It took 50 years for the International Committee of the Red Cross to admit its “moral failure with regard to the Holocaust”.
Half a century after the Nazis killed more than six million Jews, ICRC President Cornelio Sommaruga finally acknowledged this in his annual press conference, adding that the ICRC “did not succeed in moving beyond the limited legal framework established by states”. Later statements, commentary, research, and apologies have gone much further: The pre-eminent aid group of the time knew about the Nazi genocide against Jews and other minorities, but it failed to act in a way that was truly helpful to the victims, or to speak publicly about the atrocities.
It has been more than 14 months since the Israeli military began its onslaught in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas killing 1,200 people – two thirds of them civilians – and kidnapping hundreds more in Israel on 7 October 2023.
Aid groups are failing to make themselves heard once again.
This is after the International Court of Justice almost a year ago deemed Israeli actions in Gaza a plausible genocide. This is after a succession of war crimes professors, Holocaust scholars – and now Amnesty International – have gone further still, concluding there’s enough evidence of intent to declare that Israel is committing a genocide.
But you don’t have to wait for the charge of genocide, “the crime of crimes”, to be legally established (this will take years and be too little and too late for those dying today) to condemn Israel’s actions. The evidence that Israel is committing generational war crimes in Gaza is overwhelming: the percentage of population and territory affected; the number of dead, wounded, and orphaned civilians; the lack of ability to escape; Israel’s total control over every facet of life in the enclave; the psychological impact of being forced to live in enforced deprivation for so long; the brazen enablement of all of this by some of the most powerful countries in the world.
International aid groups must do what their Palestinian colleagues have been doing for a long time, and speak out – in plain language – about Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. If not, history will judge this as moral cowardice or, worse still, complicity.
In the first year of its campaign, Israel dropped 75,000 tonnes of bombs on the Gaza Strip – a territory roughly twice the size of Washington D.C. – killing and wounding tens of thousands of civilians, including a staggering number of women and children. It continues to systematically obstruct humanitarian aid, deliberately destroying efforts to bring emergency assistance to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians, many of them close to death with starvation.
Yet, even now, too many international aid organisations – not to mention the majority of governments and other important institutions – are carefully couching their words, failing to mention war crimes, crimes against humanity, let alone even the possibility of genocide. Some struggle to even mention Israel at all.
Aid groups have their reasons for not speaking out: a desire to appease the Israeli authorities so they can retain their ability to work in Gaza, concerns about relations with government donors who support Israeli policy, fear of retaliation against Palestinian staff in Gaza, and the oft-cited humanitarian principle of neutrality.
But if they ever were, these can no longer be justifications for prosaic ceasefire calls, equivocation, or silence. By failing to speak truth to power and call out US-backed Israeli war crimes for what they are, aid agencies risk becoming passive collaborators in Israel’s political instrumentalisation of aid. And they also risk ripping their own organisations apart, as cautious senior management alienate frontline staff who are increasingly desperate to speak up.
International aid groups must do what their Palestinian colleagues have been doing for a long time, and speak out – in plain language – about Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. If not, history will judge this as moral cowardice or, worse still, complicity.
Even more so because, as the focus on the daily horrors Israel is perpetrating in Gaza slips, there’s a real risk that its conduct becomes normalised, and that the brutalisation of Palestinians fades into the background as just another terrible thing happening in the world. The institutions that are supposed to be at the forefront of defending human rights and international humanitarian law have a duty to speak out forcefully now.
Aid access is no excuse
This has been the deadliest year for aid workers ever, because Israel has regularly bombed aid convoys and aid workers. Aid groups are actively concerned that coordinates they provide to the Israeli military for deconfliction have been used to target their people.
Israel has also systematically attacked and obstructed aid efforts to such an extent that the International Criminal Court says it believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former minister of defence, Yoav Gallant, bear “criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation”.
From the very start of this inhuman campaign, Israel appears to have allowed an aid response in Gaza to exist only to the extent that it serves its own interests: to enable the US government to state that it still cares about the suffering of Palestinians as it maintains its vital support; to bolster its legal defence for war crimes; to cultivate actors on the ground that can help with the goal of uprooting and replacing the Hamas-affiliated government; and to assuage the international community when its brutality crosses the shamefully high threshold of what precipitates outrage.
In acquiescing to Israel, aid agencies have crossed just about every red line they’ve drawn for themselves: U-turning on their initial refusal to work in so-called humanitarian zones like al-Mawasi; negotiating quid pro quo over access or items allowed in; even building a pier that cost $230 million for a day’s worth of aid.
