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The head of an international medical charity whose hospital in northern Afghanistan was destroyed in a U.S. airstrike says the "extensive, quite precise destruction" of the bombing raid casts doubt on American military assertions that it was a mistake. The Oct. 3 attack on the compound in Kunduz city, which killed at least 22 patients and hospital staff, should be investigated as a possible war crime, said Christopher Stokes, general director of Doctors Without Borders, which is also known by its French abbreviation MSF. The trauma hospital was bombed during a firefight between Taliban and government troops, as U.S. advisers were helping Afghan forces retake the city after the insurgents overran it and seized control on Sept. 28. Afghan authorities say they are now largely back in control of Kunduz.

According to Associated Press reporting, American special operations analysts were scrutinizing the Afghan hospital days before it was destroyed because they believed it was being used by a Pakistani operative to coordinate Taliban activity. The analysts knew it was a medical facility, according to a former intelligence official who is familiar with some of the documents describing the site. It's unclear whether that information ever got to commanders who unleashed the AC-130 gunship on the hospital. "The hospital was repeatedly hit both at the front and the rear and extensively destroyed and damaged, even though we have provided all the coordinates and all the right information to all the parties in the conflict," Stokes said, standing in the burned-out main hospital building. "The extensive, quite precise destruction of this hospital ... doesn't indicate a mistake. The hospital was repeatedly hit," Stokes said. The bombing went on for more than an hour, despite calls to Afghan, U.S. and NATO to call if off, MSF has said.

tokes, who has called for an independent inquiry into the incident, told The Associated Press in an interview in the remains of the hospital on Friday that MSF wanted a "clear explanation because all indications point to a grave breach of international humanitarian law, and therefore a war crime." Afghan authorities have refused to comment before investigations are complete. President Ashraf Ghani's deputy spokesman, Zafar Hashemi, told reporters on Saturday that the Afghan government has "faith" in investigations being conducted by the U.S. military, and by a joint Afghan-NATO team. MSF has denied there were any armed Taliban on the hospital grounds at the time of the attack. "The compound was not entered by Taliban soldiers with weapons," Stokes said. "What we have understood from our staff and guards is that there was very strong, very good control of what was happening in and around the compound and they reported no firing in the hours preceding the destruction of the hospital." More than 70 staff members were on duty, tending to more than 100 patients at the time, he said. According to its policy, MSF treats government troops and insurgent combatants equally. Hospitals are regarded as protected sites in war.

Afghanistan's acting defense minister said Monday that the Doctors Without Borders hospital bombed by U.S. forces in the northern city of Kunduz was being used by insurgents as a "safe place." The hospital was bombed by a U.S. AC-130 gunship in the early hours of Oct. 3, killing at least 22 people and wounding many more. The main building was destroyed and the hospital has been shut down. "That was a place they wanted to use as a safe place because everybody knows that our security forces and international security forces were very careful not to do anything with a hospital," Defense Minister Masoom Stanekzai told The Associated Press, adding that a Taliban flag had been mounted on one of the hospital's walls.

The Israeli military on Wednesday completely destroyed the al-Wafa rehabilitation and geriatric hospital in the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shujaiya after weeks of missile strikes on the hospital and the forced evacuation of the patients, caregivers and hospital staff last week. The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the Israeli military claimed the hospital buildings were “being used as a Hamas command center and rocket-launching site.” However, the hospital director, Dr. Basman Alashi, says that Israel has targeted the hospital based on false and misleading claims.

mage: The video clip showing apparent firing from an annex to the hospital was actually shot during Israel’s 2008-09 “Operation Cast Lead,” and the audio clip accompanying it was from an incident unrelated to Al Wafa. (Screengrab: The Times of Israel)

A video distributed by the Israeli military in July suggesting that Palestinian fighters had fired from the Al Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital in Gaza City was not shot during the recent Israeli attack on Gaza, and both audio and video clips were manipulated to cover up the fact that they were from entirely different incidents, a Truthout investigation has revealed. The video, released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on July 23, the same day Israeli airstrikes destroyed Al Wafa, was widely reported by pro-Israeli publications and websites as proving that the hospital was destroyed because Hamas had turned the hospital into a military facility. But the video clip showing apparent firing from an annex to the hospital was actually shot during Israel’s 2008-09 “Operation Cast Lead,” and the audio clip accompanying it was from an incident unrelated to Al Wafa. The misleading video was only the last in a series of IDF dissimulations about Al Wafa hospital that included false claims that Hamas rockets had been launched from the hospital grounds, or very near it, and that the hospital had been damaged by an attack on the launching site.

AZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Israeli forces fired a tank shell at a hospital in Gaza on Monday, killing at least four people and injuring 40 others, health officials said. It was the third hospital Israel's military has struck since launching a ground offensive in Gaza last week. advertisement The four people killed at al-Aqsa Hospital on Monday included one patient and three visitors, health officials told NBC News. Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra told Reuters that the tank shell hit the third floor of the building that houses an intensive care unit and operating rooms.

The Hamas-run al-Aqsa TV station showed chaotic footage from the scene, including what it said was an ambulance driver being wheeled inside on a stretcher and a doctor with a neck wound. Speaking to the station, deputy hospital manager Dr. Faiz Zaidan said: "I urge the Red Cross and its hospitals to come and transfer as many cases as possible, we have nothing to offer to patients." He added that shrapnel had been found in the facility's reception area. Another doctor, who was not identified, added: "The Israeli aggression, they could not find any targets to hit, so they started hitting hospital, hitting patients."

Israel has defended shelling civilian-inhabited areas where Hamas allegedly hides rockets. The strike came just hours after charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said health workers in Gaza were coming under fire and urged Israel to stop its strikes. Gaza's Wafa hospital was evacuated and then "obliterated" by more than 15 direct hits from Israeli forces on Friday, senior nurse Ali Hassan said in an interview with the U.K.'s Channel 4 News.

A US tank has forced its way into the shell of the Afghanistan hospital destroyed in an airstrike 11 days ago, prompting warnings that the US military may have destroyed evidence in a potential war crimes investigation.

The 3 October attack on the Médécins sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz killed 10 patients and 12 staff members of the group. In a statement on Thursday, the medical charity, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said they were informed after Thursday’s “intrusion” that the tank was carrying investigators from a US-Nato-Afghan team which is investigating the attack. “Their unannounced and forced entry damaged property, destroyed potential evidence and caused stress and fear,” MSF said. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported intrusion, which came as new evidence emerged that US forces operating in the area at the time of the attack knew that the facility was a hospital. US special operations analysts were gathering intelligence on the hospital days before the attack, because they believed a Pakistani operative was using it as his base, according to areport by the Associated Press citing an unnamed former intelligence official. The analysts had mapped the area and drawn a circle around the hospital, the official was quoted as saying. The Pakistani man, described both as a Taliban suspect and as a worker for the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence directorate, was killed in the attack, the official told the AP.

Of the nearly 200 patients and staff inside the hospital at the time of the attack, more than three dozen were wounded, said MSF, which has called the attack a violation of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime. The group has said some patients burned to death in their beds.

Israel has banned Norwegian doctor and human rights activist Mads Gilbert from entering Gaza for life. Gilbert, a professor at the University Hospital of North Norway, where he has worked since 1976, earned international renown for his philanthropic work in late 2008, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, an attack that, according to Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, killed roughly 1,400 Gazans, including almost 800 civilians, 350 of whom were children. The aid worker, along with fellow Norwegian doctor Erik Fosse, decided to volunteer in Gaza as soon as he heard that bombing had started, on 27 December 2008. Thanks to diplomatic and economic support (in the sum of $1 million dollar of emergency funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the two physicians managed to arrive in the strip by 30 December.

