Category: News & Stories

I was at Rafik Hariri University Hospital when the bombardment began.

I was there with our MSF emergency room doctor for a routine visit. It was an ordinary moment—until it wasn’t. Suddenly, white smoke and dust engulfed the space. For a few minutes, no one understood what was happening. Then the ambulances began arriving.

And they didn’t stop.

The first patients came in with severe head injuries, with fragments of glass, metal and debris lodged in their bodies. Many were unconscious. Some died shortly after arrival. There was no time to process—only to move, to respond, to try to save their lives.

Soon, the emergency room filled with people searching. Injured parents calling out for their children. Families coming with children’s pictures asking if anyone had seen their loved ones—maybe still under the rubble, maybe taken somewhere else.

I was trying to stop the bleeding of man who had arrived with severe head trauma and shrapnel in his abdomen, when a young man came up to me holding a phone, showing me a photo of his brother. He was asking if I had seen him. I didn’t have an answer, but I searched with him, checking rooms and faces, trying to find his brother while our emergency doctor helped bandage wounds and stabilize the patient.

Hours passed, but it felt like years. The cases kept coming—so many of them critical. At one point, nearly four hours after the bombardment began, around twenty ambulances arrived at once. 50 people inside, all already gone.

There was one young man I can’t forget. He had lost both his legs, and there was a piece of debris lodged in his abdomen. I can almost still hear his brother’s cries in my ear. We tried everything we could to stabilize him, to control the bleeding, to suture. But we lost him.

The emergency room was overwhelmed. I found myself running alongside the hospital staff—exhausted, but extraordinary—moving from one patient to the next, from one corridor to another, trying to keep up with the sheer scale of need with limited supplies.

Despite everything, more and more doctors began arriving. The doctors’ syndicate had sent out a call for support to all hospitals, and specialists came in waves—surgeons, physicians—everyone ready to help. There was an incredible sense of solidarity. But in the ER, the available supplies were quickly used, the stretchers were full, and too many patients were arriving in critical condition or already dead.

What we saw that day was not just a medical emergency. It was the direct impact of attacks on civilians, residential areas, on families, on children, on people who, just hours earlier, were living their normal lives.

The hospital staff did everything they could, both here and across Lebanon, as other hospitals faced similar mass influxes. I saw extraordinary dedication at Rafiq Hariri Hospital: people pushing themselves beyond exhaustion to care for others. But dedication alone is not enough in a mass-casualty situation.

As MSF, we are supporting hospitals and responding where we can, but what this day showed us clearly is how urgent the protection of civilians is.

Notes to editors:

MSF launched a nationwide emergency response since the escalation of 2 March. MSF teams are supporting hospitals responding to mass influxes of wounded patients and have been present in several emergency rooms during these influxes, assisting with triage, patient flow, and the management of severe trauma cases. MSF has also donated fuel, mass-casualty and dressing kits, and other medical and nonmedical supplies to help hospitals cope with the surge in needs, and is coordinating with additional facilities to provide similar support based on assessed needs. Beyond hospital support, MSF continues its emergency response through 20 mobile clinics across the country, while scaling up the distribution of essential relief items, as well as water, sanitation, and shelter assistance.

These indiscriminate strikes on highly densely populated areas are completely unacceptable.

Our teams are responding to mass influx of injured patients, including children, at Rafik Hariri Public Hospital, Beirut. Patients are arriving with shrapnel injuries and heavy bleeding. One patient arrived to the hospital having lost both legs. The situation is chaotic as more people are brought in. MSF teams are mobilizing and sending more support to other hospitals in impacted areas.

Earlier this morning, MSF teams in the Jabal Amel hospital in Sour, southern Lebanon, responded to an influx of injured patients, including one child who lost six members of her family. One of the families that was brought in had returned home a few hours before being injured, thinking there was a ceasefire in place. At the same time health care staff are being injured and pushed to exhaustion: last night the Hiram hospital, also in Sour, where MSF has provided donations, was struck by Israeli forces injuring multiple health care workers.