The justification for institutional self-censorship, even as Israel targets healthcare workers and bombs aid convoys, is often “access”. No supplies or international aid groups can get into Gaza without permission from Israel – and Gazan aid workers, for the most part, can’t leave. Aid groups want to retain their ability to enter Gaza, however limited, and they want to keep their staffers safe.
There can be good reasons to balance speaking out with maintaining access in the service of saving lives. Helping desperate people in difficult conflict settings often requires doing just that: back-channel negotiations, and saying very little if you can: “stay and deliver”, in the parlance of the aid industry.
But because of Israel’s blockade on humanitarian assistance and commercial goods, and its relentless military strikes, aid organisations are simply unable to deliver a significant amount of aid.
What have 14 months of attempted humanitarian advocacy and diplomacy meaningfully achieved? Why continue to adhere to the standard rules of the game when those rules have so clearly been trampled all over by Israel and its backers?
Long past the point when a sustainable assistance pipeline should have been established, there is a critical shortage of medical supplies and medications throughout the Gaza Strip. Doctors often have to perform surgeries without anaesthesia. And the amount of food Israel is allowing in – and therefore available for aid organisations to distribute – is at its lowest level since October 2023.
All of this invites some important questions: What have 14 months of attempted humanitarian advocacy and diplomacy meaningfully achieved? Why continue to adhere to the standard rules of the game when those rules have so clearly been trampled all over by Israel and its backers?
Doing something is better than nothing is the mantra we often hear. But it now rings painfully hollow. Why not speak out while continuing to try to deliver? You have nothing to lose. Being silent hasn’t achieved anything for you or for the people of Gaza.
Once again, there are echoes of past failures.
In World War II, the ICRC’s diplomacy, which included a strategy of not directly addressing the issue of Jews with the German authorities – or indeed with the world at large – did nothing to stop mass murder.
As the ICRC itself now acknowledges, it had hoped that bilateral approaches with the Nazis might get it somewhere. But, aside from the work of some individuals and “a few sporadic instances”, its efforts to assist Jews and other persecuted groups were a failure. It sent 122,000 food parcels to concentration camps, but it “did not succeed in reaching those deportees who were subjected to the harshest regime, nor did it give captives any protection from torture or massacres”.
The humanitarian alibi
Another justification we often hear for silence is maintaining the long-held humanitarian principle of neutrality.
But neutrality means delivering aid without prejudice. It should not become a fig leaf for the truth. And it does not mean that NGOs with multi-million dollar budgets, often funded by Israel’s allies, should pretend they do not know that Israel is intentionally killing and starving people in Gaza.
In softening their words or acting as if this conflict is like any other, aid groups have helped enable Israel to peddle a humanitarian alibi. By allowing Israel to instrumentalise aid, aid groups, and aid workers, they have supported an illusion of safety as Israel has forced people into so-called “safe zones” like al-Mawasi, displacing them time and time again. But the aid people receive there is not even close to sufficient, and safety is non-existent.
An entire generation of people in the Middle East, and in other parts of the world, bought into humanitarian and human rights values but are coming to regard the global structures that promote them as a giant, hypocritical lie.
Again, this use of the neutrality defense, much like the access rationale, is not new. There are historical examples to draw lessons from.
In 2015, then-ICRC president Peter Maurer said this of the organisation’s activities during the Holocaust: “Tragically, the leaders of the International Committee of the Red Cross were part of the by-standers who – when confronted with questions about the silence of the institution – defended standard responses to extraordinary circumstances: To speak now would be ineffective; it would not change the course of history; it would compromise existing access to people in need; it would reflect badly on the neutrality and impartiality of the organisation.”
In short, they were wrong. These are, once again, “extraordinary circumstances”, and, again, those “standard responses” just aren’t enough.
It’s easy to suggest that international aid agencies speaking out now won’t make any difference. Why would it when greater visibility – and calling out – of atrocities doesn’t seem to prevent them from taking place?
But this is also wrong.
The stakes both within and outside your organisations are far too high. An entire generation of people in the Middle East, and in other parts of the world, bought into humanitarian and human rights values but are coming to regard the global structures that promote them as a giant, hypocritical lie.
It’s therefore vital that you speak out fearlessly right now when the very tenets of international humanitarian law – and the political structures that have sustained the presence of humanitarian aid – seem to be crumbling.
And to those who ask why humanitarians should be outspoken on Gaza if they haven’t been over other war crimes – in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, or Myanmar – as an organisation founded to provide early warning of future genocides after the horror in Rwanda, and to hold the aid sector accountable, we urge this: Speak out about these other atrocities, too.
Calling these appalling actions what they are will help restore the moral authority of your endeavours. It will help build political pressure. And beyond all else, it will acknowledge the true scale of suffering of those who have endured – and who continue to endure – Israel’s live-streamed war crimes.
