Across Battlefields, Aid Workers Are Targeted More Than Ever

After 2024 became the deadliest year on record for humanitarian workers—breaking 2023’s previous high—2025 is on a similar trajectory. Recent data paints a grim picture: humanitarian workers are being attacked at rates historically unseen.

The dangers faced by aid workers are evident across conflict zones. In Gaza alone, there have been more than nine hundred deaths at aid sites over the past few months. Sudan has recorded thirty-two attacks on aid workers this year, including five who were killed in an ambush in June. Organizations in Ukraine, meanwhile, have reported at least 109 incidents that have disrupted aid delivery in 2025.

The world’s major wars are escalating as violations of international law unfold across battlefields in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine. It is not a coincidence that reports continue to stream in of humanitarian aid workers and sites being struck—either in crossfire or intentionally—experts tell CFR.

“The rules of humanitarian law have lost their respect. We’ve seen a veritable epidemic of medical personnel, units, and vehicles being attacked and abused… implemented across different theaters of war,” Janina Dill, global security professor at the University of Oxford, said. “So that is definitely a trend.”

Despite aid worker protections within international law, recent conflicts increasingly include attacks on those who are working to bring medicine, food, and shelter to civilians. As Western countries are pulling back on aid funding, local organizations are left exposed to more vulnerabilities than ever before. 

How many aid workers have been killed? 

This April, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported at least 377 deaths across twenty countries in 2024. This topped 2023’s death toll by nearly 100—a year that had already seen a 137 percent increase over 2022.

The latest figures are three times the yearly average of the past decade, and a tenfold jump since the late 1990s, said Abby Stoddard, a partner at Humanitarian Outcomes, an independent research organization largely made up of former aid workers. The organization has tracked these attacks in its Aid Worker Security Database since 1997.

So far in 2025, Humanitarian Outcomes has recorded at least 245 major attacks, which it defines as “killings, kidnappings, and attacks that result in serious injury,” and has seen an uptick in arrests and detentions of aid workers.

As global wars endlessly generate one alarming headline after another, “We have become numb to this violence,” OCHA Assistant Secretary-General Joyce Msuya told the UN Security Council in April. “Being shot at is not—I repeat, not—part of our job.”

The hot spots for aid attacks, Stoddard said, are primarily Gaza and Sudan. For the first time, her organization is also documenting rising rates of violence targeting local aid workers specifically. These regional groups are the cornerstone of relief efforts because they “are the ones most willing and most able to gain access to the most dangerous parts of these countries,” Stoddard said. The scale of these strikes is disquieting—Msuya estimated that at least 95 percent of last year’s aid worker attacks were on locals. “Yet, conduct harming our local staff rarely elicits reactions or makes the news,” Msuya said.

Why is this trend unprecedented?

Attacks on civilians and aid workers are not new; such violence goes back centuries. What makes today’s attacks striking is that there are now legal frameworks in place to prevent them, CFR international law expert David J. Scheffer said.

“There’s a constellation of codified and customary international law that provides legal protection” for aid workers that has only continued to amass as time goes on, Scheffer explained. These include the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their 1977 Protocols, the 1994 Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel, the 1998 Rome Statute—which Scheffer himself negotiated—and UN Security Council resolutions such as Resolution 2730, which was adopted last year.

Despite the increase in laws aimed at protecting aid workers, the violence has nevertheless intensified.

Yet the rise in attacks is only one part of the story. According to several experts, an even more troubling trend is that the violence is mostly being perpetrated by states themselves—even those who have ratified international humanitarian law. In past conflicts, these violations typically came from local militias or other groups that weren’t party to the conventions, such as the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Now, it is state-led militaries, which are legally bound by the conventions, that are ignoring these decades-old norms.

There have been documented instances of the Israeli, Russian, and Sudanese governments striking aid sites in their respective conflicts. Each has repeatedly rejected allegations of violating the law and reinforced that their aims are to strike military targets. Humanitarian workers have to report their coordinates to a notification system when on-duty, a protocol designed to help prevent such attacks, according to Stoddard. The fact that they’ve been in the line of fire in spite of this demonstrates “deconfliction failure,” she added.

