Sparks: Hospitals deliberately targeted by Sudan's RSF fighters, BBC finds

When the militia that was raised to liberate discovers that the hospital is the last institution the people still trust, it burns the hospital, because the new order cannot tolerate an authority it did not create.

What we call a war crime is, before the naming, merely a pattern - the same pattern across clinics, markets, and water points - and the pattern is the evidence, not the word.

Strike the hospital and you do not weaken the enemy; you harden every witness who survives, and the surviving witness is the army you cannot defeat.

Forget the condemnation - the general who targets a hospital has calculated that the outcry costs less than the wounded he would otherwise have to feed, and until that calculation changes, the targeting continues.

The fighters were armed by someone, trained by someone, paid by someone, and now they turn on the sick - and the ones who made them will call this an atrocity rather than a consequence.

Track the sequence: a rifle enters the country, a chain of command assigns it a sector, a sector contains a hospital, and the hospital falls - every step is operational, and every operator has a name.

They will investigate the strike for eighteen months and publish a report that names no one, because the institution's function is not to punish the crime but to survive the knowledge of it.

The fighters who burn the hospital and the foreign governments that armed them are partners in a trade - weapons one direction, impunity the other - and neither party intends the hospital, which is precisely why the hospital burns.

A mother carried her son to that hospital because it was the only building in the district with a generator, and the generator is why the fighters came - the same machine that saved the child marked the building for destruction.

Read the sentence again - 'may amount to war crimes' - the verb is conditional, the subject is abstract, and nowhere does it say the patients bled, which is the sentence's entire purpose.

In every land I traveled the hospital was sacred - the sultan's peace extended to the sick - and I have never seen a people survive the loss of the place where they took their wounded.

You tell me to wait for the investigation to conclude, but the mother who carried her child to that hospital did not wait - she ran - and she is the only one in this affair who has acted without pretense.