Record number of aid workers killed in 2024, UN says

GENEVA (AFP) — A record 383 aid workers were killed in 2024, the United Nations said Tuesday, branding the figures and lack of accountability a “shameful indictment” of international apathy — and warning this year’s toll was equally disturbing.

The 2024 figure was up 31% on the year before, the U.N. said on World Humanitarian Day, “driven by the relentless conflicts in Gaza, where 181 humanitarian workers were killed, and in Sudan, where 60 lost their lives.”

It said state actors were the most common perpetrators of the killings in 2024.

The U.N. said most of those killed were local staff attacked in the line of duty or in their homes.

Besides those killed, 308 aid workers were wounded, 125 kidnapped and 45 detained last year.

“Humanitarians must be respected and protected. They can never be targeted,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. “This rule is non-negotiable and is binding on all parties to conflict, always and everywhere. Yet red lines are crossed with impunity.”

He called for perpetrators to be brought to justice.

‘Life-saving work’

Provisional figures from the Aid Worker Security Database show that 265 aid workers have been killed this year, up to Aug. 14.

“Attacks on this scale, with zero accountability, are a shameful indictment of international inaction and apathy,” said U.N. aid chief Tom Fletcher, head of its humanitarian agency OCHA. “Violence against aid workers is not inevitable. It must end.”

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement said 18 of their staff and volunteers had been killed so far this year “while carrying out their life-saving work.”

“Each killing sends a dangerous message that their lives were expendable. They were not,” the movement said.

Meanwhile the U.N.’s World Health Organization said 1,121 health workers and patients had been killed and hundreds injured in attacks across 16 territories — though most deaths were in Sudan.

“Each attack inflicts lasting harm, deprives entire communities of life-saving care when they need it the most, endangers health care providers, and weakens already strained health systems,” the WHO said.

OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke said “very, very few” people had “ever been brought to justice for any of these attacks,” with the U.N. human rights office urging countries bring perpetrators to account using the principle of universal jurisdiction.

World Humanitarian Day marks the day in 2003 when U.N. rights chief Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 other humanitarians were killed in the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.

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By ROBIN MILLARD Agence France-Presse