LONDON: The targeting of medical facilities in war should be categorized as “healthocide,” academics have said, amid a surge in such attacks in recent years.
Most deliberate attacks on health services have taken place in Gaza since 2023, but other strikes have been recorded in Lebanon, Syria, Sudan and Ukraine, The Guardian reported. Individual medical staff have also been deliberately targeted.
International humanitarian law has explicitly promoted the longstanding principle of medical neutrality, which prohibits attacks on healthcare workers and facilities during war, enabling doctors and surgeons to perform their work on anyone in need.
Dr. Joelle Abi-Rached and his colleagues at the American University of Beirut submitted a commentary to the British Medical Journal warning of the surge in the targeting of health services.
“Both in Gaza and Lebanon, healthcare facilities have not only been directly targeted, but access to care has also been obstructed, including incidents where ambulances have been prevented from reaching the injured, or deliberately attacked,” they wrote.
“What is becoming clear is that healthcare workers and facilities are no longer afforded the protection guaranteed by international humanitarian law.”
The authors highlighted data from Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which has killed at least 986 medical workers.
Healthcare Workers Watch data also shows that 28 doctors from the Palestinian enclave are being detained without charge in Israeli prisons.
Eight of them are senior consultants in surgery, orthopedics, intensive care, cardiology and pediatrics.
Gaza’s health facilities, including major hospitals, have been “turned into battlegrounds” by Israel’s assault, Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, representative of the World Health Organization for the West Bank and Gaza, said in January.
Israel has also engaged in a policy to “systematically dismantle” the health system and “drive it to the brink of collapse,” he added.
Earlier this year, The Guardian conducted an investigative project, Doctors in Detention, to interview healthcare workers in Gaza.
They told the newspaper that their detention, along with hundreds of other medical staff held by the Israeli military, was likely due to their occupation.
In detention, they suffered torture, beatings, starvation and humiliation, The Guardian was told.
Their Israeli guards also played loud music throughout the day and night to prevent them from sleeping, and they were regularly denied food, water and showers.
Israel’s war in Lebanon last year also featured similar tactics to disrupt and destroy local health services.
According to Lebanon’s Public Health Ministry, 217 healthcare workers were killed by the Israel Defense Forces between Oct. 8, 2023, and Jan. 27, 2025.
A further 177 ambulances were damaged, and authorities recorded 68 separate attacks on Lebanese hospitals.
Doctors around the world must “forsake the principle of medical neutrality” and voice their concerns over “healthocide,” the authors of the BMJ commentary urged.
Failing to do so would only embolden future violations of the neutrality principle, they warned, adding that the documentation of attacks and abuses against health workers would help in the enforcement of justice.
The British Medical Association’s medical ethics committee chair, Dr. Andrew Green, said: “In recent years, doctors have been devastated to see the appalling increase in attacks on healthcare, patients and staff in conflict zones, and the disregard for medical neutrality and international humanitarian law.”
He called on international medical associations, NGOs, governments and the UN to “call out when we see human and health rights abused, and hold those breaking international humanitarian law accountable.
“Those with power must use all levers at their disposal to ensure the provision of humanitarian aid and urgent healthcare to the world’s most vulnerable.
“One clear step would be the establishment of a UN special rapporteur on the protection of health in armed conflict.”
