On the afternoon of 30 November 2023, an ambulance was driving towards Wegel Tena, in Delanta woreda. It was coming back from Tita, near Dessie. Three health workers from the primary hospital had gone there to collect medicines the hospital had run short of. The boxes were in the back. In front, the three of them sat together: Bizuyehu, the driver; Henok, the pharmacist; and Dr Getachew, who ran the hospital.
Anyone could see it was an ambulance. There was no fighting in the area. Three residents saw a drone circling above the town that day.
The munition killed at least four people and gravely wounded another.
We do not have this from a single witness. Human Rights Watch investigated the strike. It analysed satellite imagery, authenticated video and photographs taken afterwards, and published its findings in July 2024, at the close of an inquiry carried out in thirteen towns across Amhara with fifty-eight witnesses. Doctors and residents told the organisation they believed the ambulance had been hit on purpose, so that the medicines would not reach Fano fighters. Human Rights Watch concluded that the Ethiopian military has committed serious violations of the laws of war that may amount to war crimes.
In our registry, that afternoon fits on a single row. A date, a place, a woreda, a zone, a number in the column marked killed, and one word in the column marked target: health.
That is the distance this article hopes to close. And to say why, in spite of it, we go on counting.
The silence was arranged before we arrived
From August 2023 to July 2024, mobile internet was restricted and telephone lines cut in nineteen towns across Amhara. Eleven months. Freedom House set out the chronology. The Amhara Association of America, for its part, writes in its reports that the attacks it managed to record are only a fraction of what took place — because of that shutdown, precisely.
A blackout of this kind is not a technical failure. It is a method. It stops a mother from reporting her son’s death, a journalist from checking a claim, an investigator from reaching a village. It manufactures the absence of evidence. Then the absence of evidence is invoked.
Meanwhile, the institutions whose task it was to establish the facts fell silent, one after another.
In October 2023, the mandate of the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia came to an end. No state tabled a resolution to renew it — not even the European Union, which had created it two years earlier. In its final report, the commission concluded that all the common risk factors for atrocity crimes were present in the country. It stopped there.
Within Ethiopia, the national human rights commission published a 152-page annual report covering 2024 and 2025 without mentioning a single aerial attack. Its chief commissioner explains that only two strikes were reported to the commission over the year, and that neither seemed credible.
In that emptied space, all that remains are families who speak and organisations that write things down.
Why the figures do not agree — and why that is not suspicious
An attentive reader will come across several different counts. They are right to ask whom to believe.
ACLED records around a hundred drone strikes in Amhara since April 2023. The European Council on Foreign Relations counts at least 449 civilians killed. The United Nations verified eighteen strikes, 248 civilian deaths and 55 injuries in the final five months of 2023. Our own registry holds, as things stand, 191 strikes and 1,216 deaths — a figure that rises with every entry added, and which the dashboard always shows current.
None of these figures contradicts the others. They are not measuring the same thing.
A strike is not an incident. Our principal source says so itself: for the autumn of 2024 alone, it counts more than ninety-nine strikes across seventy-four incidents. ACLED, for its part, codes events according to its own rules. The United Nations retains only what its own staff have been able to verify — which is little, when the lines are cut and the roads are closed.
The lowest figure is not the most honest one. It is the most cautious, and caution comes at a cost: it leaves out those whom nobody was able to reach.
What we do with our own doubts
Our registry contains disagreements. We publish them.
Take the strike on Waber, on 9 November 2023. Our primary source counts seventeen dead and describes homes. The United Nations counts thirteen and describes a bus station, where people were waiting to board. We have not settled the question. Both accounts are in the entry, with their sources and their links.
At Merewa, in August 2026, the same source reports at least five civilians killed: a mother, her two children, and two men passing through. BBC Tigrinya reports three deaths. The woreda administrator speaks of one. We kept the figure from our primary source, the only account that says who these people were. And we write, in the entry itself, that it is the highest of the three.
A registry that hides its discrepancies believes itself strong. It is brittle. One that shows them may be argued with, but it will not be caught out.
What these strikes reach
On 6 November 2023, a primary school in Wadera district. The United Nations counts seven dead there, three of them teachers; our primary source records twelve. Both figures are in the entry. On 12 May 2024, in Kewet district, seven teachers gathered in their schoolyard for a celebration. On 7 September 2026, two primary schools in Dera woreda, Sana and then Mecho, struck one after the other in the early morning. It was registration day. Children and their parents had gathered there because the resumption of classes had just been announced.
UNICEF counts more than six thousand schools closed across the country and close to ten thousand damaged, eighteen per cent of its schools. In Amhara, the regional education bureau counted in March 2025 more than 3,600 still shut, over four hundred of them destroyed outright in East Gojjam zone alone. It is also where the 4.4 million out-of-school children recorded by UNICEF live — the highest number anywhere in Ethiopia, ahead of Oromia and its 3.2 million.
That number is not holding steady. It stood at roughly 3.9 million in October 2023; it stands at 4.5 million today. Each year of war adds another cohort to those who will not learn to read.
An entire generation is learning that school is the place where people die.
The laws of war ask three simple things. Tell civilians apart from combatants. Do not cause them harm out of all proportion. Take every feasible precaution before striking. The United Nations found that the attacks of November 2023 amounted to an arbitrary deprivation of life under international human rights law. Human Rights Watch speaks of violations that may amount to war crimes. These are not words of outrage, they are legal characterisations — and a characterisation calls for responsibility.
What documentation has already achieved
One might assume that counting changes nothing. Experience suggests otherwise.
In 2020, civil society organisations and journalists — not governments — established something straightforward: sensors made in Canada, the kind used to mark out targets, were fitted to drones flying in a war they had never been sold for. Ottawa suspended deliveries, then cancelled twenty-nine export permits, at the close of an official review that found credible evidence of diversion. A British firm stopped supplying after being contacted by human rights defenders. The manufacturer spent years replacing those components, until in 2025 it flew an engine of its own.
Then, in January 2024, Canada reopened its exports, as part of a diplomatic arrangement tied to NATO. Deliveries resumed. On the ground, nothing had changed.
What worked once can work again. But nothing moves without documentation, and documentation carries weight only if it is beyond reproach.
That is why we check every date. Why we keep the link to every report. Why we write down where two sources disagree. And why we refuse to round a death toll upwards, even when anger urges us to.
One thousand two hundred and sixteen. That is not a number. It is one thousand two hundred and sixteen times someone — an ambulance driver, a pharmacist, a hospital director, a mother and her two children, teachers gathered in a schoolyard. That it can be checked line by line is perhaps all we can still offer them.
- Attacks on medical care in the Amhara conflict, including the strike on an ambulance at Wegel Tena on 30 November 2023. hrw.org Human Rights Watch, July 2024
- Eighteen recorded drone strikes, 248 civilian deaths and 55 injuries between August and December 2023. ohchr.org OHCHR — Update on the human rights situation in Ethiopia, June 2024
- Strikes on a primary school in Wadera district and on the bus station at Waber; attacks of this kind amount to arbitrary deprivation of life. ohchr.org OHCHR, 17 November 2023
- The Human Rights Council did not renew the mandate of the Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia. hrw.org Human Rights Watch, 4 October 2023
- Ethiopia country chapter, covering drone strikes and accountability. hrw.org Human Rights Watch, World Report 2025
- Incidents including the strike on teachers in Kewet district, 12 May 2024. state.gov United States Department of State, 2024 Country Reports
- Mobile internet restricted and telephone lines cut across nineteen towns in Amhara. freedomhouse.org Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2024
- The national human rights commission annual report and its position on reported strikes. ethiopiaobserver.com Ethiopia Observer, 6 August 2025
- Out-of-school children by region; schools closed and damaged nationwide. unicef.org UNICEF, Ethiopia Humanitarian Situation Report No. 9, October–November 2024
- Schools still closed in Amhara and the scale of destruction in East Gojjam. addisstandard.com Addis Standard, August 2025
- Trend in out-of-school children in Amhara since October 2023. acaps.org ACAPS — Ethiopia country analysis
- Drone warfare in Ethiopia: procurement, supply routes and civilian toll. ecfr.eu Zecharias Zelalem, European Council on Foreign Relations, February 2025
- Satellite imagery confirming the presence of Turkish, Chinese and Iranian drones in Ethiopia. paxforpeace.nl PAX
- Western components in drones operated in the Ethiopian conflict, and the supplier that withdrew. dronewars.net Drone Wars UK, April 2022
- Cancellation of twenty-nine export permits to Türkiye. canada.ca Global Affairs Canada, 12 April 2021
- Final report of the review of export permits to Türkiye. international.gc.ca Global Affairs Canada
- Resumption of Canadian sensor exports after the January 2024 lifting of controls. ploughshares.ca Project Ploughshares, June 2025
- First flight of a domestically developed engine on the TB2. aviationweek.com Aviation Week, 2025
- Recorded drone and air strikes in the Amhara Region, incident by incident. amharaamerica.org Amhara Association of America
- Witness accounts of drone strikes on civilians in Amhara. aljazeera.com Al Jazeera, December 2023
- Civilian toll of Ethiopia's turn to combat drones. thenewhumanitarian.org The New Humanitarian, March 2024