The UN yesterday condemned the “unacceptable” level of violence becoming commonplace against humanitarian workers, a record 280 of whom were killed worldwide last year.
It also warned that the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza is potentially fueling even higher numbers of such deaths this year.
“The normalization of violence against aid workers and the lack of accountability are unacceptable, unconscionable and enormously harmful for aid operations everywhere,” Joyce Msuya, acting director of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said in a statement on World Humanitarian Day.
Photo: AFP
“With 280 aid workers killed in 33 countries last year, 2023 marked the deadliest year on record for the global humanitarian community,” a 137 percent increase over 2022, when 118 aid workers died, the agency said in the statement.
It cited the Aid Worker Security Database, which has tracked such figures back to 1997.
More than half of the deaths last year, or 163, were aid workers killed in Gaza during the first three months of the war between Israel and Hamas, mainly in airstrikes, the UN said.
South Sudan, wracked by civil strife, and Sudan, where a war between two rival generals has been raging since April last year, are the next deadliest conflicts for humanitarians, with 34 and 25 deaths respectively, it said.
Rounding up the top 10 are Israel and Syria, with seven deaths each; Ethiopia and Ukraine, with six deaths each; Somalia at five fatalities; and four deaths each in Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In all the conflicts, most of the deaths were among local staff.
Despite last year’s “outrageously high number” of aid worker fatalities, OCHA said that this year “may be on track for an even deadlier outcome.”
As of this month, 176 aid workers have been killed worldwide, the Aid Worker Security Database shows.
Against this backdrop, the leaders of multiple humanitarian organizations were to send a letter yesterday to UN member states calling for the international community “to end attacks on civilians, protect all aid workers, and hold perpetrators to account.”
Each year the UN marks World Humanitarian Day on Aug. 19, the anniversary of the 2003 attack on its Baghdad headquarters.
The bombing killed 22 people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN special representative to Iraq, and injured about 150 local and foreign aid workers.
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