New war trend involves targeting hospitals, Médecins Sans Frontières

Senior humanitarian specialist Michiel Hofman at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has noted that it is conventional armies that were repeatedly violating the laws of war, not rebel groups.

He chided the permanent members of the security council, four of whom are engaged in conflicts where medics are targeted, saying such a situation had not occurred since the Korean war in the 1950s.

Despite a resolution passing on 3 May by the security council demanding an end to attacks on medical workers and hospitals in war zones, Hofman said those who passed the resolution, including the UK, are themselves complicit in the killing of medical workers.

The Guardian explains that Hofman was referring to the military and logistical support provided by four of the permanent members of the security council to countries and coalitions that have bombed hospitals.

Hofman described the fighting in Syria as a “dirty war”, where both sides are attacking medical institutions, but emphasising that the greater destruction was coming from state-fired explosives.

“When we talk about the bombing of hospitals, bombing means air forces,” he said. “Rebel groups don’t have air forces, so this is exclusively states who by definition have much larger firepower [...] and they are the ones that actually signed these conventions.”

On Monday night, at least two dozen civilians were killed in the latest attack on health services when the national hospital in the opposition-held city of Idlib was hit by multiple airstrikes, putting it out of service.

Last month, a hospital in Aleppo supported by MSF and the International Committee of the Red Cross was destroyed in an airstrike by the Syrian government, killing one of the only paediatricians left in the rebel-held east of the city. Three days later a maternity hospital was partly devastated in rebel shelling of a government-controlled area in the city’s west.

An anti-terrorism law passed by the Syrian parliament in 2012 outlined any medical facility operating in opposition-held areas as illegal if not in possession of government approval. As a result hospitals have become legitimate targets for Assad’s air force. Since then, the Guardian reports that clinics in the rebel-controlled parts of the country have gone underground, sometimes moving into caves and basements.

According to the Guardian, these were only the latest incidents in a series of attacks on medical facilities that amount to a systematic targeting of aid workers in the war.

The UN independent commission of inquiry said as early on as 2013 that attacks on medical facilities were being used systematically as a weapon of war by the Assad regime.

Similar attacks have been carried out in other countries in conflict.

The civil war in Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition backs the government against militia, has also seen attacks on medical facilities.

In February, an MSF report identified 94 airstrikes and shelling attacks on hospitals across Syria. In February last year, the NGO Physicians for Human Rights said it had documented 224 attacks on 175 health facilities since the start of the conflict, and 599 medical personnel had been killed, the Guardian reports.

Hofman said medics operating in combat zones had “the right and the duty to treat everyone, including combatants, and that is being challenged by a lot of states at the moment.”