A young patient was among those wounded in a Russian missile strike on a Ukrainian children’s hospital in Kyiv on July 8, 2024. Two people were killed and at least 16 wounded in the strike on Okhmatdyt Hospital.[ZelenskyyUa/X]

Wartime attacks on health-care workers and facilities on steep rise

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Attacks on clinics, hospitals and health-care workers in conflict zones numbered more than 3,600 in 2024, a 62 per cent increase in two years, says a new report.

More than a third of the attacks targeted Gaza or the West Bank; hundreds more were recorded in Ukraine, Lebanon, Myanmar and Sudan.

The report “Epidemic of Violence: Violence Against Health Care in Conflict 2024,” by the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, says the attacks consisted of air, missile and drone strikes; shelling; tank fire; shootings; arson; the looting and takeover of health facilities; and the arrest and detention of health workers.

“By far the largest number of attacks on health care—more than 1,300—took place in Gaza and the West Bank, far more than we have ever reported in one conflict in one year, including more than double the number of health workers killed,” wrote coalition chair Len Rubenstein.

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Flying Officer Donald Galloway Watt McKie was returning from a mission when his, and another plane were shot down by U.K. friendly fire. He did not survive. [McKie family]

Remembering Canadian downed by U.K. friendly fire tragedy in WW II

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

Craig McKie of Fraser Valley, B.C., never met his father.

He was just two months old on May 29, 1944, when Flying Officer Donald Galloway Watt McKie of Toronto, piloting the Wellington bomber LN443, lost his life, along with all five other crew members, following a friendly fire incident near the rural English village of Hazelbury Bryan in Dorset.

The absence the tragedy left never went away. It was “always there,” recalls Craig. There was “always a missing chair.”

As for many families who lost fathers, brothers and sons, the McKie’s never really got over it.

The lost became internalized and its ripple felt for generations, including by people who didn’t even meet him. Craig’s daughter Catriana was one of them.

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