Hospitals were protected by the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which said that innocent civilians were to be spared in time of war. The conventions' additional protocols of 1977 stated that, "The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against the dangers arising from military operations." Today, these prohibitions are regularly ignored, according to the second part of an article on the Hospital & Health Networks website.
Hospitals have an obligation to support and protect each other and do their part to reduce the violence, the article said.
To the extent that they can, they should:
• refuse to serve as a haven for active combatants
• not allow weapons on the premises
• not allow attacks to be launched from their premises
"Using hospitals, outside their humanitarian function, for acts harmful to the enemy, such as sheltering able-bodied combatants, storing arms or ammunition, as military observation posts or shield for military action, leads to a loss of their protection, exposing such hospitals to a risk of attack," the UN report on violence in Syria said.
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