This paper presents a method to characterize tissue thermal damage by taking into account the thermal-mechanical effect of soft tissues for thermal ablation. This method integrates the bio-heating conduction and non-rigid motion dynamics to describe thermal-mechanical behaviors of soft tissues and further extends the traditional tissue damage model to characterize thermal-mechanical damage of soft tissues. Simulations and comparison analysis demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively predict tissue thermal damage and it also provides reliable guidelines for control of the thermal ablation procedure.