Geneva (AFP) – A record 383 aid workers were killed last year, the United Nations said Tuesday, branding the figures and lack of accountability a “shameful indictment” of international apathy, and warning that this year’s toll was equally grim.
The 2024 figure was up 31 percent on the year before, the UN said on World Humanitarian Day, “driven by the relentless conflicts in Gaza, where 181 humanitarian workers were killed, and in Sudan, where 60 lost their lives”.
It said state actors were the most common perpetrators of the killings last year, and most of the victims were local staff attacked in the line of duty or in their homes.
Besides those killed, 308 aid workers were wounded, 125 kidnapped and 45 detained.
“Humanitarians must be respected and protected. They can never be targeted,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.
“This rule is non-negotiable and is binding on all parties to conflict, always and everywhere. Yet red lines are crossed with impunity,” he said, calling for perpetrators to be brought to justice.
‘Life-saving work’
Provisional figures from the Aid Worker Security Database show that 265 aid workers have been killed this year to August 14.
“Attacks on this scale, with zero accountability, are a shameful indictment of international inaction and apathy,” said UN aid chief Tom Fletcher, head of its humanitarian agency OCHA.
“Violence against aid workers is not inevitable. It must end.”
OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke said “very, very few” people had “ever been brought to justice for any of these attacks”.
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement said 18 of its staff and volunteers had been killed so far this year “while carrying out their life-saving work”.
“Each killing sends a dangerous message that their lives were expendable. They were not,” the group said.
Meanwhile the UN’s World Health Organization said 1,121 health workers and patients had been killed and hundreds injured in attacks across 16 territories — with most deaths in Sudan.
“Each attack inflicts lasting harm, deprives entire communities of life-saving care when they need it the most, endangers health care providers, and weakens already strained health systems,” the WHO said.
Frustration with impunity
World Humanitarian Day marks the day in 2003 when UN rights chief Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 other humanitarians were killed in the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.
Current UN deputy human rights chief Nada al-Nashif — who survived that blast — urged countries to use the principle of universal jurisdiction to go after the perpetrators of such attacks.
“It’s supreme frustration with impunity,” she told AFP.
“Where the pursuit in national jurisdictions is not coming through — then we have to resort to universal jurisdiction.”
Speaking of the Baghdad attack, she said: “I lost a finger, I was badly hurt, I had about six surgeries over four years, but it is nothing, it pales in comparison to what we lost that day.
“I am really saddened that we are in the same place now, where the United Nations is being undermined.
“We are being manipulated again, attacked, directly, and find ourselves prey to misinformation and disinformation at a time when more than ever we need a robust, vivid and dynamic UN.”
