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It’s getting hot in here
An article published by the UK tabloid the Daily Mail has described the summer heatwaves, which have killed at least 2,800 people in the UK alone, as “like a gloriously long holiday in France” prompting calls for government intervention to address climate misinformation in the media. In the last issue of the Digest, we noted that the language used to describe the heat deaths in Europe avoided the stark terms normally used in relation to humanitarian catastrophes elsewhere in the world. But it’s not just the words. The visual imagery in media reports reinforces the idea of a glorious summer. A 2022 study of the visual coverage of the 2019 heatwaves in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK found that the most common pictures showed people enjoying themselves in or beside water; when danger was depicted, people were usually absent. There are almost none of the sorts of images used when reporting on crises elsewhere – no images of bodies or funerals. The choice of news imagery can be a signal about how seriously audiences should take threats. Sadly, European media is signalling that heatwaves are more fun in the sun, not the deadly mass killers they actually are.
Focus on Ethics
Keeping it human
A recent advertisement for a “Humanitarian AI & Machine Learning Adviser” to support the UK government's response to humanitarian crises and stabilisation challenges made me wonder whether we are fast approaching the time when AI replaces the human in humanitarian response. Avishan Chanani reflects the concern that “we've gone from talking about people and affected populations to talking about ‘humans’ as components in an AI system: AI delivers the ‘solutions’, while a ‘human’ is kept somewhere in the loop so we can call it ethical.” The International Organization for Migration, which was the subject of her complaint, says it limits AI use to “when there is a clear, justified need and it is the right tool for the job”, and that safeguards include “involv[ing] diverse stakeholders and affected communities in designing and deploying AI”. But that may be a tall order given that AI is not ethically neutral. As Professor Fainos Mangena of the University of Zimbabwe notes: “Despite the designers’ pretensions toward universality… deeply embedded in the technology itself are the values of its creators. The growth of AI therefore means the imposition of Western values – very much at the expense of Indigenous frameworks”. How do we protect communities from “algorithmic colonisation” posing as inclusion?
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Behind the Press Release
The devil is in the details
A Save the Children press release marking World Humanitarian Day warns that “national staff bear the brunt of record violence against humanitarian workers”. Drawing on the Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD), it notes that national workers comprise the overwhelming majority of aid workers killed, injured, kidnapped, or detained.
But dig beneath the numbers and a rather different story emerges. The AWSD distinguishes attacks targeting humanitarians from violence where a victim’s status as an aid worker was not relevant. From 2019 to 2022, the data shows that the latter category comprised just 10% of national humanitarian fatalities with incidents classified as both “Combat/Crossfire” or “Incidental”. However, that proportion quadrupled between 2023 and 2025.
And this is a highly localised, not universal phenomenon. Of the 426 deaths of national humanitarian staff in this category between 2023 and 2025, three quarters occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories, with the vast majority caused by aerial bombardment by the Israel Defense Forces. In fact, the database attributes 450 of all 1,013 national humanitarian fatalities worldwide during those three years to the IDF.
The press release’s global framing thus performs a curious disappearing act. Palestinians become “national staff”; Gaza becomes one among many humanitarian crises; aerial bombardment becomes “record violence”; and an identifiable perpetrator – Israel – vanishes within a generic appeal for all parties to respect international humanitarian law.
The release is right to point out that national staff bear the brunt. One would expect that this would be the case by virtue of local staff being vastly more numerous. However, the issue lurking in the numbers may be that the humanitarian designation does not protect locals in the same way it does internationals.
The death of a Palestinian aid worker killed by an airstrike at home may be recorded separately from that of their neighbours because of their occupation. But their job may have had nothing to do with why the bomb killed them. The assault on them may be part of the general assault on the civilian population. While international humanitarians can often be relocated or evacuated when danger becomes intolerable, their local counterparts remain members of the societies experiencing the violence.
The point, then, may not simply be that we need to better protect local aid workers, though that is needed. Rather, it may be a recognition that humanitarian status cannot protect local humanitarians from the violence inflicted on the civilian populations to which they belong.
Local suspicions
Another release by the IFRC three months into the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Ebola outbreak highlights the dangers faced by the 1,500 local Red Cross volunteers helping to combat it. Ushindi, a motorcycle-taxi driver and volunteer of 16 years, was attacked by people who had come to believe the Red Cross was spreading the disease not fighting it. He was left with a paralysed hand, wrecked balance, sleepless nights, and no way back to the work that fed him. Still, he returned to the response anyway.
Ushindi, too, is a national aid worker, one directly harmed in the line of duty. But he could not be less like the Palestinian killed at home by an airstrike. In Gaza, the killer is a foreign military and the worker is targeted primarily because of who they are, not just what they do; in Congo, the attacker is the served community and the job is the reason. Labelling these "violence against national staff" tells us little except that the international could have flown out, whereas neither of the local aid workers could go anywhere.
There is something else though. The community served by Ushindi appears in the IFRC release only as an obstacle to be managed – credulous, irrational, dangerous. Their suspicions and distrust of a foreign-funded, frequently militarised response apparatus is dismissed as rumour and conspiracy theories. Yet it has a history, a political economy, a long memory of who has come and what they have taken. Yes there is misinformation, but that should not insulate humanitarians from asking: Why do those we try to help believe we are the threat?
From the Decolonise How? Column
That’s a wrap from the narrative front lines.
Seen crisis coverage that raised your hackles – or warmed your heart? Send it our way: [email protected]
