How do we protect doctors, media and NGOs in war? - a time to discuss
I write this from Egypt where I am currently with the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office (EMRO) Trauma Operation Advisory Team (TOpAT) who are running their Mass Casualty Management course. Its aim is to prepare healthcare systems in the region for managing events that lead to their emergency departments and hospitals being overwhelmed. As the training is delivered, thoughts of how close the reality is for many in the Middle East are never far away.
Dr Saleyha Ahsan
Dr Saleyha Ahsan
As we talk about our shared mass casualty experiences, I refer to my time in Palestine in 2002 where I experienced direct targeting as a clearly identified journalist during a conflict setting. I was making the film Article 17 – Doctors in Palestine at the time, which charts the story of healthcare workers delivering care under curfew during the second intifada.
I refer also to the wars in Syria and Libya where I worked as a doctor and how I had to hide that I was a doctor. Violent targeting of healthcare was taking place. I witnessed an ambulance being painted black on the Syrian Turkish border to hide its medical identity.
The situation now feels like an alternative universe to the time I first deployed to a war zone in the 1990s, with the NATO Stabilsation Force to Bosnia as part of the British Army. I was a non-medical support officer and in command of a troop of combat medic technicians. Though not a doctor, we all wore the red cross emblem on our uniforms and vehicles. I saw the access afforded to us and the protection we enjoyed under laws of armed conflict. This has not been experienced in recent conflicts.
Lindsey Hilsum, international news editor of Channel 4 news, has been reporting from the Ukrainian frontline. She says: ‘Like others, I was shocked to be reporting a major war in Europe in 2024. I was in Ukraine in 2014 and in Kosovo in 1999, but this is a bigger war…’
Lindsey Hilsum. Credit: Elizabeth Dalziel
Lindsey Hilsum. Credit: Elizabeth Dalziel
From the early stages of this war, healthcare was targeted. A Ukrainian Army medic told me told, for my 2022 report for the Lancet, that he removes his red cross armband when operational because Russian snipers directly target anyone wearing a red cross.
My role as a journalist, having reported from conflict settings for the BBC, the Lancet, The World Today (Chatham House), New York Times and the Guardian and as a doctor has led me to ask: how do we protect healthcare workers and the media in conflict settings? It’s the question defining our time and will be discussed at a Cambridge Festival event: The challenges of delivering healthcare in conflict and telling the story in a warzone on Thursday 21st March at the Cambridge Union.
On the panel, Hilsum will speak of the challenges covering the current conflict in Gaza.
She says: “All news organisations, including Channel 4 News, have colleagues in Gaza. We worry about them all the time. The work they have been doing is tremendous and unbelievably dangerous, even as they have to look after their families.”
The interdisciplinary relationship that exists in war struck me as I flew out to Libya in 2011 during the conflict there. On the plane were doctors, journalists and humanitarian workers. It formed the basis of the CRASSH research network I co-founded in Cambridge, Healthcare in Conflict, a practitioner and academic group accommodating the core people who run to a war zone – medics, media and NGOS.
Rob Williams
Rob Williams
The current situation in Gaza has reinforced the need for such collaborative conversations. Fellow panellist, Rob Williams, CEO of the War Child Alliance, says in response to the current situation: “NGOs are not getting the support we need to provide humanitarian aid, which means that children are effectively being abandoned by the international community when they most need support whilst we spend our time and resources trying to persuade politicians to live up to the international norms on which the international system is founded.”
Medics and media are protected under international humanitarian law and yet they have never been more vulnerable. “Humanitarian space and independence is a fundamental legal construct which has served us well for decades and needs to be properly defended across all conflicts, even those where public opinion is polarised,” says Williams.
The losses suffered by the medical and media professions far exceed losses in previous conflicts in comparable timeframes. A wider cross-disciplinary discussion is urgently required and that is what the panel will begin.
Toby Cadman
Toby Cadman
In previous conflicts, accountability is beginning to be sought. In response to the conflict in Syria, panellist and human rights specialist barrister Toby Cadman has led a legal team in the filing of a complaint against Russia in the European Court of Human Rights for targeting hospitals in Syria and at the International Criminal Court against Russia and Syria for the targeting of schools and hospitals as one element of the crime of forced deportation.
Also joining the discussion will be the crucial voice of Jim Campbell, Director of the Health Workforce Department at the World Health Organization. He oversees the development and implementation of global public goods, evidence and tools to inform investments in the education and employment sphere as well as the retention of the health and care workforce in pursuit of global health security, universal health coverage and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Jim Campbell
Jim Campbell
As leading global journalists sign an open letter demanding access to cover the situation in Gaza, Hilsum says: “We do all we can to support our colleagues, but we cannot protect them from air strikes. We use news agency pictures, as well as video shot by our own stringer and verified social media footage to show what's going on, as well as interviews with eye-witnesses inside Gaza and those who have recently left. None of it compensates for not being on the ground.”
As part of the event, I will screen my film, Article 17 - Doctors in Palestine, that began my journey into the subject of healthcare in conflict, and the experience of which brought me to Cambridge to study for my PhD looking at the impact of attacks against healthcare in war. I never imagined how sadly timely such an event would be when I first planned the screening. An important conversation begins at the Cambridge Festival on the protection of those who risk so much for those affected by war.
Williams says the time for it is now.
“This panel is crucial to understanding the crisis in access for aid and objective news gathering and how this can be reversed before the rules based system unravels any further,” he says.
Last month marked 12 years since the death of award-winning war correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed in Syria when an airstrike hit the media centre she was working in. She was Hilsum’s close friend and colleague and in her memory Hilsum co-founded the Marie Colvin Journalists' Network. It has eight members in Gaza, supported through grants which cover equipment lost in airstrikes and other emergency needs.
Hilsum says: “I think of Marie a lot. She would be determined to tell the story of what is happening to civilians in Gaza. Nor would she forget the Israeli hostages. She is an inspiration to us all. I miss her a lot.”
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