MSF suspends Port-au-Prince work after threats from Haitian police

MSF suspends Port-au-Prince work after threats from Haitian police

Event date: 2024-11-19. Doctors Without Borders said it was suspending operations in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding metropolitan area after its staff were threatened with rape and death by members of the Haitian police. The group said the shutdown would begin on Wednesday and continue until further notice.

In its statement, the aid group said police had repeatedly stopped its vehicles and directly threatened staff. MSF Haiti mission chief Christophe Garnier said the organization was used to working in extreme insecurity, but that law enforcement itself had become a direct threat. The evidence packet says one of MSF’s ambulances had been attacked the previous week, with two patients shot and killed by Haitian police. It also says an armed plain-clothes officer had threatened to start executing and burning staff, patients and ambulances.

The group’s decision matters because it runs some of the few functioning healthcare centers left in the capital. MSF said it was one of the key suppliers of free healthcare in Port-au-Prince and operated several centers for trauma injuries and a burns clinic. It said its suspension would not affect five patients already hospitalized under its care, and it would continue mobile clinics and maternal health activities in the south at Port-a-Piment.

The shutdown comes as Haiti’s capital remains trapped in deep insecurity. The packet says the city has been under a state of emergency since March 2024 after gangs took control of large parts of it. It also says that, according to a UN estimate last month, only 24 percent of the city’s healthcare facilities remained open. Against that backdrop, the loss of MSF’s services removes another important source of care from a system already under strain.

The report also notes that police and civilian self-defense groups killed 28 alleged gang members in Port-au-Prince in an overnight operation on Tuesday, burning the bodies in the streets. That detail underscores how violence in the capital has become fragmented and hard to control, with armed actors on multiple sides operating outside normal safety rules.

MSF has been present in Haiti for three decades. Its withdrawal from the capital does not solve the security crisis, but it does show how far the crisis has reached when an organization built to work in unstable settings decides that the threat has become too direct. In a city where medical access is already scarce, the suspension is likely to deepen the gap between violence and care.

The suspension is likely to have consequences well beyond one organization. When a medical charity with a long presence in Haiti says police threats make it impossible to operate, it signals that routine care has been overtaken by security collapse. In practical terms, that means fewer trauma beds, fewer burns services and fewer places for people in the capital to seek treatment without facing another layer of danger.

Haiti’s health system already depended heavily on organizations like MSF, which makes the suspension especially serious. Once a group like this scales back, the impact is not abstract: trauma cases wait longer, burns patients lose access and the city has one fewer place able to absorb emergencies. The decision therefore reflects a security crisis becoming a healthcare crisis in real time.