Only a halt to the fighting can prevent a health crisis unfolding in real time across the Middle East, the World Health Organization’s regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean told the Guardian. Dr Hanan Balkhy said the region was watching not only lives lost but a collapse of access to care, and she called for hospitals to be treated as safe havens even as the war on Iran continued. Her region covers 22 countries and territories, from Iran and the Gulf states to conflict zones in Gaza, Sudan and Afghanistan. Instability in one part reaches patient routes and medical supplies across the rest.
A collapse of access
Balkhy told the Guardian the situation had been difficult for some time but had turned into a regional health crisis unfolding in real time. The crisis was not only about lives lost, she said, but a collapse of access to healthcare “in many, many dimensions way above and beyond what we would have imagined.” The war on Iran had killed more than 1,500 people in Iran and over 1,000 in Lebanon, according to authorities in the respective countries, with 16 deaths reported in Israel and more than a dozen across the West Bank and several Gulf Arab states.
Displacement compounded the toll. Within a single month, 3.2 million people were uprooted in Iran and more than one million in Lebanon, the Guardian reported, straining the hospitals still standing. Balkhy said the effects would outlast the fighting, and she named a likely rise in maternal deaths, a sharp deterioration in mental health and a growing number of orphaned children among the harms that would persist.
Hospitals under fire
The World Health Organization has independently verified dozens of attacks on healthcare facilities in Lebanon, Iran and Israel since the war on Iran began, the Guardian reported. Balkhy pointed to an attack the previous week on the El-Daein teaching hospital in East Darfur, Sudan, which killed at least 70 people, among them 13 children, two nurses and a doctor, and left the hospital nonfunctional. She said the old assumption that hospitals would be spared no longer held. “That’s not the case any more,” she said, calling for renewed compliance with international humanitarian law on protecting healthcare.
That erosion is the part most relevant to any country that sells itself as a place to travel for care. A hospital that has been bombed cannot admit a patient, however it is accredited, and the same conflict has already cut Gulf medical travel to Asia as closed airspace and rising risk kept patients from reaching clinics abroad. Attacks on health workers and facilities have been reaching a record across war zones over the same period, in Sudan as much as in the Gulf’s near neighbourhood.
Water and nuclear risk
Balkhy said she was also worried about strikes on nuclear sites and on water. The Bushehr nuclear power plant was hit by a projectile on its grounds on a Tuesday night, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization reported, after a similar incident on 17 March. She warned that damage to desalination plants would be a disaster for the Gulf populations that depend on them for drinking water. Strikes on oil or nuclear facilities could contaminate rainwater and the groundwater beneath it, she said. The World Health Organization was working with other United Nations agencies to find ways to limit such an outcome, she said.
What operators should watch
Balkhy said the focus on the war on Iran had pushed other emergencies out of view, and she named Gaza, Sudan and Yemen as crises whose hardship was going unrecognised. Her appeal was for de-escalation, or at least a pause, and for the healthcare sector to be spared. “Let’s secure the healthcare sector,” she said.
For medical tourism the warning restates a standing condition rather than a passing shock. A destination rests on a stability it does not control, and the accreditation, the marketing and the flight connections all assume that the hospital at the end of the journey is still open and safe to reach. When that assumption fails, the sector does not decline gradually. It stops. The wider turmoil is already reshaping medical tourism across the region, and any recovery will track the fighting rather than any campaign to draw patients back.
The near-term markers are grim but countable. Whether the World Health Organization’s verified tally of attacks on health facilities in Lebanon, Iran and Israel keeps climbing, whether the El-Daein hospital and others like it reopen, and whether desalination and nuclear sites stay clear of strikes will decide how much of the region’s health infrastructure survives the war. Until the fighting pauses, no part of it can honestly be marketed as a safe place to travel for care.