Continuous attacks on civilians must stop. Healthcare facilities, staff and patients need to be protected. The repeated forcible displacement of people – a war crime – needs to stop”.

In Beirut, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) had been providing care through its Bourj Hammoud clinic, a northern suburb of Beirut, provided around 1,500 consultations of medical care, mental health support and social services a month. In response to the growing needs following Israel’s escalation of attacks, MSF has expanded through its mobile clinics reaching forcibly displaced communities across the city and surrounding areas. Together, the clinic and two mobile clinics are now providing some 3,000 consultations per week, as well as distribution of core relief items and food support to migrant-led community kitchens.

Since early March, medical referrals from MSF’s Bourj Hammoud clinic have doubled, with many patients requiring blood transfusions, intensive care admissions, or surgery. This increase reflects both the escalation of the war and the suspension of the International Organization for Migration referral programme in January. Other actors are also struggling to fill these gaps due to lack of funding, leaving many patients without access to lifesaving care.

“I was living in Dahiyeh (Beirut’s southern suburbs) when the bombardment started. We fled that same night, not knowing where to go,” explains displaced migrant Salam receiving health care from MSF mobile clinic in Ghosta, Mount Lebanon. “We ended up on the road, searching for shelter, knocking on doors that wouldn’t open, asking for help that never came. There was nowhere for us. No safety. Just the road beneath us.”

Migrant communities in Lebanon already face significant economic, legal and social barriers to accessing basic services. Many are now sheltering in overcrowded accommodations arranged by community leads, or sleeping on the streets, with some reportedly being explicitly turned away, discriminated against, or deprioritized from formal collective shelters in favour of Lebanese nationals.

Violence and fear shape lives in the West Bank

Between 7 October 2023 and 7 March 2026 1,071 Palestinians, including 233 children, have been killed in the occupied West Bank, and Jerusalem, according to OHCHR. Eleven were killed by settlers this year alone. “It is shocking and deeply disturbing”, says Salam Yousef, an MSF staff member in the West Bank.

“They attack and kill people without consequences – it feels like there is no justice for us, like our lives don’t count,” says Yousef. “Last week, they [Israeli forces] shot a family of six who were driving home. Only two of the sons survived; they are orphans now – their family was killed in front of them; their brothers were seven and five years old.”

The widespread and multilayered violence has reshaped life for Palestinians – the sense of an existential threat captures a broader reality unfolding across the West Bank. “These developments feel like more than a series of isolated incidents, it is a slow but significant transformation, step by step Israeli forces and settlers are taking over,” says Salam Yousef. “It is frightening because we have no control and the world doesn’t seem to care about what happens to us.”

She adds: “If the world continues to look away, the shrinking of Palestinian land will not stop. It will simply continue — checkpoint by checkpoint, road by road, house by house — until a reality that once seemed temporary becomes permanent.”

“Our lives and dreams are on hold”

“The psychological toll of this environment is immense,” says Elsa Salvatore, MSF psychotherapist in Nablus. “It’s not only about physical violence from settler attacks or what happens at checkpoints. In our sessions, people often speak about the humiliation they experience daily and the constant uncertainty. They become hyper-vigilant, unable to sleep, always expecting something bad to happen.

“Most people have stopped making plans. Many suffer from symptoms related to post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD) – although PTSD is not correctly describing it, because they are not ‘post’ the traumatic experience, they are still in it, continuously experiencing trauma and uncertainty,” she says.

During this time, when violence, insecurity and restrictions on daily life are increasingly widespread across the West Bank, it is vital that people have access to healthcare. But in reality, it is just the opposite: access to medical care is blocked or severely obstructed.

In certain regions, like Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, NGOs are blocked from providing essential humanitarian support, as large parts of the area are designated as a military zone and movement is heavily restricted by the Israeli forces. Consequently, we have had to reduce the number of our mobile clinics in the area from 17 to just 5 since September 2025; patients are being cut off from even the most basic medical services. “We feel abandoned and forgotten. There is no one coming to us anymore. When we get sick, we have no choice but to walk for miles. Sometimes we just stay and endure the pain,” says a resident from Masafer Yatta.

