Doctors staged a die-in to raise awareness about hundreds of doctors who have been killed in a brutal war.

A sea of white coats and signs covered the grounds of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in New York City on Thursday afternoon, as hundreds of volunteers performed a “die-in” to highlight the deaths of nearly 700 health care workers since civil war broke out in Syria in 2011.

Organized by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), the event aimed to raise awareness that health care facilities have been targeted 313 times during the war, and 90 percent of the attacks have been committed by government forces, according to PHR. Earlier this month, PHR said Russian airstrikes  hit three medical facilities over a two-day period, injuring staff and damaging buildings.

“The crisis in Syria has involved the most intense and directed and brutal attacks on health care and health workers that we have ever seen,” says Susannah Sirkin, director of international policy and partnerships at PHR. The goal of the die-in, she says, is to show the public “what killing hundreds of doctors physically looks like.” 

http://www.newsweek.com/hundreds-don-white-coats-stage-die-syrian-doctors-medical-workers-388767