Doctors Bombed, Killers Shielded: International Law’s Collapse in Conflict Zones -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

International law still falsely argues that medical personnel, ambulances and hospitals are protected in war. The epitaphs of health workers across Gaza, Sudan, Syria and Yemen tell another tale: how protection has become a modern fable dutifully recited by diplomats while medics are buried alive under the rubble.

Attacks on health care in a conflict zone are no longer an unintended consequence of the war. It is a method of war. You bombard the hospitals, you intimidate and capture surgeons, you torture ambulance crews (or kill them), you’ve taken out their oxygen supply…you don’t just injure people, you fracture or destroy civilian capacity to survive. That is the point. A scalpel the threat, a hospital, a military nuisance and an army medic collateral damage in this globalized order that has legalized impunity.

This is the point at which hypocrisy in international law becomes intolerable. Special protection of medical personnel and facilities is promised in the Geneva Conventions, customary humanitarian law and endless Security Council rhetoric. In theory, the rules are straightforward. But those norms evaporate the instant a predator is powerful, insulated or politically expedient. The law is uttered with gravity and trampled on with impudence.

Consider the pattern. Its hospitals hit time after time, not once. Ambulances Are Struck Even With Clear Markings Humanitarian corridors become killing fields. Under the cover of ‘security operations’, medical personnel were arrested, tortured or disappeared, even executed. And then the ritual response: concern, condemnation, fact finding, procedural delay and finally disappear. The dead receive statements. The perpetrators receive time.

What legal order generates reams of paperwork and so little deterrence? A failed one. A morally compromised one. A selective one. And, of course, international law is not crumbling because its texts are weak; it is collapsing precisely because their full enforcement depends on geopolitics that have become deeply corrupt. When atrocities happen with ally states, accountability becomes convenient. It looks and sounds nice until states acting in competition with one another do the same. This is not law as principle acting. What is law but a degraded form of theatre?

The consequence is devastating. Medical neutrality which was once the bare minimum of civilization has become very optional. The international community has taught armed actors: if you destroy healthcare gradually, loudly deny it was your intent and conceal behind military language no one will hold you meaningfully accountable. Put differently, operational doctrine has became impunity.

Now let us be honest with the victims. Often these are simply not abstractions like “humanitarian losses.” These are nicu doctors without anesthesia, paramedics driving through sniper fire, nurses holding onto the hands of babies on ventilators as generators fail to work properly and surgeons doing amputations in pitch black secondary to long-term Israeli missile strikes. They are murdered not only by bombs and bullets but also through the cowardice of states unwilling to enforce the very rules they profess make civilization.

It is too kind to call this a gap in protection. It is a protection fraud. It has built a cathedral of humanitarian law while almost allowing its most grotesque violations to recur unpunished. We not only have no enforcement but we now seem to accept. That normalization is what transforms legal immunity from an exemption into a death sentence for those attempting to save lives.

Attacks on healthcare should lead to automatic repercussions (independent investigations, targeted sanctions, universal jurisdiction convictions and/or prosecution of perpetrators followed by the imposition of an arms embargo against violators and suspension or limiting military assistance). If the international system wants any credibility left it has no alternative. Not years later, not after another commission report, and not after the political temperature cools but right now. Protection without enforcement is propaganda.

In fact, the truth is even uglier. Some people’s lives are by law protected in wars, others only through a headline for an hour or so. When the attention is lost, then bombing starts again and law remains silent!

It is time to drop the act that medical protection on the battlefield still exists. It is not. The minute hospitals turn into battlefields and the medics become targets, it is no longer just about compliance. It is whether international law can be seen as law at all.

And if those who bomb doctors are protected by power, vetoes, allies or strategic restraint, then the message to every medic in every conflict zone is unmistakable: your white coat will not be spared. It is a target.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia