The protection is explicit and old. The First Geneva Convention of 1949 protects the wounded and sick, medical personnel, medical units and transports, and the emblems — the red cross, red crescent and red crystal. The protection is not a courtesy; it is a treaty obligation, and misuse of the emblem is itself prohibited.
What to record when a health facility, an ambulance or a medical worker is attacked. As with any strike, from a safe position and without touching anything:
- What was hit, precisely: the building and the part of it, the vehicle and its markings, whether the emblem was displayed and visible.
- Whether it was in use as a health facility at the time, and how that is known — patients present, staff on duty, ambulances outside.
- Time, exactly, and how the time is established.
- The effects: the shape and direction of damage, remnants where they are visible from a distance, fire, secondary collapse.
- Casualties: numbers, whether patients, staff or others, with the caution of the casualty-recording lesson.
- Whether any warning was given, by whom, when, and how — and whether it allowed evacuation in the time available.
- Any statement by any party about the attack, quoted, dated and attributed.
What not to conclude. That a hospital was hit is not by itself proof of a war crime. The legal elements — the status of the object at the time, what the attacker knew, whether the object had been used to commit acts harmful to the enemy, whether a warning was required and given, proportionality — are decided by a competent court on evidence. A record that states the facts carefully is useful to that court. A record that announces the conclusion is not, and it damages the credibility of everything else in the file.
Attacks are counted. The World Health Organization runs a Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care, https://extranet.who.int/ssa/Index.aspx , and the ICRC's Health Care in Danger project documents the pattern, https://healthcareindanger.org/
Source. Geneva Convention (I) for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field, 1949, in the ICRC treaty database, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gci-1949 ; ICRC customary international humanitarian law, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl ; WHO Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care, https://extranet.who.int/ssa/Index.aspx
What this is not. Legal advice, and not a determination of responsibility. The association does not decide who committed a crime.