Since 2 March, civilians have faced increasingly dire conditions, as a marked escalation of attacks by Israeli forces has forced more than one million people from their homes and disrupted their access to healthcare. According to the Ministry of Health, 1,039 people have been killed, 12 per cent of whom are children, between 2 and 23 March.

Combined with ground attacks and repetitive airstrikes targeting civilian infrastructure such as bridges in the south of Lebanon, these actions are effectively isolating large cities and numerous villages south of the Litani River, along with their remaining residents, from the rest of the country.

Following the ceasefire in November 2024, I decided to return to Odaisseh, to my family’s home, seeking the safety I had lost.

I went to the village and tried to repair the house as much as possible. I was overjoyed at first; after all, this house is my refuge, my safety and my stability.

Unfortunately, after spending four months there, I no longer felt safe[1]. It was constant anxiety, fear, tension and explosions.

[1] Despite the ceasefire agreement in November 2024, Israeli bombardment by drones and warplanes continued across various Lebanese regions, particularly targeting southern border villages on a near-daily basis.

“I came with my family from Odaisseh, and we were amongst the first people who forcibly evacuated our villages [in 2023],” says Ghina, standing outside the shelter. “I have been living in this shelter for almost three years. I lived with my family of five in one room, now an influx of people arrived, and, in some rooms, there are up to 30 people living together.”

Montana shelter used to be a hotel some years ago. Today, it is home for more than 120 displaced families, many of whom have been living here since villages in the south were forcibly evacuated nearly three years ago. But with the latest evacuation orders, many more people have arrived in the past days, overcrowding the shelter and placing further stress on the families there.

Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF’s) mobile medical units regularly visit this shelter, providing general healthcare to its residents. We run similar activities in several other shelters across the country, including in North, Akkar, Bekaa, Mount Lebanon, and Beirut governorates, where hundreds of thousands are seeking refuge.

According to Lebanese authorities, more than 217 people have been killed since Monday 2 March and close to 800 have been injured as a result of Israel’s relentless bombing. Thousands of families have been displaced as sweeping evacuation orders covering large parts of southern Lebanon, southern Beirut and areas of the Bekaa Valley, force people to flee with nowhere safe to go, raising serious concerns about potential violations of international humanitarian law.

“This escalation comes after 15 months of a ceasefire that never brought an end to Israeli attacks. Now families are being pushed into impossible choices: flee once again or remain at home under threat. In this environment of relentless bombing of densely populated areas, we call for the protection of civilians, healthcare workers and medical facilities,” adds Ristord.

Since 2 March, MSF teams have been assessing needs and responding in several collective shelters, towns and cities across Lebanon where tens of thousands of displaced people have gathered. Many people have already been displaced multiple times during previous escalations. Shelters are overcrowded, with some people sleeping in their cars or on the streets. Others have remained in their homes despite evacuation orders or returned due to a lack of space in shelters or lack of means to rent accommodation.

Despite the US-led peace plan, the Israeli authorities continue to heavily restrict and even deny water, shelter and medical care. Living conditions are maintained at undignified levels, and violence continues to kill and injure Palestinians on a daily basis. In recent weeks, humanitarian aid reaching Gaza has significantly decreased. In the West Bank, medical and humanitarian needs continue to escalate amidst alarming increases in violence, forced displacements, armed settler attacks, home demolitions, settlement expansion and obstruction to healthcare.

The withdrawal of MSF’s registration with the Israeli authorities is already impacting patient care, as deregistration compounds the strain on a health system devastated over the past two years and constrained by persistent restrictions on essential medical equipment and supplies. Since the beginning of January, MSF has been prevented by the Israeli authorities from bringing international staff and additional supplies into the OPT, and by March 1 2026 all MSF’s international staff will be forced to leave the territory.