The World Health Organization released a report Thursday documenting the deaths of 959 people and 1,500 injuries from 594 military attacks on health care facilities and health care workers in 19 nations throughout the world. The largest number and percentage of attacks were in Syria (38 percent) and the West Bank and Gaza (9 percent). Sixty percent of all these were deliberate assaults on facilities and health care workers, both of which are supposed to be off-limits in war. The Guardian reports:
Syria, where a civil war has raged since 2011, had the most attacks on hospitals, ambulances, patients and medical workers, accounting for 352 deaths. The Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Iraq, Pakistan and Libya, followed. An estimated 62% of all attacks were deemed intentional and many led to a disruption of public health services.
“This is not an isolated issue, it is not limited to warzones, it is not accidental. The majority of these are intentional,” Dr Bruce Aylward, executive director of the WHO emergency programme, told a news briefing.
“It is also not stopping and it has real complications for what we are trying to do. It is getting more and more difficult to deploy people into these places, it is getting more and more difficult to keep them safe when they are there and it is getting more and more difficult to ensure they survive, let alone recover in crises.”
Over the two-year period ending in December 2015, Afghanistan suffered 19 attacks on hospitals and health care workers. Sixty-nine people were killed in these attacks and 50 injured. Sixty percent of those were killed in a single attack, the October 2015 U.S. assault on a hospital in Kunduz run by the French humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders. Forty-two patients and medical staff were killed in that air attack which lasted at least 30 minutes, during which time hospital personnel made phone calls to U.S. commanders and officials in Washington to stop it.
It took U.S. authorities 3,000 pages to come to the conclusion that mistakes were made but it was all unintentional. Many critics quite rightly view the incident as a war crime. Mild administrative disciplinary measures were doled out to 16 uniformed U.S. military personnel for their roles in the Kunduz attack.