Doctors without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), says health facilities across Ethiopia’s Tigray region have been looted, vandalised, and destroyed.

The humanitarian outfit said of 106 health facilities visited by its teams between mid-December 2020 and early March 2021, nearly 70 percent had been looted.

In some health facilities across Tigray, the looting of health facilities continues, according to MSF teams.

‘While some looting may have been opportunistic, health facilities in most areas appear to have been deliberately vandalised to make them non-functional’, MSF said in a statement on its website.

‘In many health centres, such as in Debre Abay and May Kuhli in North-West Tigray, teams found destroyed equipment, smashed doors and windows, and medicine and patient files scattered across floors’.

It further said medical equipment, including ultrasound machines and monitors, in Adwa hospital in central Tigray, had been deliberately smashed.

‘In the same region, the health facility in Semema was reportedly looted twice by soldiers before being set on fire, while the health centre in Sebeya was hit by rockets, destroying the delivery room’, the statement read.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been deprived of medical care for months and have received little humanitarian assistance, according to the medical aid outfit.

The conflict involving federal and local forces in Tigray has left hundreds dead, thousands displaced, and millions in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

The conflict started on 04 November after the country’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, ordered the Ethiopian Defence Forces (EDF) to attack the Tigray Regional Paramilitary Police and militia loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

MSF says most of the displaced people inside Tigray stay with the host community, while tens of thousands live in informal sites or are still hiding in the bush or the mountains.

Source: MSF

Photo source: MSF