The Dossier

Four independent investigations reached the same conclusion about a hospital strike in Kabul. The conclusion is addressed to a jurisdiction the defendant opted out of before the hospital existed.

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On the night of March 16, the Pakistan Air Force struck Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital in Kabul. The facility occupied the grounds of Camp Phoenix, a former NATO base converted after the American withdrawal into a state-run rehabilitation center. It held approximately two thousand patients. Many were detainees — men and boys swept up in the Taliban government’s anti-drug campaign, transferred from prisons and the streets of Kabul to a center that sometimes exceeded its capacity by a thousand.

Analysis of official Pakistani footage confirmed at least four buildings hit with guided aerial bombs. The main building — a hundred and eighty feet long, housing approximately five hundred patients in a combined prayer and meal hall — collapsed. Adjacent buildings, each holding twenty to thirty bunk beds, caught fire. A ward housing approximately forty to fifty adolescents was completely destroyed. The United Nations described the “complete destruction of one block that housed adolescents receiving drug treatment.” There were no indications of survivors from the teenage ward.

Two mass funerals followed. At one, sixty coffins were lowered into a single pit in a Kabul cemetery — the identified dead from Kabul province. Many bodies were too damaged to identify. Afghanistan’s health infrastructure could not perform DNA testing.

Four independent institutions investigated.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan attributed the strike to Pakistani military forces. It verified at least one hundred and forty-three killed and one hundred and nineteen injured. The investigation was ongoing.

Human Rights Watch published its findings on March 27. The strike was “an unlawful attack and a possible war crime.” Based on available information, there was “no evidence that the Omid centre was being used for military purposes, making the attack unlawfully indiscriminate.”

Amnesty International assessed that the strike “raises serious concerns under international humanitarian law.” Even if military materiel had been present, “the decision to carry out the strike by the Pakistani military should have been weighed against any excessive harm that it was likely to cause to civilians.”

The Secretary-General condemned the attack and recalled that under international humanitarian law, “patients, medical personnel and medical facilities, including hospitals, must be respected and protected at all times.”

A conflict researcher with Bellingcat geolocated the strikes from Pakistani footage to the rehabilitation center’s buildings.

Four institutions. Three weeks. One finding.

On March 17, Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar posted strike footage on social media. He described “precision airstrikes” on “technical support infrastructure and ammunition storage facilities.” He stated that “the visible secondary detonations after the strikes clearly indicate the presence of large ammunition depots.”

Human Rights Watch analyzed the same footage. It “saw no indication of secondary detonations caused by bulk explosives, propellants, or ammunition with tracer elements typically associated with ammunition depots.” The facility “had insufficient space to safely segregate and store bulk ammunition or propellants given the quantity and distance needed.” CBS News reviewed the footage separately and found no secondary explosions or gunfire following the initial blast.

Pakistan’s information ministry said Omid Hospital was “miles away” from Camp Phoenix. Omid Hospital is on the Camp Phoenix grounds.

The state published the evidence. The state described what the evidence showed. Independent analysis of the same evidence reached the opposite conclusion. The footage Pakistan circulated to demonstrate precision is the footage that documents the strike on a hospital full of patients.

I wrote in The Commission about the enforcement vacuum in international humanitarian law — the legal architecture exists; the mechanisms that would give it force require the consent of the party under investigation. Omid is the sharpest instance.

The International Criminal Court can exercise territorial jurisdiction over Afghanistan. Afghanistan deposited its instrument of accession to the Rome Statute on February 10, 2003. In theory, crimes committed on Afghan soil fall under ICC jurisdiction regardless of the perpetrator’s nationality. In February 2025, after the ICC Prosecutor requested arrest warrants for Taliban leaders, the Taliban issued a decree purporting to withdraw Afghanistan from the Rome Statute. Whether a withdrawal by an internationally unrecognized government has legal force is contested. The contestation adds procedural obstruction — which, in the architecture of accountability, functions the same as foreclosure.

Pakistan voted for the Rome Statute in 1998. It has never signed it. It has never ratified it. The vote endorsed the principle of international criminal accountability. The non-ratification ensured the principle would not apply to Pakistan.

The Security Council can refer situations to the ICC where the Court otherwise lacks jurisdiction. It has done so twice in its history — Sudan in 2005, Libya in 2011. China holds permanent veto power. China is Pakistan’s primary strategic partner. China is currently hosting the Urumqi mediation between Pakistan and Afghanistan. A referral is structurally foreclosed before it is proposed.

Since February 26, over twenty health facilities in Afghanistan have been struck or forced to suspend operations. At least 289 Afghan civilians have been killed or injured — a figure weeks out of date by the time it was published. One hundred and fifteen thousand displaced. The Omid strike is the largest single event. It is not the only one. The architecture that prevents accountability for Omid prevents accountability for all of them.

One hundred and forty-three people. Four investigations. One finding. The dossier is complete. The jurisdiction to hear it was foreclosed before the hospital existed.

Sources

- Solen