The Israeli government prevented all international press from entering Gaza during Cast Lead (a documentary, The War Around Us, was made about the only two foreign reporters in the strip at the time), in what Gilbert called Israel’s insidious “PR plan.” The doctor, as one of the only international aid workers in Gaza, thus devoted considerable time to speaking with local Palestinian news outlets, some of whom were reporting on behalf of foreign networks including BBC, CNN, ABC, and Al Jazeera. BBC aired an interview with Gilbert, conducted in the hospital. The questions asked, and the answers garnered, were eerily similar to those he would give just five years later, during Operation Protective Edge. The interviewer began asking him to respond to Israel’s claims that it was not targeting civilians, that it was only attacking Hamas militants. Gilbert called the claim “an absolutely stupid statement” and explained that, among the hundreds of patients he had seen at that point, only two had been fighters. The “large majority” were women, children, and men civilians. “These numbers are contradictory to everything Israel says,” he reported.

The doctor directed one heart-wrenching passage to President Obama, writing “Mr Obama – do you have a heart? I invite you – spend one night – just one night – with us in Shifa. I am convinced, 100 per cent, it would change history. Nobody with a heart and power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.” Israel later attacked Shifa hospital. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) “strongly condemn[ed]” the incursion, saying it “demonstrate[d] how civilians in Gaza have nowhere safe to go.” MSF director Marie-Noëlle Rodrigue stated, in an official statement, “When the Israeli army orders civilians to evacuate their houses and their neighborhoods, where is there for them to go? Gazans have no freedom of movement and cannot take refuge outside Gaza. They are effectively trapped.” Shifa was one of the over 10 medical facilities Israel bombed in its 50-day offensive.

Palestinians from the Gaza Strip have criticized an Israeli report on the country’s 2014 military operation against the besieged coastal enclave. The report was released by Israeli state comptroller Yosef Shapira on Tuesday. “I understand from the report that Gaza was merely the setting for an Israeli war game, with no objective but to destroy and murder indiscriminately,” said Basman Alashi, executive director of the El-Wafa Medical Rehabilitation and Specialized Surgery Hospital. The hospital, formerly located in the Shujaya neighborhood by the separation barrier with Israel east of Gaza City, was repeatedly shelled by Israeli forces during the 51-day offensive before it was evacuated under fire on July 17, 2014.

“The overall impression it leaves is this: ‘Netanyahu, You didn’t do a good job of destroying Gaza, do it better next time,’” Alashi said of the report. Others said the document contained useful information about Israel’s behavior during the offensive, even if its conclusions remained incomplete. “The report shows that Israel follows a systematic policy of humiliating Palestinians, especially through careless targeting of civilians,” said Ramy Abdu, founder and chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Abdu’s Geneva-based agency has conducted investigations of Israel’s military conduct, including an Oct. 30, 2014 report stating that its forces had “deliberately targeted locations with concentrations of civilians” during operations earlier that year. “What the report has failed to cover is to cite careless targeting of civilians as a consistent failure of the Israeli forces, with almost no serious actions to do something about it,” Abdu said in regard to the Israeli comptroller’s findings.

It also claimed the cabinet had not only failed to consider diplomatic alternatives to military action, but also to set any clear strategy concerning Gaza. Once the operation began, it said, Israeli forces largely failed to meet their objective of thwarting tunnels dug by Palestinian resistance groups, destroying only half of them over weeks of a bloody ground invasion that produced many casualties. The comptroller did not appear to consider the goals of an earlier military operation, launched by Israel in the West Bank on June 13, 2014. These goals were to weaken Hamas, obstruct an agreement by Hamas and Fatah to form a unity government across the West Bank and Gaza Strip and recover three young settlers captured by Palestinians.

the system is very efficient : the administrative cost of the health system is around 4,5% (for US private insurance companies : 10 to 13%) and 1,2% for the retirement system (vs. around 10% for most pension funds). The health system reimburses very quickly (after four days).