As a result, many humanitarians have lost trust in these systems and deliberately avoid them, believing that participating in them actually puts them at more risk, Stoddard said. “If you have a military such as Russia acting in bad faith, it’s kind of putting a target on your back to say where you’re going to be.”

Why is this happening?

The inability to prevent these attacks is not a problem of capacity or knowledge—it’s a problem of motivation and a lack of deterrence, Oxford’s Dill told CFR.

“The question is, under what conditions are they ever inclined to actually follow this law,” Dill said of warring parties. There are many factors at play, she explained, including whether actors feel they can “win” while obeying the law, whether they feel they’re being watched by the international community, and whether they have something to lose from a loss of legitimacy.

That final factor is playing out on the frontlines of the Russia-Ukraine war, for example. “I recently talked to a member of the Ukrainian military,” Dill told CFR. “She said that one of the strongest reasons for why Ukrainians obey the law is that they ‘don’t want to be like Russia.’” Obeying the law differentiates Ukrainians from their adversary and keeps them in broad international favor. By contrast, in Sudan, the civil war has spiraled into a race to the bottom.

For countries like Russia and Israel, what’s missing is external pressure—international law relies on other states enforcing compliance with international norms. Global courts like the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have limited enforcement mechanisms, while the UN Security Council (UNSC) is hampered by conflicting interests. Russia has a seat on the council alongside the United States (a longtime Israel ally) and China (a Russian ally)—as such, the UNSC often doesn’t have the unanimity it needs to pass resolutions, let alone ensure accountability. 

Other powerful states that have the ability to add global pressure have not taken a firm position on the matter. In Sudan, there has been a lack of global attention compared to other conflicts. In Israel, historic alliances with the United States and European leaders have made those partners reluctant to criticize Israeli actions.

This reluctance was on display in March, after OCHA and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society recovered the bodies of fifteen aid workers in Rafah, Gaza—the victims had been killed several days earlier by Israeli forces. Yet the response from the United States was muted, with the Donald Trump administration declining to say whether it would investigate. Instead, U.S. officials said they expected “all parties” to adhere to international law, while a U.S. spokesperson shifted blame toward Hamas. Rights groups criticized the response, with several having previously pointed to the fact that U.S. law prohibits foreign governments from using American-made weapons to violate humanitarian law.

While Europe has started to become more vocal on conflicts like the one in Gaza, this reluctance to call out crimes undermines the international legal system, Dill said. “Equal application of the law is really intrinsically important to law,” she added. Selective enforcement speaks to a crisis of compliance and the erosion of values once held in high regard.

What can countries do about it?

These surging attacks are also occurring at a time when support for humanitarian aid is vanishing, with countries like the United States and United Kingdom cutting funding for global aid programs. That funding has long been crucial in supporting all aspects of aid, including data collection, on-the-ground distribution, and worker safety. When budgets are slashed, “security risk management as an organizational function is one of the first things to go,” Stoddard said. Restoring that support is a priority for her own organization, which previously received from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Beyond restoring funding, experts note that improving accountability from states is a critical component of deterring aid attacks. That process starts domestically. “National militaries should review their rules of engagement so that the identification and protection of humanitarian aid workers is more precisely established,” Scheffer said. At the international level, he continued, states should ratify the 1994 Convention as well as its accompanying 2010 Optional Protocol, which expands protections to more aid workers than just peacekeeping personnel. So far, ninety-five states have ratified the convention, but only thirty-three have ratified the protocol.

Another crucial step is ensuring third-party compliance and better commitment to international humanitarian law, particularly from Western states. These nations are the ones who largely created this system, Dill pointed out, making them instrumental in upholding it. States should hold even their closest “allies accountable when they don’t obey the law.” 

Will Merrow and Austin Steinhart contributed to the graphics for this article.