Posted on 8 July, 2014

Medical care has come under fire in South Sudan. Over 6 months, at least 58 people were killed on hospital grounds, including 25 patients and at least 2 Ministry of Health staff. Ambulances, medical equipment and hospitals were burned, looted, and destroyed. And hundreds of thousands of people have been cut off from health care. 

Photo by Michael Goldfarb/MSF

This is the burned front gate of the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in the town of Leer, South Sudan as of February 2014. The hospital was thoroughly looted, burned, ransacked, and effectively destroyed, along with most of Leer, sometime between the final days of January and early February 2014, leaving hundreds of thousands of people cut off from critical, lifesaving medical care. The hospital, opened by MSF 25 years ago, was the only secondary health care facility in Unity State, South Sudan. Hospitals have been ransacked in the towns of Bor, Malakal, Bentiu, Nasir and Leer, often during periods of heavy fighting. The damage goes far beyond the acts of violence themselves as vulnerable people are cut off from healthcare when they desperately need it.