The World Health Organization confirmed Friday that more than 20 attacks on healthcare facilities have been verified in Iran since the beginning of March, killing at least nine people including a health worker and a member of the Iranian Red Crescent — a toll that places the US-Israeli campaign in direct conflict with the laws of war that designate medical infrastructure as protected under any circumstances.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus disclosed the figures on X in the early hours of Friday, identifying specific recent strikes in Tehran that targeted the Pasteur Institute, the Delaram Sina Psychiatric Hospital and the Tofigh Daru pharmaceutical facility. The Pasteur Institute is one of Iran’s most significant public health research institutions. Tofigh Daru produces anaesthetics and cancer drugs — medications whose absence from the market creates immediate, cascading harm for patients whose treatment cannot wait for a war to end. The psychiatric hospital sustained significant damage last Sunday, Tedros confirmed, without specifying whether patients were present at the time.
The WHO’s own Tehran office was damaged at the start of the week, placing the international health body’s in-country operations among the casualties of a conflict that has now reached into the physical spaces from which humanitarian work is conducted.
Read also: India Converts LPG Import Crunch Into Piped Gas Push
“The conflict in Iran, and the region, is impacting the delivery of health services and the safety of health workers, patients, and civilians present at health facilities,” Tedros wrote. “Peace is the best medicine.”
The statement was measured in tone and devastating in implication. Twenty verified attacks on healthcare in less than a month, nine dead, pharmaceutical production disrupted, hospitals damaged across Tehran — these are not incidental effects of a campaign aimed at military targets. They are a pattern whose accumulation the WHO felt compelled to document publicly at the level of the director-general.
Iran’s own accounting is considerably broader. The Iranian Red Crescent reports that 307 health, medical and emergency care facilities have been damaged since the war began on February 28 — a figure that dwarfs the WHO’s verified count and reflects the difference between what an international body can independently confirm and what a country experiencing sustained bombardment can observe across its own territory.
The legal framework governing these strikes is not ambiguous. The Geneva Conventions, negotiated and ratified by world powers in the aftermath of the Second World War, explicitly designate healthcare facilities as protected locations in armed conflict. Attacking a hospital, a pharmaceutical plant or a medical research institute is not a grey area in international humanitarian law — it is prohibited, subject to the narrow exception that the facility has been repurposed for military use and a warning has been issued before any strike. The burden of demonstrating that exception lies with the attacking party.
Trump has threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” language that legal experts have characterised as threatening war crimes and that sits in stark tension with the protections international law extends to civilian infrastructure. The administration has not publicly addressed the specific strikes on healthcare facilities documented by the WHO or by the Iranian Red Crescent.
The pattern has a precedent that the WHO and human rights organisations have noted carefully. During Israel’s military campaign in Gaza beginning in October 2023, Israeli forces repeatedly struck hospitals across the territory, claiming in each case that the facilities were being used by Hamas operatives. Those claims were contested by independent investigators, UN agencies and the hospital administrators themselves, and the strikes generated sustained international condemnation without producing accountability for those who ordered them. The question of whether the same impunity will apply to healthcare strikes in Iran is now being asked by the same organisations that asked it about Gaza, against the same parties who answered it there.
“Healthcare workers and patients must never be targets,” Tedros wrote. The words have been said before, about other conflicts, by the same institution. The attacks have continued regardless.