The Abiy Ahmed Government Is Targeting Amhara Hospitals — The U.S. Must Act Under Existing Law

The Abiy Ahmed Government Is Targeting Amhara Hospitals — The U.S. Must Act Under Existing Law

Drone strikes on hospitals, looted medical facilities, and detained physicians have devastated healthcare for 22 million Amharas — and Washington's silence is enabling it.

By: FANA Advocacy Team

May 17, 2026 (Ginbot 9, 2018 E.C.)

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Since April 2023, the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) has systematically dismantled the health care infrastructure serving more than 22 million people in the Amhara region —destroying or looting nearly 1,000 health facilities, killing or detaining medical workers, and conducting drone strikes that human rights organizations have documented as targeting civilians. The pattern meets established thresholds for war crimes and may constitute crimes against humanity, according to investigations by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the U.S. Department of State.

The Federation of Amhara Associations in North America calls on the U.S. Congress, the State Department, and international human rights bodies to use the leverage available to them to end the targeting of Amhara civilians and restore humanitarian access.

Background and Context The current war did not appear from nowhere. Following the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement that ended the war in Tigray — an agreement to which Amhara was not a party despite the region having borne much of the fighting — the Prosperity Party government led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed moved to forcibly disarm the Amhara Special Forces and the Fano, an Amhara self-defense movement the federal government had previously armed. Many in the Amhara region experienced this as a strategic betrayal. Open conflict erupted in April 2023, and the federal government declared a state of emergency in August 2023. Although the formal state of emergency expired in June 2024, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and multiple human rights organizations have confirmed that military operations have continued at the same intensity. Communications

blackouts — the most recent beginning February 2, 2026, across South Wollo, North Shewa, East Gojjam, Awi, and Gondar zones -have made it nearly impossible to verify the scale of ongoing abuses in real time. International journalists have had almost no access to the region. The UN Human Rights Council declined to renew its independent inquiry on Ethiopia in October 2023, removing one of the few mechanisms for impartial international monitoring.

The result is a war fought largely in the dark — and a war fought in the dark is a war that can be denied.

The Evidence

The targeting of health infrastructure is a defining feature of the Amhara conflict. A peer-reviewed commentary published in Discover Public Health in October 2024 (Yeshaneh, Mulatu, & Ayalew) documented that the previous war in northern Ethiopia destroyed or looted 40 hospitals, 453 health centers, 1,850 health posts, 466 private health facilities, and hundreds of ambulances across the Amhara region — close to half of the region's total health infrastructure.

Before the system could rebuild, a new war began. In March 2024, Amhara regional health officials publicly acknowledged that 967 health facilities had been damaged or pillaged in the renewed conflict and that 124 ambulances had been seized. In February 2025, the regional government estimated that ten billion U.S. dollars would be required for recovery.

On November 30, 2023, a clearly marked ambulance carrying medications was struck by amunition as it pulled up to the Delanta Primary Hospital in Wegel Tena, South Wollo. The drone strike — confirmed by Human Rights Watch through verified video, photographs, and witness testimony — killed at least four civilians, badly wounded a fifth, and destroyed the hospital's remaining medication stock. The European Council on Foreign Relations, drawing on ACLED conflict-monitoring data, documented at least 449 civilians killed in Amhara by drone strikes alone between August 2023 and early 2025. ACLED itself, in its April 2025 situation report, counted 73 air and drone strikes in the region since the war began.

The deadliest single incident— a strike on a school compound in Gedeb, East Gojjam, on April 17, 2025 — reportedly killed more than 100 civilians, including teachers and students who had gathered to clean the grounds before the start of the new semester.

The 66-page Human Rights Watch report released in July 2024, “If the Soldier Dies, It's On You”:

