Investigation
With Yemen Attack, US Continues Long History of Deliberately Bombing Hospitals
In repeatedly targeting and destroying a cancer center in Yemen, the United States has carried on a long pattern of bombing hospitals.
On March 24, the United States carried out a premeditated attack on the Al Rasool Al-Azam Oncology Hospital in Saada, Yemen, turning it into rubble. At least two people were killed and 13 more injured.
This was not an isolated incident. Eight days previously, on March 16, Washington launched 13 separate airstrikes against the building, systematically destroying the hospital's five blocks.
The Anti-Cancer Fund, a local government medical organization, described the events as a clear "war crime."
"These attacks are not just airstrikes, but systematic executions, intended to eliminate hope and wipe out life amid a suffocating blockade," it said in a statement.
The Yemeni Cancer Control Fund, a government body tasked with overseeing the country's healthcare system, agreed, alleging that they were part of what it called:
A systematic American policy that has targeted the Yemeni people for years through bombings and a suffocating blockade, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis and spreading deadly diseases, including cancer, which has surged due to the use of internationally banned weapons since 2015."
The newly built Al Rasool Al-Azam Hospital was the centerpiece of the region's healthcare network. Costing over $7.5 million, the center provided crucial treatment to hundreds of cancer patients who previously went without any care at all or faced an eight-and-a-half-hour round trip to the capital, Sanaa, for therapy.
The repeated strikes on healthcare facilities in Yemen have received virtually zero attention in the United States. Indeed, Washington's attacks on Yemen have elicited almost no critical coverage, with corporate media seemingly more outraged that senior Trump officials used a Signal group chat to plan their operations than those deeds leading to the deaths of dozens of civilians.
The United States returned to bombing Yemen because its government, in an effort to halt the Israeli assault on Gaza, stopped Israeli ships traveling through the Red Sea. And like Palestine, Yemen is under an international blockade, depriving its people of basic necessities.
Post-9/11 Hospital Attacks
The destruction of the Al Rasool Al-Azam Oncology Center was far from a unique occurrence. In fact, the attack carries on an extremely long and well-documented tradition of the United States targeting hospitals.
In August 2017, the Trump administration itself not only bombed a hospital in Raqqa, Syria but reportedly used white phosphorous munitions to do so. Officials from the Red Crescent reported that the U.S. carried out 20 separate attacks on the hospital, systematically targeting its power generators, vehicles and wards, turning the site into rubble. At least 30 civilians were killed, some likely due to the effects of the white phosphorous, which causes respiratory damage and organ failure.
A highly controversial and widely-banned weapon, white phosphorous instantly ignites upon contact with oxygen, sticks to clothes and skin, and burns at an extremely high temperature. It cannot be extinguished by water, leaving those affected to suffer excruciating - and deadly - injuries.
In 2015, the U.S. Air Force carried out a bombing campaign against a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The trauma center, one of the newest, largest, and most recognizable buildings in the city, was deliberately targeted; Doctors Without Borders had already supplied the military with its precise coordinates.
|The aftermath of US airstrikes on the MSF Trauma Centre in Kunduz, Afghanistan in October 2015. Photo An internal inquiry revealed that the airmen aboard the AC-130 gunship that carried out the operation pushed back against their superiors, questioning the strike's legality. However, they were overruled and ordered to bomb the hospital regardless of their concerns. A Doctors Without Borders report concluded that the U.S. knew where the hospital was and that it did not hide any Taliban fighters and targeted it anyway. At least 42 people are known to have been killed in the incident.
The 2015 Kunduz bombing was a unique moment in history, as it was the first time that one Nobel Peace Prize winner (Barack Obama) bombed another one (Doctors Without Borders).
During his time in office, Obama bombed seven countries, including Libya. In July 2011, as part of its mission to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi, NATO planes bombed Zliten, destroying the city's hospital. Eighty-five people were killed, including at least 11 at the medical center. The event helped turn what was once Africa's most prosperous and stable country into a failed state replete with open-air slave markets. Libya's downfall has, in turn, helped to destabilize the entire Sahel region.
Perhaps no country in the 21st century has felt the wrath of Washington as much as Iraq. U.S. strikes on civilian infrastructure were a frequent occurrence, and hospitals were no different. Arguably, the most notable example is the April 2003 bombing of the Red Crescent Maternity Hospital in Baghdad.
American missiles struck the city center complex housing the hospital, killing several and wounding at least 25 people, including doctors.
The charitable hospital was crucial to providing affordable healthcare to working-class Iraqis, charging ten times less than the city's private clinics. It developed a reputation as a first-class maternity hospital, delivering an average of 35 babies per day before the invasion. UNICEF noted a sharp rise in maternal mortality after the bombing, partially due to the lack of obstetric care in Baghdad.
Clinton's War on Hospitals
Four years earlier, in May 1999, U.S.-led NATO planes dropped cluster munitions on an outdoor market and hospital in the Yugoslav city of Nis, killing at least 15 people and injuring 60 more, according to the hospital's director. Cluster munitions are now banned under international law. Regardless, between 2023 and 2024, the United States transferred large quantities to Ukraine for use against Russian forces.
Two weeks after the Nis bombing, NATO targeted a hospital in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade. The missile strike destroyed much of the maternity ward, with rescuers pulling infants and mothers from the rubble in the dead of night. At least three people were reported killed.
The Yugoslav attacks were not the Clinton administration's only attacks on medical facilities. In 1998, in response to Osama bin Laden's recent bombings of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Bill Clinton ordered an attack on the Al-Shifa medicine factory in Sudan. Fourteen cruise missiles hit the plant, turning what had been the largest producer of medicine in the country into a pile of twisted metal. The factory had produced over half of Sudan's pharmaceuticals, including crucial antibiotics and antimalarial and diarrhea medications.
While not a hospital, the destruction of Al-Shifa was vastly more lethal than any other attack listed. The event led to a collapse in the availability of drugs in one of Africa's poorest countries. The German Ambassador to Sudan estimated that the death toll reached into the "tens of thousands."
The Clinton administration publicly insisted that the plant was actually bin Laden's chemical weapons factory. Privately, however, Secretary of State Madeline Albright worked hard to suppress a government report, noting this was not true.
Sudan was Clinton's second attack on Africa. In June 1993, U.S. soldiers (under U.N. auspices) carried out a mortar attack against Digfer Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia. The bombs destroyed the main reception area, blew a gaping hole in the wall of the recovery room, and shattered glass across the building. "It probably will never be known how many Somalis died in the U.N. [U.S.] onslaught," wrote The Chicago Tribune. One reason for this is that helicopter-borne soldiers attacked reporters and photographers attempting to cover the attack, throwing stun grenades at them and chasing them away from the scene.
Latin American Dirty Wars
During the 1980s, Latin America and the Caribbean were the sites of intense U.S. interest. In October 1983, during the U.S. invasion of the island, American warplanes hit the Richmond Hill Mental Hospital in Grenada. The Reagan administration initially attempted to deny the attack before finally conceding their culpability. Dozens of people were injured, and at least 20 were killed, although The New York Times suggested an actual death toll of over twice that number.
The U.S. invaded Grenada in order to crush the island's socialist revolution. In Central America, however, it relied on funding, training and arming proxy forces to do its bidding. These death squads would wreak destruction across the region and continue to shape its politics and society to this day.
In El Salvador, U.S.-trained forces waged a dirty war against the population in order to crush leftist FMLN guerilla forces. Hospitals were among their preferred targets. On April 15, 1989, for instance, pilots flying U.S.-made A-37 jets and UH 1M and Hughes-500 helicopters bombed an FMLN hospital in San Ildefonso, killing five people.
|A hospital staff member is videotaped as he talks with US military personnel outside the bomb-damaged mental hospital in Grenada. Photo Paratroopers armed with M-16 rifles arrived on U.S. helicopters and attacked and abducted the medical staff, including French nurse Madeleine Lagadec. Before executing her, the soldiers spent eight hours raping and torturing her. Images of the remains of her mutilated body caused outrage in France, which issued an international arrest warrant for the four U.S.-backed officers overseeing the operation.
In Nicaragua, meanwhile, throughout the 1980s, U.S.-trained paramilitaries intentionally attacked "soft targets" such as hospitals in an effort to terrorize the population into dropping their support for the country's socialist government.
A study by Richard M. Garfield, Professor of Nursing at Columbia University, found that, between 1981 and 1984, at least 63 health centers were forced to close due to attacks from the U.S.-backed "Contra" death squads.
These operations were carefully planned for maximum effect, with the Contras leaving behind graffiti at the crime scenes, announcing that the "Lion Cubs of Reagan" had visited the area. Throughout their campaign, President Reagan supported the Contras, labeling them "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers." Dr. Michael Gray, Chairman of Occupational Medicine at Kino Community Hospital in Tucson, AZ., a doctor who visited Nicaragua, held a different opinion, describing them and their actions as "no different than the SS at the end of the Second World War."
Cold War Killing Machine
During the American wars in Indochina, the bombing of hospitals was official - if unstated - U.S. policy.
Alan Stevenson, a former Army intelligence specialist, testified that, while on duty in Quang Tri province in Vietnam, he regularly identified hospitals to be struck by U.S. fighter jets. "The bigger the hospital, the better it was," he said, explaining the military's thought process. "This wasn't something that was hush-hush," he added. "We really didn't consider it that nasty an item."
Former Air Force captain Gerald Greven corroborated Stevenson's allegations, noting that he personally ordered bombing raids against medical centers. It was official policy to "look for hospitals as targets," he said.
Perhaps the most notorious and well-documented case of this in Vietnam occurred on December 22, 1972, when American planes dropped over 100 bombs on the 1000-bed Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi, nearly obliterating the building, in the process killing 28 medical staff and an unconfirmed number of patients.
The U.S. military justified the strike by claiming that the hospital "frequently housed antiaircraft positions" and noted its proximity to a military airbase.
During the Congressional hearings on clandestine U.S. activities in Laos and Cambodia, meanwhile, lawmakers were told that the bombing of hospitals was "routine." Indeed, the former remains the most bombed country, per capita, in world history.
Like in Vietnam, the targeting of hospitals was not only commonplace but deliberate. In 1973, former Army captain Rowan Malphurs testified that, while serving with the Combined Intelligence Center of Vietnam, he helped orchestrate attacks on Cambodian health centers. "We were planning bombings of hospitals," he said. Yet Malphurs was unrepentant. "I think it was a good thing because the North Vietnamese Army had a privileged sanctuary in Cambodia," he added.
Thus, as this brief rundown of the past five decades has shown, last month's attacks on the Al Rasool Al-Azam Oncology Hospital in Yemen are far from an aberration. As these examples from 13 different countries show, Washington, in fact, has a longstanding history of targeting medical centers.
Going further back, the government of North Korea estimates that the U.S. military destroyed some 1,000 hospitals during the Korean War. These numbers are entirely plausible, given the gigantic bombing campaign that the country faced. Entire cities were leveled or flooded after American planes targeted dams. Professor Bruce Cummings, America's foremost expert on Korea, estimates that the U.S. killed around 25% of the entire North Korean population between 1950 and 1953.
Radio Silence
Article 8 of the Rome Statute, one of the fundamental texts of international law, explicitly identifies "intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives," as war crimes.
That the Trump administration repeatedly struck a well-known and easily identifiable hospital in Yemen is an extremely important story. But it has, in fact, received zero coverage in corporate media. Searches for "Al Rasool Al-Azam Hospital" and "Yemen Hospital" in the Dow Jones Factiva news database, a tool that records the content from more than 32,000 U.S. and international media outlets, show that no mainstream American publication has even mentioned this grave war crime.
This is not because the information is particularly hard to find. Well-known media figures such as Pepe Escobar and 𝕏 Jackson Hinkle visited Saada and recorded viral videos from the wreckage where the hospital once stood. The information has been all over social media for weeks and has been covered widely in alternative media, including Drop Site News, AntiWar.com, Truthout, Common Dreams, and foreign outlets such as Al-Jazeera, 𝕏 RT (formerly Russia Today), and The Cradle. Thus, every single editor in every newsroom and television studio in the United States has access to this information and made the decision not to cover the story - a fact that suggests a lot about the diversity of opinion and freedom of our press.
This complete disinterest in U.S. misdeeds sits in stark contrast to when official enemy states do the same thing. When Russia hit hospitals in Ukraine and Syria, those incidents became front page news and led television news bulletins. Moreover, corporate media regularly explicitly framed the events as war crimes (see PBS, Politico, Foreign Policy, CNN, Newsweek, ABC News and the Los Angeles Times). Talking heads waxed lyrical about how Russian President Vladimir Putin must be brought to justice. And yet, when the United States does the same, that cacophony falls to complete silence - even when it is carried out by a president that many in corporate media appear desperate to attack at any opportunity.
What the recent attack on the cancer center in Yemen underlines is that it is dangerous to be a healthcare worker. The United States has a longstanding history of targeting hospitals in nations it selects for regime change. This is true of both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Therefore, the sad truth is that if you are in a country targeted by the United States, you are often safer away from a hospital than inside one.
Feature photo |Illustration by MintPress News
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela and Propaganda in the Information Age, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.