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What's New

12/22/2023

With the Israeli government recently stating that, according to its own calculations, over 65% of deaths from Israeli military operations in Gaza were civilians, time and investigations will tell whether any of that military conduct violated the Geneva Conventions. Another question, however, demands critical attention as well: Whether Israel is promoting an interpretation of international humanitarian law that undermines the Conventions’ values and subverts their rules. That might explain some of the outcomes we are seeing on the ground. Despite couching its explanations in humanitarian law’s language of proportionality and minimization of harm, Israel has asserted a theory of justifiable conduct in war that, contrary to this body of law, elevates claims of military necessity in achieving the war’s aims over protection of civilians, particularly in a just war. The theory harks back to the influential nineteenth-century intellectual and military theorist Francis Lieber, who advanced it around the very time the first Geneva Convention was being developed. It is important to look back at that long-rejected concept of legitimate warfare and to closely trace what Israeli officials have propounded in the current conflict.
12/15/2023

This case study - a joint product of eyeWitness to Atrocities (eyeWitness), Insecurity Insight, the Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR), and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) - expands on existing documentation of Russia’s widespread and systematic attacks on Ukraine’s health care system. It explores ways in which Russia has sought to systematically target health care as an apparent means of degrading resistance and, in Ukraine’s occupied territories, as a means of enforcing control over the civilian population, including by limiting and conditioning access to health care through a range of coercive practices. These practices include: (1) Russian forces misusing civilian health facilities for nonmedical purposes; (2) requiring forced changes of nationality as a precondition for gaining access to health care (otherwise known as “passportization”); and (3) threatening and harassing health care professionals as a way to further limit care and assert control over Ukraine’s health care system. Based on a joint dataset, the study details a range of reported incidents that collectively suggest an apparent pattern of illegal attacks on health by Russia that both limit and violate the right to health of Ukrainian civilians. These attacks are violations of both international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law. They also threaten the integrity of Ukraine’s health care system, which, while resilient, faces ongoing challenges following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
12/06/2023

The scale of attacks on healthcare has become more visible and its impact greater in recent armed conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar. In these conflicts, combatants systematically target health facilities and ambulances. We need to ensure that attacks on healthcare do not become the new norm amongst governmental troops and non-State armed groups. There is limited evidence about why and how attacks on healthcare have become “normal” practice amongst many combatants, despite the likely tactical and strategic costs to themselves. We are convinced that the problem now needs to be tackled like any other public health issue by assessing: the scale of the problem; who is the most at risk; identifying risk factors; developing new interventions to prevent the risks or address the issue; and evaluating the effectiveness of these interventions.
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