Colombo, 3rd May, 2026 – The 3 May will mark 10 years since the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2286. Over 80 Member States committed to protect medical and medical humanitarian personnel, infrastructure, transport and equipment. Today, international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) calls on States to respect this commitment, and protect medical care.
MSF has teams working in over 70 countries around the world, including in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar, as well as other areas of conflict and war. In the last decade, 21 MSF staff have been killed in 15 incidents whilst undertaking their duties. In 2025 alone, the World Health Organization’s Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care (SSA) reported a total of 1,348 attacks on medical facilities, resulting in the deaths of 1,981 people.
Over the last 10 years attacks on healthcare have been various and have included airstrikes on hospitals in Syria and Yemen, shellings of hospitals in Ukraine and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, drone strikes on a hospital in Myanmar, and attacks on clearly marked ambulances in Cameroon, Haiti, and Lebanon. The response from perpetrating States has often been denial, to claim a mistake, or accusations of loss of protection without proof. Health workers are also increasingly being treated as suspect rather than protected.
The immediate consequence of attacks is injuries and loss of life. Longer-term, the consequence is that communities are often deprived of life-saving care as health infrastructure is not rebuilt or humanitarian organisations suspend their activities because of security concerns. In 2025, MSF teams in Sudan carried out nearly 850,000 outpatient consultations, admitted just under 95,600 people to hospital and assisted almost 29,000 births. In Gaza, over the same period, teams undertook 913,000 outpatient consultations, admitted just under 54,000 people and ran 89,800 mental health sessions. In Ukraine in 2025, MSF ambulances referred 10,700 patients, 60 per cent of whom had war-related injuries, and teams provided 45,300 outpatient consultations via mobile clinic, and undertook 9,750 physiotherapy sessions. When healthcare infrastructure is damaged or destroyed, and if people are too scared to leave their homes to seek medical care, it is the communities that suffer.
