(Safeguarding Health in Conflict) – In its fifth annual report released today, the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition warns that attacks on health care in conflict zones around the world are continuing with impunity and may in fact be increasing. The report entitled “Violence on the Front Lines: Attacks on Health Care in 2017” documents more […]
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(ICRC) – Since my last briefing, brutal attacks have continued, unabated, against the wounded and sick, medical care providers, ambulances and health care facilities. We are at risk of creating a ‘new normal’: too many actors are legitimizing attacks as “collateral damage” rather than outrageous violations. The question we need to be asking today is ‘where […]
(The Washington Post) – A smiling physiotherapist beams in a framed photo inside the Red Cross center here, hinting at the radiant personality that charmed her orthopedic patients before a man with polio took out a gun hidden in his wheelchair and killed her. The slaying of Lorena Enebral Perez at a clinic in the northern […]
(IRIN) – Ihsanullah, 17 months, suffers from a virulent, drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, which has alarmed his father and challenged the doctors. “There are injections and so many pills,” said his father, Bismillah. “The baby sees everyday the doctors with a white coat coming to inject him, so he is afraid.” But despite the daily needles and pills, […]
(AFP) – After the Taliban closed his local health clinic, Afghan farmer Haji Fazel Ahmad was forced to rent a car to take his sick wife to the nearest hospital six hours away. To his dismay the insurgents had shut that too. It is a scenario being played out across Afghanistan as medical facilities and workers […]
(Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition) – Statement of Leonard Rubenstein, chair of the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, gave the following statement at the UNGA 2017 side event, Protection of Health Care in Armed Conflict, on September 22, 2017. I am honored to be here today representing the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition. The coalition consists of […]
(New York Times) – Muhammad Anwar, 8, was vomiting all night and had severe diarrhea. His father, Hajji Aslam, did not know what to do. Most, and perhaps all, of the clinics in Oruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan are shut, including the one in their village, Shawali Karez. The province remains largely controlled by the Taliban, […]
(NPR) – Why would anyone want to harm an aid worker? They’re just there to help. They don’t take sides. They’re protected by international humanitarian law. Yet they’ve repeatedly been the target of some of the worst forms of violence, from kidnapping to gang rape to beheadings. In 2016 alone, 288 aid workers were attacked. Link
(Huffington Post) – Fourteen years ago, on August 19, 2003, a suicide bomber drove a truck bomb into the offices of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq, killing 22 people, wounding over 100, and damaging a nearby hospital. In tribute to aid workers risking their lives in service, the UN General Assembly designated August 19 […]
(Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Late last year, a bunker buster bomb shot through an underground shelter in Syria’s Hama province. A group of aid workers were taking shelter inside at the time. Nine of them, all Syrian, were killed instantly. In February, six Red Cross workers were shot dead in an ambush in northern Afghanistan while travelling through […]
