Witnesses on the hospital and the UN say the assault killed medics, sufferers and should ‘quantity to a conflict crime’.
Revealed On 13 Dec 2025
Myanmar’s army has acknowledged it performed an air strike on a hospital within the western state of Rakhine that killed 33 individuals, whom it accused of being armed members of opposition teams and their supporters, however not civilians.
Witnesses, help employees, insurgent teams and the United Nations have stated the victims had been civilians on the hospital.
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In a press release revealed by the state-run International New Mild of Myanmar newspaper on Saturday, the army’s data workplace stated armed teams, together with the ethnic Arakan Military and the Individuals’s Defence Drive, used the hospital as their base.
It stated the army carried out obligatory safety measures and launched a counterterrorism operation towards the overall hospital in Mrauk-U township on Wednesday.
Nonetheless, the United Nations on Thursday condemned the attack on the power offering emergency care, obstetrics and surgical companies within the space, saying that it was a part of a broader sample of strikes inflicting hurt to civilians and civilian objects which can be devastating communities throughout the nation.
UN rights chief Volker Turk condemned the assaults “in [the] strongest doable phrases” and demanded an investigation. “Such assaults might quantity to a conflict crime. I name for investigations and people accountable to be held to account. The combating should cease now,” he wrote on X.
World Well being Group chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated he was “appalled”. “No less than 33 individuals have been killed … together with well being employees, sufferers and members of the family. Hospital infrastructure was severely broken, with working rooms and the primary inpatient ward utterly destroyed,” he wrote on X.
Myanmar has been gripped by attritional combating in a raging civil war.
Mrauk-U, positioned 530km (326 miles) northwest of Yangon, the nation’s largest metropolis, was captured by the Arakan Military in February 2024.
The Arakan Military is the well-trained and well-armed army wing of the Rakhine ethnic minority motion, which seeks autonomy from Myanmar’s central authorities. It started its offensive in Rakhine in November 2023 and has seized a strategically necessary regional military headquarters and 14 of Rakhine’s 17 townships.
Rakhine, previously often known as Arakan, was the location of a brutal military counterinsurgency operation in 2017 that drove about 740,000 Muslim-majority Rohingya to hunt security throughout the border in Bangladesh. There may be nonetheless ethnic stress between the Buddhist Rakhine and the Rohingya.
The Arakan Military pledged in a press release on Thursday to pursue accountability for the air strike in cooperation with international organisations to make sure justice and take “sturdy and decisive motion” towards the army.
The army authorities has stepped up air strikes forward of planned December 28 elections. Opponents of army rule cost that the polls can be neither free nor truthful and are primarily an effort to legitimise the military retaining energy.
Myanmar has been in turmoil because the military took energy in 2021, triggering widespread well-liked opposition. Many opponents of army rule have since taken up arms, and enormous components of the nation are actually embroiled in battle.