22 Euros

"three best symbols of the French nation" are the flag, the health and the Marseillaise

Médecins Sans Frontières has taken a decision to publically release the initial outcomes of its own MSF review of what happened before, during and immediately after the US airstrikes on the hospital in Kunduz. “The hospital was razed to the ground after a wave of attack from the air. We lost our ability to treat patients at a time when we were needed the most. Thirty of our patients and medical staff died. Some of them lost their limbs and were decapitated in the explosions. Others were shot by the circling gunship while fleeing the burning building. We were forced to leave patients to die on the operating table and others burning in their ICU beds. The view from inside the hospital is that this attack was conducted with a purpose to kill and destroy.

Médecins Sans Frontières has taken a decision to publically release the initial outcomes of its own MSF review of what happened before, during and immediately after the US airstrikes on the hospital in Kunduz. “The hospital was razed to the ground after a wave of attack from the air. We lost our ability to treat patients at a time when we were needed the most. Thirty of our patients and medical staff died. Some of them lost their limbs and were decapitated in the explosions. Others were shot by the circling gunship while fleeing the burning building. We were forced to leave patients to die on the operating table and others burning in their ICU beds. The view from inside the hospital is that this attack was conducted with a purpose to kill and destroy.

A hospital in northern Yemen run by Doctors Without Borders was destroyed by warplanes belonging to a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia, even though the coalition had been given the coordinates of the hospital, the relief organization said Tuesday.The airstrikes, about 10:30 p.m. Monday, forced the evacuation of staff and patients from the site and raised new questions about what precautions Saudi Arabia and its military partners were taking to avoid civilians.The coalition, of 10 Arab states, receives military and intelligence support from the United States and has been battling Yemen’s Houthi rebels since March. Bombings by the coalition have killed more than 1,100 people — the majority of civilian casualties during the war, according to human rights advocates. The airstrikes have also hit nonmilitary targets, including markets, houses and wedding parties.

“With the hospital destroyed, at least 200,000 people now have no access to lifesaving medical care,” Doctors Without Borders said in a statement. Hassan Boucenine, the group’s head of mission in Yemen, said in the statement that the attack was “another illustration of a complete disregard for civilians in Yemen, where bombings have become a daily routine.”A spokesman for the coalition did not return phone calls seeking comment.Mr. Boucenine said in an interview that the hospital was hit by several airstrikes while roughly a dozen patients and staff members were inside. The operating theater and maternity ward were struck. The staff evacuated the hospital between strikes, and one staff member was slightly injured in the escape.The airstrikes then continued for at least two hours, leaving most of the facility in rubble, the group said.

Doctors Without Borders had supplied the hospital’s coordinates to the coalition about six months ago and reconfirmed them every month, Mr. Boucenine said. The group’s logo was on the roof.

Amid weeks of violence in Jerusalem, Israeli police and special forces raided an East Jerusalem hospital for a third day in a row on Thursday and fired tear gas, sound grenades and rubber bullets into the medical compound, injuring three patients. Israeli police first burst into Makassed hospital in the Mount of Olives neighborhood on Tuesday with a court order to confiscate the medical records of a 16-year old patient who was treated on October 13th for injuries from a gunshot wound. “They were not trying to confirm that he was shot—because they have him [the patient] in custody and so they know he was shot and they can confirm the bullet wound, but they wanted to see who was with him, who came in with him to the hospital,” said Dr. Rafiq Hussein, the director of Makassed hospital, who questioned why police undertook a militarized operation inside of his facility. “They were after not a dangerous person, or a wanted person, only a file,” he noted.

Over the last two days, the American, British, and other governments have referred to reports from several groups, including Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), while stating that the use of chemical weapons in Syria was “undeniable” and designating the perpetrators. MSF today warned that its medical information could not be used as evidence to certify the precise origin of the exposure to a neurotoxic agent or to attribute responsibility. On August 24, MSF announced that three hospitals it supplies in Syria’s Damascus governorate had reportedly received 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms, of which 355 died. Although our information indicates mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent, MSF clearly stated that scientific confirmation of the toxic agent was required, and therefore called for an independent investigation to shed light on what would constitute, if confirmed, a massive and unacceptable violation of international humanitarian law. MSF also stated that in its role as an independent medical humanitarian organization, it was not in a position to determine responsibility for the event. Now that an investigation is underway by United Nations inspectors, MSF rejects that our statement be used as a substitute for the investigation or as a justification for military action. MSF's sole purpose is to save lives, alleviate the suffering of populations torn by Syrian conflict, and bear witness when confronted with a critical event, in strict compliance with the principles of neutrality and impartiality.

