying diagnostic imaging equipment. Equipment of this kind does not fire missiles, does not shelter fighters in any conventional sense, and is not dual-use in the way that tunnel networks or weapons storage sites are alleged to be. Its destruction is, in that narrow sense, hard to reconcile with a "Hamas infrastructure" framing — and easy to reconcile with the broader claim that Gaza's civilian capacity is being systematically degraded.

What an absence of scanners actually means

Clinicians working in low-resource and conflict settings routinely describe CT as the dividing line between treatable and untreatable cases. A patient with a suspected intracranial bleed cannot be triaged without imaging; a patient with a perforated viscus cannot be routed to surgery with confidence; a cancer patient cannot be staged. Removing imaging capacity converts emergency rooms into triage tents — places where clinicians can stabilise and refer, but rarely confirm a diagnosis.

In Gaza, where evacuation to tertiary care outside the Strip is at best intermittent and at worst politically contingent, the absence of working CT scanners means that difficult cases must be managed on clinical suspicion alone. The downstream effect is not only higher mortality in the acute phase but also the loss of longitudinal care: oncology, stroke rehabilitation, complex orthopaedic follow-up, and paediatric imaging all become impossible at any reasonable standard. This is the structural point the Electronic Intifada's reporting gestures at, and it is the point on which the claim deserves corroboration rather than dismissal.

The reporters who carry this story into Western outlets will face the predictable objection that a single outlet's count is unverifiable. That objection is fair in the abstract. It is also the reason this publication is naming what would constitute verification: WHO situation reports listing non-functional imaging equipment by facility; medical-journal editorials from physicians who have worked in Gaza and named the machines they have lost; OCHA-led access assessments. If those documents corroborate the count, the framing shifts.

Stakes and what remains contested

The political stakes of the imaging-infrastructure story are not primarily about a single number. They are about whether the international community continues to treat the collapse of civilian infrastructure as an unfortunate by-product of war, or as evidence that requires a categorical response. Sixteen CT scanners is a countable, verifiable claim. If it is correct, it is a fact that fits a pattern aid agencies have been warning about for months. If it is overstated, the underlying pattern — Gaza entering its fourth year with a health system stripped of advanced diagnostics — remains.

What remains genuinely contested is the intent question: whether the destruction of civilian medical infrastructure is a deliberate strategy of pressure, as Hamas statements and a wide swath of Global South commentary argue, or an operational reality of war against a non-state actor that embeds within civilian facilities, as Israeli framing maintains. The CT scanner does not resolve that debate. But it makes it harder to maintain the operational framing without explaining what a CT scanner was doing in the targeting picture in the first place.

This publication treated the CT-scanner claim as a verifiable infrastructure story rather than a partisan talking point. The number and the population ratio are claims to be checked against WHO, OCHA, and named clinicians — not assertions to be amplified or dismissed. The simultaneous Hamas and Iranian-channel statements are reported as the political framing of one party to the conflict, not as independent confirmation of the underlying medical facts.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://electronicintifada.net/content/two-ct-scanners-one-million-people-northern-gaza/51479
• https://t.me/alalamarab
• https://t.me/mehrnews
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Gaza_Strip
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict