Medical neutrality is threatened as clinicians and hospitals are deliberately attacked, particularly in Gaza, says BMJ Global Health.

“War has devastating consequences on healthcare, with attacks becoming normalised and health weaponised,” academics from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon have written in BMJ Global Health.

The study conceptualises the systematic and deliberate attacks on healthcare as ‘healthocide’.

“We mean the intentional, systematic destruction of not only healthcare infrastructure, hospitals, healthcare workers and medical supply lines, but also the devastation of a population’s health and its well-being in its entirety. In other words, healthocide refers to a shattering of the very wholeness that health itself implies,” they wrote.

The authors cite data from Israel’s full-scale invasion of Gaza, which has resulted in at least 986 medical workers’ deaths. Recent figures from the Healthcare Workers Watch show that 28 doctors from Gaza are being held inside Israeli prisons without any charge, eight them senior consultants in surgery, orthopaedics, intensive care, cardiology and paediatrics.

Figures from the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition recorded 3,623 attacks on or obstruction of healthcare in 2024, the highest number ever documented, The Guardian reported.

These attacks included doctors, nurses and allied healthcare professionals who were beaten, arbitrarily arrested, kidnapped, tortured and killed; patients shot in their beds or dragged to detention centres; and hospitals that were deliberately bombed and raided.