Death toll of 22 could rise, with 24 staff and nine patients still unaccounted for five days after US strike on Médecins sans Frontières trauma centre in Kunduz

Thirty-three people are still missing five days after a US air strike on an Afghan hospital, Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) warned on Thursday, sparking fears the death toll could rise significantly. Saturday’s bombing in the disputed town of Kunduz killed 12 staff and 10 patients, prompting the medical aid agency to close the trauma centre.

President Barack Obama has apologised to MSF but three investigations – by the US military, by Nato and by Afghan officials – are underway and the general would not be drawn on their progress.

Much is due to the fame of the White Helmets Syrians, if they're coming in a few days than 1.5 million signatures the petition on Avaaz  Protect Aleppo's children, now! Asking for no-fly zone (a successful workhorse for Avaaz also to time of Libya, on the basis of false information). And award-winning source doc The White Helmets or white helmets, autodefinitisi Syria Civil Defense, active in areas controlled Syrian armed opposition, have recently received the Right Livelihood Award , or "alternative Nobel", normally assigned since 1990 to people who have really helped mankind - the first to receive it were an Egyptian architect of the poor and organization solutions for the vegetable against world hunger. In the words of the founder, " the award is intended to help the North find a wisdom to match the science he possesses, and the South to find a science to match the ancient wisdom that has ." Good intentions. The White Helmets Syrians are the "source" credited with many of the news coming from Aleppo East - for example on the use of "barrel bomb" or the "deliberate shelling of hospitals" - days ago in a twitter have put together the two crimes talking about a cowardly "attack on a hospital with bomb barrels." To be believed on bombs and hospital nature of the affected buildings, the helmets do not need proof, just a few photos of rubble. Of course, what they fail to tell the same International Red Cross admitted to our question (we preserve their email): the 'hospitals' in opposition areas are in no way signaled, rather they are well hidden.

Those who support them and what they really do, they know a few. censored The White Helmets spread video in which always appear in the rubble with babies in their arms (parents, where are they?). But, nevertheless, their deeds are other videos that are real autodenunce, but that the world has chosen to ignore, or to censor. It 'just been cleared from the site of Change the petition that the anti-war activists network Syria Solidarity Movement had addressed to the organizers of the Nobel Prize (which have already been received from: Obama, Kissinger, pears, European Union ...). The petition was titled very clearly , " Do not give the Nobel Prize in 2016 to the Syrian White Helmets ". But a few days, if you try to type on the search engine, you will see this inscription: " The petition is not available ." The authors denounce the removal, stating : " He had collected 2,800 signatures and thousands of comments. This is a clear case of censorship . " So we summarize the news on the White Helmets contained in the aforesaid petition, supported with a video (more pictures can be found at the link above). Activists wrote: " Please watch the video of Steve Ezzedine Al Qaeda with a facelift  . The White Helmets will say neutral, independent, self-financed, exclusively civilian. It does not. Have received more than $ 40 million from USAID and the British Foreign Office, entities directly involved in the conflict in Syria. I am not helpless: there are photographs and films of the group members who support Al Nusra Front / Al Qaeda. More photos and video showing their 'activists' while attending the execution of civilians or while cheering on the bodies of dead soldiers. The White Helmets work only in areas controlled by armed extremist groups. Fomenting sectarianism in Syria, asking for example to set fire Kafarya and Foua two Shiite villages besieged by five years in the area of Idlib. They have repeatedly called for the no-fly zone in Libya, whose results are seen. " Added: the White Helmets or Syria Civil Defense are the highlight of the stated Maydayrescue , organization "humanitarian" founded by former British Colonel James Le Mesurier based in Dubai and Amsterdam, and training centers in Turkey and Jordan.

