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Red Cross set to end funding at 25 hospitals in Afghanistan
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is likely to end the financial running of 25 Afghan hospitals by the end of August due to funding constraints, a spokesperson told Reuters, amid growing concerns over a plunge in aid to Afghanistan.
“Although we continue to engage with government ministries, donors, and organisations to find alternative sustainable support mechanisms for the hospital sector, the phase-out of the Hospital Program is expected to happen tentatively at the end of August,” Diogo Alcantara, ICRC’s spokesperson for Afghanistan, told Reuters on Thursday.
“The ICRC does not have the mandate nor the resources to maintain a fully functioning public health-care sector in the longer term,” Alcantara said.
In April, ICRC said its governing board approved 430 million Swiss francs ($475.30 million) in cost reductions over 2023 and early 2024 and a rolling back of operations in some locations as budgets for humanitarian aid were expected to decrease.
“The financial difficulties the ICRC is facing have sped up, in transparency with Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) authorities, the expected return of the full responsibilities of the health services to the Ministry of Public Health,” Alcantara said, referring to the Taliban administration.
The program’s end comes amid growing concerns over cuts to Afghanistan’s humanitarian aid, two years after the IEA took over and most other forms of international assistance, which formed the backbone of the economy, were halted.
The Geneva-based organisation would continue its other Afghanistan health programs, including rehabilitation support for people with disabilities, Reuters reported.
A spokesman for the health ministry did not respond to request for comment.
It was not clear how much was needed to pay for the operations, which fund salaries and other costs at many of Afghanistan’s major hospitals serving millions of people, and if IEA authorities could cover that amount from the fiscal budget.
An Afghan finance ministry spokesman said this year’s budget had been finalised, but not publicly released.
The hospitals have been supported by ICRC since a few months after foreign forces left in August 2021.
Development funding was cut to Afghanistan as the IEA – which has not formally been recognised by any country – took over the country. The sudden financial shock imperilled critical public services including health and education.
The ICRC and other agencies including the U.N. stepped in to try to fill gaps.
“The (ICRC) took this decision back then to save the healthcare system from collapsing due to the financial crises that Afghanistan was experiencing and because many development agencies and other organisations left the country while the ICRC stayed,” Alcantara said.
The ICRC hospital program had originally covered 33 hospitals, eight of which have already been phased out, paying for the salaries of over 10,000 health workers and some medical supplies. The hospitals provided thousands of beds and served areas encompassing more than 25 million people – over half the population.
Neighbouring Pakistan is closely watching the development, a senior government official told Reuters. Pakistan, a major destination for healthcare for Afghans, routinely has thousands of medical visa applications lodged with its embassy, officials said.
“We are concerned about a further influx of medical patients,” said the Pakistani official, who declined to be identified to speak openly about sensitive diplomatic issues.
Pakistan’s foreign office did not reply to request for comment.
There is growing alarm over cuts to aid to Afghanistan, where the U.N. humanitarian plan for 2023 is only 25% funded, even after requested budget was downgraded from $4.6 billion to $3.2 billion.
Diplomats and aid officials say concerns over IEA restrictions on women alongside competing global humanitarian crises are causing donors to pull back on financial support. The Islamic Emirate has ordered most Afghan female aid staff not to work, though granted exemptions in health and education.
Almost three-quarters of Afghanistan’s population are now in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the aid agencies.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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