WHO warns northern Ethiopia's health system is near collapse

On Monday 2 November, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described attacks on civilians in Ethiopia's Amhara and Tigray regions as "deeply disturbing". His statement followed a weekend of drone strikes and renewed fighting between the federal government and rebel groups in the north of the country.

What happened

On Friday 30 October, a series of drone strikes hit the Jaari 2 camp for displaced people in Amhara. At least 15 people, several of them children, were killed, according to sources involved in a rescue operation cited by Reuters. Tedros confirmed that children, including a newborn, were among the dead. In Rama, in neighbouring Tigray, several people were killed while trying to get food, according to the WHO account reported by Al Jazeera.

The director-general gave no overall casualty toll and did not identify the perpetrators. But he warned that drone attacks and civilian deaths had become "tragically frequent" across Ethiopia. "The violence in northern Ethiopia is pushing an already fragile health system closer to collapse," he said. "Hospitals face shortages of health workers, medicines and equipment. Ambulance services are severely limited. Insecurity is obstructing the delivery of life-saving medical supplies to some areas."

Fighting resumed in September, almost four years after the November 2022 Pretoria peace agreement that ended the Tigray war. According to Al Jazeera, an alliance of rebels from the north and the government in Addis Ababa have all but shattered that deal, stoking fears of a wider conflict. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called on the parties to spare civilians and critical infrastructure and to agree "without delay" to a cessation of hostilities as a first step towards mediation.

The WHO and its partners say they are working "around the clock" to deliver more medical supplies to all affected regions. Tedros closed his message with a line that sums up the urgency: "The best medicine is peace."

The map: the starting point

The map colours countries by infant mortality, the number of deaths of children under one year old per 1,000 live births. The data comes from the World Bank and the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) for 2024. The scale runs from 1.2 in San Marino to 71.9 in South Sudan.

Ethiopia records 34.5 deaths per 1,000 live births. That is below Sudan (42.9), Somalia (65.4) and South Sudan (71.9), and above Eritrea (24.7) and Kenya (34.2). The comparison with high-income countries shows the starting point: Spain is at 2.6 and Japan at 1.8. Ethiopia's rate is more than thirteen times Spain's.

The figure does not measure the current collapse. It is a national average for 2024, before the latest fighting resumed, and the map does not separate Amhara, Tigray and Afar. What it does show is the ground the war is hitting: a health system that already started from high infant mortality. The WHO warns that if fighting continues, more people will lose access to emergency care, maternal and child healthcare and treatment for diseases. In a country where 34.5 of every 1,000 babies did not reach their first birthday in 2024, every interruption to services adds risk.

What comes next

No ceasefire has been announced and no dates have been confirmed for a new round of talks. On the table are Guterres's call for mediation and the WHO's effort to get supplies into Amhara, Tigray and Afar. The open question is whether the parties will agree to negotiate before the military campaign spreads to new areas.

Meanwhile, emergency care, maternal and child health and treatment for disease will continue to depend on a system that was already weak. The map cannot predict how much worse the situation will get, but it does show what is at stake when basic services are interrupted.