Attacks on Medical Care in Ethiopia's Amhara Conflict, documented attacks in at least 13 towns across the Awi, North Gojjam, West Gojjam, North Gonder, South Gonder, and South Wollo zones. Government forces killed health workers, raided hospitals in search of patients with bullet or blast wounds, looted medical supplies, and detained doctors who tried to replenish hospital stocks. The title of the report comes from a documented threat made to medical staff: treat a wounded man, and if a soldier on the other side dies, “it is on you.” Doctors themselves have been killed. Dr. Andualem Dagna, a physician in Bahir Dar, was killed in a drone strike documented by Amnesty International in 2023. By 2024, the United Nations recorded the highest rate of attacks on aid workers in Ethiopia, inside the Amhara region, with at least nine humanitarian workers killed by mid-2024. In August 2025, gunmen abducted Honelign Fentahun, an Ethiopian Red Cross Society worker, in North Gondar; he was tortured and died of his injuries. The pattern extends to the medical profession nationally. In May 2025, doctors across Ethiopia went on strike — specialist physicians were earning roughly 80 U.S. dollars per month — and the federal government's response was to arrest hundreds of medical professionals across Addis Ababa, Oromia, and Amhara, holding striking organizers in detention and threatening to revoke their medical licenses. A government willing to detain its own doctors for asking to be paid has revealed the value it places on their work. The civilian cost is measured in lives that did not have to end. Nearly 70,000 pregnant and lactating mothers in Amhara lost access to maternal and child health services after the previous war, and the head of the Amhara Regional Health Bureau described the ongoing impact as “deadly to women and girls.” UNICEF reports that approximately 4.5 million children in Amhara are out of school as of the 2024–2025 academic year — an increase of more than 500,000 in a single year. A cholera outbreak resurged in the region in early 2025, concentrated in West Gondar and Bahir Dar, and the response was crippled by the same access restrictions the war itself created.

Why This Matters Now

The cumulative documentation makes clear that what is unfolding is not the byproduct of armed conflict but a deliberate pattern of targeting. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the U.S. State Department's 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,

The Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights and Physicians for Human Rights have all documented serious violations against Amhara civilians. The State Department alone documented over 740 civilians killed by drone strikes and ground operations in the early months of the war. Yet the international response has lagged the evidence. The United States continues to provide significant security and development assistance to Ethiopia, including

funding that flows through institutions whose conduct has been credibly implicated in these violations. Section 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act (the “Leahy Law”) and Section 7008 of the annual appropriations act both impose limits on assistance to security forces credibly implicated in gross violations of human rights — limits whose application to Ethiopia has been inconsistent and largely opaque. The window for meaningful U.S. action exists, but it is narrowing as the documentary record outpaces policy response.

Policy Leverage Point

The specific mechanisms of influence available to U.S. and international policymakers include: a House Foreign Affairs Committee or Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on attacks on medical care in Ethiopia; a Section 7008 / Leahy Law review of U.S. security assistance to the ENDF; targeted sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act against named ENDF commanders and Prosperity Party officials credibly implicated in violations; a State Department determination on whether the documented conduct meets the threshold of crimes against humanity; and the restoration of an independent UN-mandated investigation into human rights violations in Ethiopia, which lapsed in October 2023.

Call to Action

The Federation of Amhara Associations in North America calls on the following actors to take immediate, specific action:

• The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee should hold a public hearing on the targeting of medical care and civilian infrastructure in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, drawing on the documentation produced by Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, and the UN.

• The U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, should issue an updated public determination on whether the documented conduct in Amhara meets the threshold of crimes against humanity and should publish a Section 7008 / Leahy Law review of U.S. security assistance to the Ethiopian National Defense Force.

• The U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, should impose targeted sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act against named ENDF commanders and Prosperity Party officials credibly implicated in attacks on medical facilities and civilians.

• U.S. Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, and Arizona's House delegation, should publicly condemn the targeting of medical care in Amhara, meet with constituents from the Amhara diaspora community, and co-sponsor or support legislation calling for accountability.

• The UN Human Rights Council should restore an independent international investigation into human rights violations in Ethiopia, with specific authority to investigate attacks on medical care and the conduct of communications blackouts.

• The African Union and the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights should publicly call for the immediate cessation of attacks on Amhara medical infrastructure and the restoration of full humanitarian access to all affected zones.

Conclusion

The hospital in Wegel Tena did not have to lose its medications. The mother in South Wollo did not have to deliver in the dark. The civilians killed at Gedeb did not have to die cleaning a schoolyard. None of this is inevitable. All of it is being chosen by men in offices, in real time, while the world looks elsewhere. The Federation of Amhara Associations in North America will continue to document, publish, and bring this evidence before U.S. policymakers, international institutions, and the global press until the targeting of Amhara civilians ends and accountability is delivered.

References

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21(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12982-024-00256-0

About the Federation of Amhara Associations in North America

The Federation of Amhara Associations in North America (FANA) is a coalition of Amhara civic and advocacy organizations across the United States working to advance the human rights,

political interests, and humanitarian well-being of the Amhara people. FANA documents human rights violations, engages U.S. policymakers and international institutions, and mobilizes the Amhara diaspora in support of accountability and protection for Amhara civilians in Ethiopia.

Media Contact

fanalightofamhara@gmail.com

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The Amhara people in Ethiopia face an overlooked public health crisis amid another armed conflict in the region - Discover Public Health