Exposed to too great a security risk, the international NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is forced to close its hospital in Cité Soleil. This temporary closure comes as the violence has been spreading in a very worrying way since Tuesday, February 28 in all the neighborhoods of the capital, with the populations caught in the crossfire and who have no choice but to flee their homes.

Following the extremely violent clashes which continued a few meters from the hospital compound and which oppose heavily armed armed groups, MSF, unable to guarantee the safety of its staff and patients, announces the temporary closure of its hospital in Cité Soleil.

3We are looking at a war scene just metres away from our hospital,3 explains Vincent Harris, MSF medical advisor. "While the hospital has not been targeted, we are a collateral victim of the fighting, since the hospital is right on the frontline of the fighting." Large numbers of stray bullets have entered the hospital compound, while reaching the hospital is currently almost impossible for the sick and wounded, some of whom have been injured in the battles nearby. "We realise that closing the hospital will have a serious impact on the people of Cité Soleil, but our teams cannot work until security conditions are guaranteed."

MSF teams have worked in Haiti for more than 30 years. We have publicly called for fighting around the hospital to stop and for medical activities to be respected, so that staff can restart their work as soon as possible and continue providing healthcare to the people of Cité Soleil. The organization is alarmed by the vertiginous deterioration of the security situation throughout the Haitian capital and the growing precariousness it causes, while the populations are facing increasingly significant humanitarian and health needs.

"Meanwhile, patient numbers have increased significantly at MSF’s emergency centre in Turgeau, in central Port-au-Prince, 10 km from Cité Soleil. In recent days, our teams have admitted up to 10 times the usual number of people with gunshot wounds. Since the fighting resumed in the neighbourhood of Bel Air on 28 February, we have received many children, women and elderly people. It's terrible to see the number of collateral victims of these clashes. It’s hard to tell how many people are wounded in total across the city because many people are too terrified to leave their neighbourhoods."

Our mobile clinics, which provide care to populations in these neighborhoods affected by urban violence, witnessed first-hand the armed clashes that broke out and had to abruptly stop their consultations. By following these populations who fled the fighting to rapidly overcrowded informal sites, our teams carried out assessments in neighborhoods located in the city center and could only observe the crying needs of many displaced people, stresses MSF.

HL/ HaitiLibre