OAN Staff Blake Wolf
10:55 AM – Thursday, June 19, 2025
The Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz accused the Iranian regime of “war crimes of the most serious kind” after an Israeli hospital was decimated by an Iranian missile.
The Iranian missiles slammed into Soroka Medical Center in southern Israel on Thursday, causing significant damage while leaving 71 individuals with “minor injuries,” according to Israel’s Ministry of Health. Soroka is the largest hospital in the Negev, a large desert region in Southern Israel.
Additional Iranian missiles slammed into a high-rise building, along with several other residential buildings, injuring a total of 271 people on Thursday.
“This morning, Iran’s terrorist tyrants launched missiles at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba and at a civilian population in the center of the country,” stated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We will exact the full price from the tyrants in Tehran.”
“We accurately hit nuclear targets and missile targets, and they hit a hospital, where people can’t even get up and run away,” he continued. “That’s the whole difference in a democracy that acts according to the law to save itself from the murderers and against these murderers who want to destroy each and every one of us. Every single one of us. Down to the last one of us. I think that says it all.”
Katz explained that Israel will retaliate to the attacks by instructing the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to “increase the intensity of attacks against strategic targets in Iran and against government targets in Tehran in order to remove threats to the State of Israel and undermine the ayatollahs’ regime.”
“These are war crimes of the most serious kind — and [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei will be held accountable for his crimes,” he added.
Meanwhile, Professor Asher Bashiri, the director of the maternity ward at the hospital, recounted the aftermath of the attack.
“It looks unbelievable,” he stated. “The upper part of the building is cracked, and fire was coming from it in the first hours. Everything looks broken.”
“We were very, very lucky,” Bashiri continued. “It could have been so much worse. But we are still living in an unbelievable situation. It’s not finished – I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, or the next day. We’re just happy that we’re alive.”
Additionally, Iranian state media responded to the attack, arguing that it was targeting a “large command and intelligence headquarters of the Israeli army and the military intelligence camp located in the Gav-Yam technology park, adjacent to Soroka Hospital.”
“These centers host thousands of military personnel, digital command systems, cyber operations, and the Zionist army’s C4ISR systems,” Iran’s state media continued in a Telegram post. “The hospital was only exposed to the blast wave and sustained no significant damage; however, the military infrastructure was precisely and directly targeted.”
The news of the hospital attack comes as Israel and Iran continue to trade airstrikes following Israel’s “preemptive” strikes against Iran last Thursday in an attempt to destroy Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon, and potentially topple the Iranian regime.
In a recent interview on Fox News, Netanyahu stated that regime change “could certainly be the result” of Israel’s military offensive, while also seemingly calling on the Iranian people to rise up and topple the regime, adding: “A light has been lit — carry it to freedom.”
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