Healthocide: New Term for Systematic Attacks on Healthcare in Conflict Zones

TPP
Aug 16
4 min read

Coined by researchers in 2025, ‘healthocide’ describes the deliberate destruction of health systems in modern warfare.

Healthocide: New Term for Systematic Attacks on Healthcare in Conflict Zones

In a bold step to describe a growing but under-recognized pattern of violence in global conflict zones, researchers from the American University of Beirut have introduced a new term: “healthocide”. Unveiled in a commentary published in BMJ Global Health on August 5, 2025, this term seeks to encapsulate the intentional and systematic targeting of healthcare systems—a phenomenon that the traditional phrase “attacks on healthcare” fails to fully capture.

What is Healthocide?

According to the commentary's co-author, Joelle Abi-Rached, a professor of medicine at the American University of Beirut, healthocide refers to “the intentional, systematic destruction of not only healthcare infrastructure, hospitals, and workers, but also the devastation of a population’s health and well-being in its entirety.” In essence, healthocide represents the shattering of the wholeness that health itself implies.

This includes a coordinated strategy that may involve:

Killing clinicians,
Bombing hospitals,
Blocking ambulances, and
Disrupting medical supply chains,

with the ultimate aim of erasing a population’s capacity for care. The authors argue that this goes far beyond collateral damage or isolated incidents—it is part of a militarized strategy to dismantle a society's ability to survive and recover.

The term draws linguistic and conceptual parallels with genocide, aiming to frame these acts as crimes against humanity and demanding stronger legal protections under international humanitarian law (IHL).

A Global Pattern: Escalating Attacks on Healthcare

The need for a term like healthocide emerges from a disturbing global trend. According to the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition (SHCC), a network of nearly three dozen organizations, 2024 witnessed over 3,600 incidents of violence against healthcare—marking a 15% increase from 2023 and a staggering 62% rise from 2022.

What’s more alarming is that these attacks are no longer accidental or collateral. As Len Rubenstein, Chair of the SHCC and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, notes, “attacks on health care are now seemingly part of the strategy of the conflict, and that is new and very, very worrisome.”

Once viewed as isolated violations, these deliberate and strategic assaults have now become tactics of war—used to:

Sow fear,
Cripple care, and
Magnify human suffering.

This weaponization of health, as experts call it, compounds the impact of war exponentially by disabling essential lifelines and leaving populations vulnerable to both violence and disease.

The Human Cost: From Lebanon to Gaza

The term healthocide is deeply rooted in the lived experiences of its proponents, particularly in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. After returning to Lebanon in 2024, Abi-Rached witnessed firsthand the escalation of violence as the Israel-Hezbollah conflict intensified following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Between mid-September and late November 2024, Lebanese health facilities faced heavy Israeli bombardment, resulting in:

408 health workers killed, and
208 recorded attacks on health facilities, according to the SHCC.

These attacks unfolded alongside the war in Gaza, where the situation was even more dire.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Palestinian Ministry of Health:

Over 1,500 medical workers have died in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
Nearly half of all hospitals in the Palestinian territories are only partially operational.

The U.N. estimates that these attacks have decimated the region’s medical infrastructure. Rubenstein describes the situation in Gaza as “the obliteration of an entire healthcare system,” adding that the “sickening regularity” of these assaults is astonishing and unique, even when compared to conflict zones like Syria, Ukraine, Tigray (Ethiopia), and Myanmar.

Israel has often justified attacks on health infrastructure by citing the presence of enemy combatants, weapons, or military command centers within or beneath hospitals. Nonetheless, the humanitarian toll of such operations continues to draw global concern.

A Call to the Medical Community

The authors of the term healthocide stress that the medical and academic communities must no longer remain passive. They advocate for:

Documenting violations,
Enforcing international humanitarian law, and
Preventing complicity in acts of healthocide.

By coining and disseminating this term, Abi-Rached and her colleagues aim to galvanize medical professionals, much like how terms such as “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” once reshaped global discourse. Naming a phenomenon, they argue, gives it power and visibility, helping drive policy change and legal accountability.

A Norm Under Threat

Experts like Zarifi echo this concern, noting a troubling silence from the international community. Even nations that historically championed the norm against attacks on healthcare appear reluctant to defend it—especially in cases involving Israel and Palestine, and to some extent Lebanon.

The norms of war, particularly those meant to protect medical neutrality, are eroding. With healthcare no longer off-limits in modern conflict, the term healthocide is an urgent attempt to restore that moral boundary and bring systematic violations into the global spotlight.

While some critics argue that "healthocide" does not introduce a completely new concept, its proponents maintain that the word serves as a crucial signal, elevating the urgency and scale of the problem. It captures the intentional destruction of care systems not merely as acts of war, but as acts of annihilation—deserving the same level of global condemnation and legal accountability as other war crimes.

Ultimately, the emergence of “healthocide” challenges us to rethink how we recognize, document, and respond to this alarming trend—and to stand in solidarity with those who heal, even in the heart of destruction.