Conflict and attacks on healthcare must cease, as without peace there can be no health, writes WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus War and disease are old friends. In the Napoleonic wars and the American Civil War, more soldiers died from disease than in battle. It was no coincidence that the 1918 influenza pandemic erupted during the first world war or that the final frontier for eradicating polio is in the most insecure regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Ebola outbreak in the relatively stable Équateur province in 2018 took just two months to control, whereas the outbreak in the insecure provinces of North Kivu and Ituri in 2020 took two years. Israel’s wars with Hamas and Hezbollah have had devastating consequences for the health of the people of both Gaza and Lebanon. At the time of writing, more than 43 000 people have been killed in Gaza, more than 10 000 are missing, and more than 102 000 are injured, at least one quarter of whom w