Hospitals

Physician for Human Right’s director of policy, Susannah Sirkin, addressed the UN Security Council on July 30, 2019, demanding that the Secretary-General launch an immediate investigation into recent attacks on health care in Idlib and northwestern Syria in violation of protection agreements. From March 2011 through July 2019, PHR corroborated 578 attacks on at least 350 separate facilities and documented the killing of 890 medical personnel.

In response to recent protests, the government of Sudan has violently raided health facilities and arrested, detained, and killed health workers. The international community has the responsibility to call attention to these attacks on health care before the crisis escalates.

Each of the eight hospitals in east Aleppo that were functioning before the siege have been hit, many of them multiple times, with 27 strikes on hospitals in four months.

Rights group Amnesty International has accused the Syrian government and Russian forces of deliberately targeting hospitals as a strategy of war in Syria's conflict. It says the attacks amount to war crimes.

The Syrian government has been attacking hospitals across the war-torn country with alarming regularity. Although such attacks are banned under the Geneva Convention, Fadel Abdul Ghani of the Syrian Network for Human Rights said the attacks on hospitals are a “systematic and widespread strategy” employed by the government.