The World Health Organization confirmed Thursday that more than 100 attacks targeted health services in Ukraine, demanding that humanitarian aid reach the city of Mariupol, which is besieged by Russian forces.
“To date, the World Health Organization has verified 103 attacks on health services, with 73 dead and 51 wounded, including medical personnel and patients,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference, expressing regret for this “grim” toll.
And 89 of these confirmed attacks affected health institutions, and the rest were transport vehicles, most of them ambulances.
The Director-General expressed “outrage at the continued attacks on health services,” recalling that they constitute “a violation of international humanitarian law.”
“The World Health Organization has been able to deliver life-saving supplies in many affected areas, but it is true that access to some of them is still very difficult,” the WHO Regional Director for Europe, Hans Kluge, said at a press conference in Lviv in western Ukraine.
“I think the priority is clearly Mariupol,” he added.
The city has been surrounded by the Russian army and its separatist allies for weeks, facing fierce Ukrainian resistance.
The two sides stress that the humanitarian situation there is catastrophic, the city is widely destroyed, and there is great concern about the fate of its civilians, knowing that it had more than 400,000 people before the Russian invasion.
On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of obstructing the delivery of humanitarian aid to Mariupol to hide the “thousands” of victims.
Kluge stressed that the World Health Organization “has so far been able to deliver 185 tons of medical supplies to the most affected areas in the country, reaching half a million people.”
The WHO official did not specify who was responsible for the attacks on health services in Ukraine, stressing that the organization “does not have the authority” to do so.
The UN official expressed concern about the future, while Russia is massing its forces in eastern Ukraine for a possible new offensive.
He said the WHO was “looking at all scenarios, from continuing to treat victims collectively” to “chemical attacks”.
Kluge admitted that “there is no guarantee that the war will not get worse.”