Aggressors may deliberately block civilians' access to medical services, medicines, and humanitarian aid, as well as attack hospitals and obstruct the work of rescue missions. This maximizes losses among civilians and the wounded, depleting the resources of the colonized society and suppressing its capacity for resistance.
The colonizer cut the Chechens off from medical care from the first day of the deportation: the Chechen historian Dalkhan Khozhaev writes that the troops, driving people out of their homes, "threw the sick off their hospital beds"[1]. Typhus broke out in the trains - the certificate of the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) of 7 April 1944 on those brought to Kirghizia states: "412 people died and 278 were hospitalized"[2]. With no quarantine and no medicine at the destinations the epidemic spread: by 1 April 1944 about 4,800 people had fallen ill in Kazakhstan, over 2,000 in Kirghizia[3]. The colonizer forbade local residents, on pain of arrest, to help the dying Chechens. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov writes: "The local population was categorically forbidden to render help to the dying by giving food, water or medicine. Even a simple display of human sympathy for the perishing women and children was punished with arrests"[4].