Afghanistan hospital bombing was one of many such attacks - latimes

 It was late into the night when a missile fired from the air slammed into the operating room at a small district hospital in Yemen’s northern Saadah province.

“We suddenly heard planes above us, and then everything was shaking, and there was dust everywhere,” said Yahya Quafi, a laboratory technician reached by phone in the provincial capital, also called Saadah.

The attack on Oct. 26, which they blame on a Saudi-led coalition and leveled the only functioning hospital for a population of 200,000, came just three weeks after a deadly U.S. strike on a trauma center in Afghanistan. In the same month, the medical group Doctors Without Borders reported that at least 12 other hospitals were bombed in Syria and another ransacked by tribal fighters in South Sudan who made off with vehicles, communications equipment and medical supplies.

Humanitarian officials fear such attacks are shredding the international laws that afford protected status to hospitals in war zones, safeguards on which they rely to provide lifesaving care in some of the world’s most dangerous places.

“As awful as war is, it still has rules,” said Jason Cone, executive director of Doctors Without Borders in the U.S., as staff gathered in New York and other cities this week in memory of the 30 people killed in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz — including at least 13 colleagues and 10 patients. Seven bodies were burned beyond recognition.

His organization is calling for a separate investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, a body set up under the Geneva Conventions. But that would require the assent of the U.S. and Afghanistan, which has not been provided.

“It’s important because it’s looking at what happened through the lens of humanitarian law,” Cone told the Los Angeles Times. “These are the basic protections that our teams need to be able to operate worldwide, not just in Afghanistan. We need to make sure that those laws are being adhered to.”

“We knowingly take the risks associated with working in war zones. But what happened in Kunduz — the precise targeting and prolonged destruction of a fully functioning hospital full of patients and health workers — transcended even the bounds of war.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross documented more than 1,200 attacks on hospitals or within their perimeters in 2013 and 2014 alone.  - Read More at latimes

Afghanistan hospital bombing was one of many such attacks