Share & more
The systems the international community has designed since the end of World War II to try to prevent atrocities and mitigate the worst effects of conflict on civilians are utterly failing: The wars in Sudan, and in the Gaza Strip, have made that abundantly clear.
The staggering levels of violence and deprivation inflicted on entire populations with utter impunity – and with complicity from powerful states – are a dark testament to the state of global humanitarianism, and the international community has shown itself unable to significantly respond to the suffering.
The desire to confront these failings head on was the impetus behind The New Humanitarian, Refugees International, and the Center for Transformational Change organising a doubleheader event on Navigating the Limits and Evolving Role of Humanitarian Aid on the sidelines of the UN’s annual high-level week in New York on 27 September.
The event consisted of two panel discussions. The first – Gaza, Sudan, and the limits of humanitarian action – aimed to take a brutally honest look at the factors preventing meaningful aid responses from taking shape in both contexts, what these failures say about the sector overall, and whether our current definition of humanitarianism needs to expand to incorporate other forms of action that can better help alleviate human suffering.
The second – If not aid, then what? – asked whether power can truly be shifted in a sector that traces its origins to colonialism, and if not, what might lie beyond the international aid system as we know it.
‘On the ground’
At the beginning of the first panel, which I moderated, Sudanese civil society activist Hanin Ahmed spoke about the reality of the humanitarian situation in Sudan.
Ahmed helped found the emergency response room in the city of Old Omdurman to address humanitarian needs arising from the brutal fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that broke out in April 2023. Ahmed was later forced to flee the country and has been raising awareness and support for the volunteer-run emergency response rooms, which have been the main humanitarian providers in Sudan.
“On the ground, it's getting worse every day and every single moment. We are trying to fill the gap, but the gap is too big,” Ahmed said.
Arwa Damon, a former CNN senior international correspondent and founder of the aid organisation INARA, also provided a window into the situation on-the-ground in Gaza. She has travelled to the enclave three times since Israel launched its assault in response to Hamas’ 7 October attacks into Israel last year. Her most recent trip was in August.
“You think that you've seen the worst of it, and then you go back over and over again, and you realise that no matter what it is that your mind tries to imagine worse becoming, it actually is not equivalent to what is happening on the ground,” Damon said. “The situation is so dire that we as humanitarian organisations cannot even provide the population with a bar of soap.”
Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency medicine physician and board member of the NGO MedGlobal, has travelled to Gaza multiple times over the years – including during previous wars – as a volunteer doctor. He spent three weeks in Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in January this year and also spoke to the reality on the ground.
He arrived in Gaza three months into Israel’s military campaign, and the enclave was already “unrecognisable from before”, he said, describing what he witnessed as a “360 degree assault on life”.
“It keeps getting compounded every single month,” he added.
‘Validating the cynics’
The panel also discussed the man-made hunger crises in both Gaza and Sudan and the trend of growing impunity for violations of international law.
Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University in the US and one of the foremost global experts on Sudan and famine, highlighted the role that parties to the conflicts have played in creating the hunger crises in Gaza and Sudan.
In Sudan – which is facing the worst levels of food insecurity ever recorded by the IPC, a group of UN-backed experts – “each side is using starvation as a means to political goals, and each is ready to make trade-offs under pressure, but the pressure is not being put on them to make those trade-offs,” de Waal said.
Gaza, which has a much smaller population, at around 2.1 million, is different, de Waal continued. It’s not the biggest by number, but it is “the most intense, the most severe – it is the most rapid descent”.
The successful rollout of the first phase of a polio vaccination campaign in September is proof that Israel can facilitate successful humanitarian activities in Gaza if and when it decides to do so, de Waal continued. “If Israel wanted every child in Gaza to have breakfast tomorrow morning, it would do it,” he added. “I think we just have to ask, why is it not doing it?”
Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, spoke about the disturbing implications of both conflicts when it comes to adherence to international humanitarian law [IHL]. He specifically pointed out the danger of the US applying different standards when it comes to condemning Russian violations of international humanitarian law in Ukraine compared to the tolerance of very similar tactics used by the Israeli government in Gaza.
“It is basically validating the cynics view that IHL, ultimately, is just window dressing and just an extension of geopolitics, and that is a deeply frightening place to be when you look at the broader sweep of history and why we have IHL in the first place,” Konyndyk said.
The conversation also addressed whether referring to what is happening in Gaza and Sudan as a humanitarian crisis actually obscures what is taking place.
“When you have 1,000 healthcare workers that have been killed, over 160 UN workers, over 125 journalists, when you talk about all of the academics that have been killed, they weren't killed by the humanitarian crisis,” Ahmad, the Palestinian-American doctor, said.
‘New responses’
Introducing the second panel, moderator Lina Srivastava from the Center for Transformational Change, said she sometimes wonders if it is even possible to imagine a different future beyond the current global humanitarian system in the midst of current challenges and struggles. “But it's clear we need a new vision. We need new responses,” she added.
Nadine Saba, co-founder and director of the Akkar Network for Development, a local NGO in Lebanon, spoke to the panel remotely. She was not able to leave Lebanon because of Israel’s escalated bombing campaign in the country, which forced many airlines to cancel flights.
Saba said imagining new approaches to aid means centring the experiences of people and organisations working on the front lines of crises. It also requires “having donors with a larger risk appetite. It means questioning the long-respected boundaries between humanitarian, development, [and] conflict resolution. It means trying new ventures and acknowledging and accepting failure sometimes,” she continued.
“What is happening at the moment is, in many instances, unrecognised, unacknowledged failure,” she added.
Alex Gray, director of international funds at the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, said many of the solutions that need to be implemented – from local, pooled funding mechanisms to survivor-led and community-led responses – are already well known. “We just don't have the political will and the decision-making powers sitting in the hands of the right leadership in order to take these solutions,” he added.
“I don't want to imagine a world beyond aid,” said Aarathi Krishnan, Founder of Raksha Intelligence Futures. “What I want to imagine is a world where states can be held to account for blatantly contravening international humanitarian law. I want to imagine a world where children are not blown up, people can get access to food, people don't have to work three day three jobs just to be able to put food on the table.”
The panel also discussed the tension in the aid sector surrounding the concept of neutrality. Ahmed, the Sudanese activist, who spoke on both panels, highlighted the utility of neutrality in a highly politicised and dangerous environment. “Any kind of political affiliation, or talk about politics… it will harm our colleagues on the ground,” she said.
Saba said the concept of neutrality is sometimes instrumentalised to maintain existing power structures. “What I've been seeing in some places is the use of neutrality, or principles of humanitarian work, to push aside local actors,” she said.
The panel went on to discuss the issue of siloing in the humanitarian sector, preparing for future shocks while resources are already stretched thin responding to current crises, and what humanitarian responses would look like if they were managed by communities themselves.
‘No alternative’
Both panels took questions from the audience, both in-person and submitted online.
In response to a question asked during the first panel about what NGOs and everyday people can do to advocate for accountability for crimes being committed in Sudan and Gaza, de Waal responded: “There is no alternative but public pressure in all possible forms… and using the courts to prosecute starvation crimes.”
The New Humanitarian also sent the panellists questions submitted online that there wasn’t time to discuss in-person.
As a stark reminder of the realities the panellists were speaking to, the timing of the event happened to coincide with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UN General Assembly, where he vowed to continue the war in Gaza until Israel achieves “total victory” over Hamas.
As the panellists spoke, Israeli warplanes unleashed a massive aerial bombardment on a Hezbollah command bunker in Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing the group’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah and pushing the region to the brink of all-out war.
Watch the full event here:
Edited by Andrew Gully.
