Your Highness,
Excellencies, expensive colleagues and pals,
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.
I thank the World Innovation Summit for Well being and the Qatar Basis for bringing us collectively to deal with the pressing challenge of defending well being in armed battle.
In northern Gaza final week, the Kamal Adwan hospital was subjected to intense preventing, a siege and a raid, decreasing it from a hospital serving to lots of of sufferers with dozens of well being staff, to a shell of itself.
Two weeks in the past, a well being facility in Pakistan the place polio staff have been getting ready for a vaccination marketing campaign was attacked, and a policeman defending them was killed.
And simply yesterday, two sufferers have been executed throughout an assault on an MSF ambulance in Haiti.
That is simply this month.
Assaults on well being care have gotten the “new regular” of battle.
The report we’re launching in the present day, developed by WHO, WISH and the Qatar Basis, exhibits that over the previous three years we’ve got seen a rise within the frequency, scale and impression of assaults on well being care.
Along with Afghanistan, Gaza and Haiti, WHO has this 12 months verified 1100 assaults in Lebanon, Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
Since we began monitoring assaults on well being care in 2018, WHO has verified greater than 7400 assaults in 21 nations or territories, with greater than 2400 deaths and 5000 accidents of well being staff and sufferers.
These assaults kill and maim;
They deprive susceptible individuals of the well being providers they want, after they want them most;
They destroy hospitals, clinics, ambulances;
They usually undermine one thing much less tangible, however extra basic: hope.
And generally, that is the purpose: to demoralize, degrade and dehumanize.
Who pays the value for these assaults? Older individuals; kids; pregnant girls; individuals dwelling with disabilities, or those that want common remedy for most cancers, kidney failure or coronary heart illness.
Let’s be clear: assaults on well being care are a violation of the suitable to well being, and a violation of worldwide regulation, that may quantity to struggle crimes or crimes in opposition to humanity.
Even when well being amenities are militarised – which is itself an assault on well being care – they’re by no means with out safety in humanitarian regulation.
And but, nearly nobody has ever been held to account for these violations.
What is the level of worldwide regulation whether it is neither revered nor enforced?
And the place are the voices of world leaders denouncing these assaults?
Silence is tacit approval. If there isn’t a accountability, assaults on well being care will solely improve.
The report we’re launching in the present day outlines 9 suggestions globally, nationally and domestically for bringing to account those that perpetrate these unspeakable assaults.
These are suggestions for all of us to behave on: governments, UN companies, worldwide organizations, civil society, NGOs and extra.
I will not undergo them; I urge you to learn the report for yourselves.
However do not simply learn it; act on it, in the present day. Everybody on this room can do one thing to implement a number of of those suggestions, beginning now.
As a result of if we do not, who will?
Finally, one of the simplest ways to cease assaults on well being care is to cease the conflicts through which they occur.
When the conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine cease, so will the assaults on well being care.
The most effective drugs is peace.
Shukran jazeelan. I thanks.
