11 juin 2025: Attacks on Healthcare: From the Syrian civil war to Gaza and Khartoum

Ghassan Abu-Sittah is a British-Palestinian Associate Professor of Surgery and a Plastic & Reconstructive Surgeon. He completed his medical education at University of Glasgow in the UK and his postgraduate residency training in London. He later underwent 3 fellowships: Pediatric Craniofacial Surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Kids (GOS); Cleft Surgery at GOS and a further fellowship in Trauma Reconstruction at the Royal London Hospital. In 2011 he was recruited by the American University of Beirut Medical Center. In 2012 he became Head of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the AUBMC, Clinical Lead of its Pediatric War injuries program and War Injuries Multidisciplinary Clinic. In 2015 co-founded and became director of the Conflict Medicine Program at Global Health Institute at the American University of Beirut. He returned to the UK in 2020 and continues in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in the private sector. He is an Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Center for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College University of London and Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Conflict & Health Research Group at Kings College London University. He is Clinical Lead for the Operational Trauma Initiative at the World Health Organization’s EMRO Office and serves on the board of directors of INARA, a charity dedicated to providing reconstructive surgery to war injured children in the Middle East, and Board of Trustees of the UK based Medical Aid for Palestinians. He serves on the UK’s National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) International Funding Committee. He has published extensively on he health consequences of prolonged conflict and on war injuries including a medical text book, “Reconstructing the War Injured Patient” and “Treating the War Injured Child.”

He has worked as a war surgeon in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, South Lebanon and during the 4 wars in the Gaza Strip. On the 9th of October 2023 he entered the Gaza Strip and worked in Shifa Hospital and then Al-Ahli-Baptist Hospital for 43 days during the current. Evidence he provided was part of the South African submission to the International Court of Justice. His work was featured by numerous newspapers and media outlets notably Le Monde, The Independent, Telegraph, BBC and CNN.

Originally from Belfast in Northern Ireland, Avril trained a nurse and specialized in intensive care nursing at Leeds Metropolitan University. She later completed her master’s in public health and tropical medicine from James Cook University in Australia and is currently completing her masters in Humanitarian leadership through Lucerne University. Avril has worked for the ICRC in various contexts and health programs since 2002 including in Liberia, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. Her most recent mission was overall responsible for health programs for the ICRC in Ukraine until February 2025. Avril is currently the Head of the Health Unit for the ICRC based in Geneva and took up her role in March this year.

Larissa Fast is Professor of Humanitarian and Conflict Studies and Executive Director of the Humanitarian and Conflict Research Institute at the University of Manchester. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of the worlds of academia, policy, and practice. Her research addresses two fundamental problems: how best to protect civilians, particularly those who intervene in violent conflict, and how to make such intervention more effective, ethical, and responsive to local needs and circumstances. In addition to her monograph Aid in Danger: The Perils and Promise of Humanitarianism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), she has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles and policy reports. She is Principal Investigator of the Researching the Impact of Attacks on Healthcare (RIAH) project (2019-2026), and co-Investigator on a project examining the ethics of research in conflict and disaster settings (2023-2025). Her research has been funded by the UK FCDO, British Academy, Research Council of Norway, the Wellcome Trust, US Agency for International Development, US Institute of Peace, and the Swiss Development Corporation.

Vinh-Kim Nguyen is a medical anthropologist and family physician from Montreal who also practises in the Canadian Arctic. He has worked in acute care settings in hospitals in Geneva and Paris and during humanitarian crises in the DRC and Guinea (during Ebola outbreaks) and in Yemen (during the ongoing conflict). He led the development and opening of covid treatment units in hospitals in Geneva and Montreal in 2020. As a result he has a broad experience in pandemic management. Nguyen’s award-winning first book examines the introduction of antiretroviral therapy in West Africa and his second, co-authored with Margaret Lock, is a landmark treatise on the anthropology of biomedicine. He has recently led research projects examining how conflict drives antimicrobial resistance and, most recently, the financialisation of pharmaceuticals. Trained in psychedelic therapy, his latest research examines the “psychedelic renaissance” in Switzerland and beyond.

Karl Blanchet is Professor in Humanitarian Public Health at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva and the Director of the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies.

Professor Blanchet’s research focuses on public health, migration, system resilience and health systems issues in global health, specifically in post-conflict and conflict-affected countries. He has developed innovative research approaches based on complexity science and system thinking and focuses on Women, adolescents and Child Health in humanitarian settings. Karl has also contributed to developing a priority package of essential health services for countries like Afghanistan and, more generally, for humanitarian crises.

Karl is also the co-Chair of the CHH-Lancet Commission on Health, Conflict and Forced Displacement and the co-Chair of the Lancet Migration Europe. Karl is also the Academic Director of InZone, a University of Geneva academic project offering university courses for refugee populations. Karl was the guest editor of the Lancet European Regional Health Special issue on Migration, Health and Equity published in May 2024.

Karl Blanchet was one of the coPI of the Lancet Series on Women’s and Children’s Health in Conflict Settings. Karl is also the coPI of the PULSE study focusing on community engagement during vaccination programmes in Nigeria and Ethiopia and the PI of the Senselet study in Ethiopia on diabetes and hypertension in Ethiopia.

Maarten van der Heijden is a lawyer and social scientist specialising in global health. He has worked with the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, Médecins Sans Frontières, and various other NGOs, with whom he continues to collaborate in a consultative capacity. He has advised over 20 countries on health, human rights, pharmaceutical and food safety legislation, as well as the implementation of international treaties.
 
Maarten is currently a doctoral researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a visiting fellow at the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute Geneva. His research spans access to medicines, antimicrobial resistance, global health governance, and the intersection of global and humanitarian medical care. He holds an LLM in humanitarian law (Geneva Academy) and an LLM in trade and investment law (University of Amsterdam