Médecins Sans Frontières has permanently closed its hospital in Lankien, South Sudan, after the facility was bombed, looted, burned and vandalised in early February. The decision, announced six days after an MSF assessment team returned to the town in late April, ends more than three decades of life-saving care for around 250,000 people who depended on the only secondary healthcare centre in the region.
The MSF team flew into Lankien over Nyirol county in a single-engine Cessna Caravan for the first time since the hospital was shut down 10 weeks earlier. From the air, they could see burnt, roofless and partly collapsed tukuls – traditional mud houses – but the full scale of the destruction became clear only on the ground. At the airstrip, a small crowd of traditional chiefs in uniforms and red sashes, alongside women in colourful lawas singing and dancing, had gathered to welcome the visitors. They had themselves only recently returned after weeks of survival in the bush.
“I saw the plane that came and bombed our hospital with my own eyes,” said Nyakeda, a deaf woman using sign language, who had been back for a week. “The situation is worsening. There’s no medication in the area. We are suffering.”
‘It’s all gone’: the scale of the destruction
The 80-bed hospital had been run by MSF for more than 30 years, providing maternal and paediatric services, treatment for chronic diseases, severe malnutrition and malaria, and care for survivors of sexual violence. None of it remains. The premises are littered with medical supplies and documents. Air conditioners, printers and oxygen concentrators have been ripped apart; electrical panels smashed open and stripped. Not a single bed, chair or desk is left in the wards. Three of MSF’s five vehicles were stolen; the two that remain are riddled with bullets, their engines and seats missing. The cold-chain room, a large metal warehouse, was completely burned, its supplies turned to ash. “This is arson,” said Ben Greenacre, MSF’s humanitarian affairs manager. “People went in and purposely set it on fire.”
Yashovardhan, MSF’s head of mission, described the scene: “There is a crater in the middle of the hospital. The hospital has been bombed, looted, burned; and whatever was left behind was vandalised. It was purposely done so that we would have no other choice but to close it down for good.” The bomb struck the hospital’s medical store, collapsing the ground underneath and swallowing everything. Metal beams now stick out of a giant jagged pit.
A local MSF employee, identified as John for his protection, was present when the hospital was discharged and evacuated on 3 February after MSF received reports of imminent military operations. “It was a day of shock. Discharging patients, who were on beds for two, three weeks, a month … was very tough. By the afternoon we had managed to discharge our 48 patients, including 26 with gunshot wounds. At 6pm we closed the hospital and left. Then at around 7.30pm the airstrike came and hit our medical store.”
When government forces began a ground assault on 7 February, Lankien’s 20,000 residents fled into the surrounding bush. “We heard that people who were not able to run away, like the elderly and the youths with mental health problems, who drink alcohol, were killed in the market,” John said. The hospital was ransacked in the days that followed. MSF says it cannot establish with certainty who was responsible.
Samson, a man from Lankien in his 30s, watched the MSF team inspect the charred metal containers of the refrigerated stores. “I ran away when the SSPDF captured the town,” he said. “I didn’t see the burning. But it was happening when the SSPDF had taken control.”
A wider war on healthcare
The attack on Lankien is part of what MSF called “a wider and deeply worrying trend of violence against healthcare in South Sudan”. The organisation has been forced to close four hospitals since early 2025: Ulang, Old Fangak, Akobo and now Lankien. In January 2025 an MSF hospital in Old Fangak, also in Jonglei, was bombed, killing seven people. Since the start of 2025, at least 12 attacks have affected MSF facilities and staff. According to the UN humanitarian agency UNOCHA, 33 health facilities have been looted or destroyed in Jonglei alone, leaving 1.4 million people with no access to healthcare.
The same day the Lankien hospital was bombed – 3 February – MSF’s health facility in Pieri, also in Jonglei, was looted by unknown assailants. The pattern of violence against health infrastructure has drawn condemnation from the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, who in late February said: “Civilians are bearing the brunt of a spike in indiscriminate attacks, including aerial bombardments, deliberate killings, abductions and conflict-related sexual violence.” He noted that on both sides, “troops have demonstrated a near total disregard for civilian protection”.
Conflict and displacement
The security situation across South Sudan deteriorated throughout 2025 as hostilities resumed between the South Sudan People’s Defence Forces (SSPDF) – the government army loyal to President Salva Kiir – and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement In Opposition (SPLM-IO), the opposition group led by the now-suspended vice-president Riek Machar. The 2018 peace agreement has been unravelling. In March 2025, Machar was placed under house arrest in Juba, accused of orchestrating an attack on a government garrison in the north-east. The UN warned at the time that South Sudan was on the brink of civil war.
In late December 2025, the SPLM-IO launched an offensive in coordination with the White Army – a youth militia drawn from Machar’s Nuer community – in northern Jonglei, capturing several government outposts. The SSPDF mounted a counteroffensive in mid-January 2026, dubbed Operation Enduring Peace, involving aerial bombardments and ground assaults. Civilians in Nyirol, Uror and Akobo counties were ordered to evacuate. The SSPDF and allied militias recaptured lost positions and sought to dislodge the SPLM-IO from strongholds including Lankien.
According to the UN, more than 304,000 people in Jonglei have been displaced since December 2025. By April 2026, over 267,000 had been displaced in Jonglei alone. Those who fled Lankien when government forces began their ground assault on 7 February sought refuge in swampy forests, surviving on leaves and wild fruit. In April, the resumption of food aid by the World Food Programme (WFP) motivated some to return – only to confront burnt tukuls, destroyed crops, damaged boreholes, no hospital and no market.
In the tangle of scorched corrugated iron where the market once stood, men were rebuilding. Hoth Majok, 28, who returned on 1 April, said: “My shop and my home were destroyed, looted and burned. Once commodities are brought to the market, the community will return.” But by the end of April, the WFP had stopped food distribution.
Famine, hunger and a health system in ruins
The WFP, alongside other UN agencies, has warned of “a credible risk of famine” in four counties, with conflict-affected communities “cut off from food, markets, and essential services”. Mid-year food insecurity projections show that 7.8 million South Sudanese – 55% of the population – will face high levels of severe food insecurity between April and July. “Acute malnutrition is being exacerbated by lack of access to health and nutrition services where facilities have been damaged or closed due to conflict,” the agencies said.
Nyanchiow Mabil, 35, had come from Nyatim, a displacement site where MSF reported 58 people had died from suspected hunger in March. The site, which holds around 30,000 displaced people, has been blocked from receiving aid by the central government and local authorities. “I’m very sad about all this. Now I’ve returned to try to resettle, but we’re still lacking food and medicine,” she said. “Those who forced us to live in this horrible situation … who broke our borehole, burned down our hospital and our market … As women and mothers, we urge them not to ever return to Lankien.”
Other recent violence in Jonglei and neighbouring areas underscores the wider crisis. On 21 February, 21 civilians were killed by government forces in Pankor village, Ayod county. On 1 March, over 160 civilians were killed, including at least 139 by fighters from the Bul Nuer ethnic group, in Abiemnom locality. Humanitarian access remains severely constrained. The conflict has also been exacerbated by the ongoing crisis in neighbouring Sudan, which has driven an influx of refugees and returnees. The hospital in Lankien, which once stood as a lifeline, is now a cratered ruin.
