Monday 2 November 2026
Attacks in northern Ethiopia kill children at a displacement camp, and the WHO chief says the health system is near collapse
The head of the World Health Organization said on Monday that attacks in northern Ethiopia, including one that reportedly killed children, among them a newborn, at the Jaari 2 displacement camp in the Amhara region, are pushing the region's fragile health system closer to collapse. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said several people were also reportedly killed in Rama, in Tigray, while trying to get food. He gave no casualty totals, no dates and no identification of who carried out either attack, and no Ethiopian government response was immediately available. The Associated Press reports that renewed fighting has effectively shattered the November 2022 peace agreement that ended the Tigray war, while the federal government also fights armed groups in Amhara and Oromia.
Tedros, who is Ethiopian and from Tigray, put the warning in a statement on X on Monday. Children were among those reportedly killed at Jaari 2, a camp for displaced people in Amhara, and in Rama, across the line in Tigray, several people were reportedly killed while seeking food. He offered no numbers for either place. What he offered instead was the judgment of the agency he runs: the attacks are bringing what is left of northern Ethiopia's health system close to the point where it cannot function.
The November 2022 agreement signed in Pretoria ended two years of war between the federal government and Tigrayan forces, a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people by most estimates, through fighting, hunger and the collapse of medical care. The fighting that has resumed this year involves shifting alliances among federal forces, Tigrayan factions and the Fano militias of Amhara, who fought beside the government in the last war and have fought against it since 2023. Each region's war feeds the others, and the civilians in the camps sit where the lines cross.
Ethiopia is fighting on a third front at the same time. In Oromia, the country's largest region, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church says gunmen killed more than 60 Christians in attacks on October 20 and 24 in the Arsi zone, a story this site has covered in full. The United States ambassador to Ethiopia, Ervin Massinga, condemned the reported targeted killings on Saturday and called for an investigation, and the Oromia regional government says 73 people have been detained in connection with the Arsi attacks. No group has claimed those killings and responsibility remains disputed. A government that is detaining suspects in the south while its health system fails in the north is a government losing ground in more places than it can hold at once, and the people in Jaari 2 and Rama are the ones who pay for the distance between the capital and the camps.
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