A decade on, Canada is still a bystander to attacks against healthcare
What does the collapse of a rules-based world order look like?
It looks like children and health workers screaming from Gaza’s hospitals as Israel’s shelling draws near. It looks like pharmacies in South Sudan burned to the ground, patients fleeing in fear, their vital medicines reduced to ashes. It feels like the panic and terror tearing through Zamzam camp in Sudan after shelling forced 400,000 people to flee for their lives. It hurts like the heartbreak of receiving yet another obituary notice to mourn a colleague killed while simply trying to do their job: providing healthcare in spaces the world promised would be protected.
May 3 marks ten years since world governments, including Canada’s, reaffirmed their obligations under International Humanitarian Law to protect hospitals and healthcare in war zones. Ten years on, the failure of states to fully implement UN Security Council Resolution 2286 has been paid for by real lives, my colleagues’ lives, one too many times. Its anniversary should serve as a wake-up call to Canada.
UN Security Resolution 2286 strongly urges governments to help prevent and address these atrocities and hold perpetrators accountable. As a co-sponsor to this global commitment ten years ago, Canada knows fully that its endorsement of the resolution was a moral pledge to stand behind the laws that protect healthcare in war, and act when those rules are broken.
Yet in the years that followed, Canada and the rest of the world drifted back into their roles of bystanders as attacks against hospitals and humanitarians continued with impunity.
At Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), our teams have repeatedly come under attack by armed combatants across many countries. Just this February, government forces in Lankien, South Sudan, hit our hospitals with airstrikes. In Darfur, Sudan, armed raids have left vital medical infrastructure in ruins. In Gaza, MSF staff have seen how Israeli forces have systematically attacked and destroyed healthcare and killed healthcare workers, including MSF colleagues. None of the perpetrators of any of these crimes have ever been held to account.
Data from the World Health Organization paints a clear picture of the massive global failure: in 2025, there were a total of 1,348 attacks on medical facilities, resulting in the deaths of 1,981 people. This is more than double from one year prior, in 2024, when 944 health workers and patients were killed. Increasingly, attacks against healthcare are even characterized as “mistakes” or “collateral damage” rather than acknowledged as the war crimes they really are.
For Canada, the 10th anniversary of UN Resolution 2286 should be a wake-up call. A decade on, Resolution 2286 remains unevenly implemented, including by Canada. The Canadian government should commit to a clear, time-bound national action plan, strengthen support for reporting and investigating attacks on healthcare when they occur, and renew efforts to help enforce accountability. We can’t afford to let Canada’s former commitments to this issue slip when it matters most.
As a humanitarian, I’m exhausted by the heartbreak that comes with every new desperate message from a colleague trapped in a bombarded hospital, every new photo of a clinic turned to rubble, every new obituary to remember another teammate lost too soon. There are no condolences or platitudes that will erase yesterday’s harm. But there’s still time for global reckoning that could prevent tomorrow’s tragedies.