How did you do? One explanation for this world enchantment for a group to say the least objectionable? And 'the effect' chain of suffering. " In April their leader Raed Saleh had been invited to the United States to pick up a humanitarian award assigned by InterAction, a platform of 180 non-governmental organizations with development projects in all countries of the world "The voice united for global change with lay and religious members, small and large, engaged with the most vulnerable populations. " (For a mixup in communication, Saleh had been dismissed as a suspect of terrorism immigration Use on arrival. Then the US State Department had the face to say that this was not about the White Helmets). Interaction between members of perhaps counted on the fingers of one hand those that have to do with the Syrian armed opposition. There is, for example, the Syrian American Medical Association, specializes in the complaints of hospitals bombed. But all the other organizations that Syria do not know and do not mind (because maybe riforestano the Sahel, or dealing with the blind, or fair trade in Asia, Latin America or build latrines) they trust their sisters' informed ». And so, in one stroke, 180 NGOs all over the world take the White Helmets as heroes, they spread the word ...

After collecting and releasing harrowing testimonies by Palestinian medical workers, Amnesty International has accused the Israeli military of deliberately attacking medical workers and hospitals in Gaza. Since the military offensive in Gaza began a month ago, Israeli fire has killed at least six ambulance workers and 13 aid workers while they were attempting to rescue injured people or retrieve the dead, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.  In addition to those killed, 49 doctors, nurses and paramedics and 33 aid workers have been injured while carrying out their duties. Israel has directly struck major hospitals throughout the Gaza Strip, and forced five hospitals and 34 medical clinics to shut down due to either extensive damage to their facilities or increasing hostilities in the vicinity.

On 4 August, Amnesty International called on the US government to immediately stop its transfer of fuel to Israel to be used for the Israeli military. On 11 July, Amnesty had called on the United Nations to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel and all Palestinians armed groups. In its recent appeal to halt the transfer of fuel for military purposes, Amnesty International reported that the most recent delivery of jet fuel took place on 14 July, soon after the bombardment of Gaza began, by the US Defense Logistics Agency Energy. Since January 2013, the US government has supplied the Israeli military with a total of 277,000 tons of jet fuel.

The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans — and likely hundreds more — during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal.

Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals, according to the report.The VA’s use of lobotomy, in which doctors severed connections between parts of the brain then thought to control emotions, was known in medical circles in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and is occasionally cited in medical texts. But the VA’s practice, never widely publicized, long ago slipped from public view. Even the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says it possesses no records detailing the creation and breadth of its lobotomy program.The Wall Street Journal’s reporting series began with Wednesday’s Forgotten Soldiers and included a documentary, archived photos, maps and medical records.

The Journal quoted the VA’s response to its inquiry: “In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, VA and other physicians throughout the United States and the world debated the utility of lobotomies. The procedure became available to severely ill patients who had not improved with other treatments. Within a few years, the procedure disappeared within VA, and across the United States, as safer and more effective treatments were developed.”The newspaper reported that musty files warehoused in the National Archives show VA doctors resorting to brain surgery as they struggled with a vexing question that absorbs America to this day: How best to treat the psychological crises that afflict soldiers returning from combat.Between April 1, 1947, and Sept. 30, 1950, VA doctors lobotomized 1,464 veterans at 50 hospitals authorized to perform the surgery, according to agency documents rediscovered by the Journal. Scores of records from 22 of those hospitals list another 466 lobotomies performed outside that time period, bringing the total documented operations to 1,930.

The Palestinian ministry of health said that the Palestinian ambulance crews, their vehicles and facilities were exposed to more than 200 violations and attacks by the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) since the beginning of the current month. In a press release on Thursday, health minister Jawad Awad stated that the Israeli army did not respect the sanctity of medical centers and hospitals during its escalation of its recent aggressive practices against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Awad added that the IOF recently stormed several Palestinian medical centers and hospitals and assaulted their employees, patients and visitors, including its violent raid on al-Makassed hospital in Jerusalem. He appealed to the international community to intervene to curb Israel's violations against the Palestinian medical facilities and cadres.