Intensifying violent clashes between rival armed gang factions have triggered a total shutdown of medical services in Haiti’s conflict-battered Cité Soleil neighborhood, forcing medical non-profit Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to evacuate all patients and suspend its operations indefinitely starting Monday, May 11, 2026.
The outbreak of sustained gunfire, which erupted early Sunday morning between the Chen Mechen gang and its former allies now aligned with the terrorist coalition Viv Ansanm, has spread across the Duvivier and Cité Soleil districts located just kilometers from Port-au-Prince’s international airport. As violence escalated through Monday, hundreds of local residents displaced by the fighting fled to MSF’s community hospital in the low-income Port-au-Prince neighborhood seeking shelter and medical care. The deteriorating security situation quickly turned life-threatening even within the facility’s walls: one of MSF’s on-site security guards was hit by a stray bullet on hospital grounds, leaving staff unable to guarantee basic safety for anyone present.
Local peer facility Fontaine Hospital, the other major medical provider in the conflict zone, also began full evacuation of its patients, moving vulnerable newborns out of its neonatal intensive care unit to safer locations outside the fighting zone. MSF confirmed that it absorbed a number of Fontaine’s transferred patients before suspending services, including several women who had given birth overnight at the evacuated facility.
By Monday afternoon, MSF confirmed that every functioning hospital in the active fighting zone had ceased operations. In an official statement, the organization emphasized that local medical needs have grown exponentially as the conflict has expanded, leaving a catastrophic gap in care for injured civilians and vulnerable residents. The NGO noted that it made the difficult decision to suspend all services after concluding it could not protect its international and local medical staff, nor the patients and displaced civilians sheltering on its grounds, from the ongoing crossfire. As of Monday evening, MSF reported it had hosted more than 800 displaced residents at its hospital before the evacuation, and no functional medical care is currently available to civilians trapped in the Cité Soleil conflict zone.