To talk to aid workers in the Middle East these days is to hear a story of anger and dejection. Anger is easy to understand. Since last October 7, following the Hamas terrorist attacks, more than 200 humanitarian workers, almost all Palestinians, have been killed in the Gaza Strip as a result of attacks by the Israeli army. Seven members of the NGO World Central Kitchen had to die, six of them western, so that some governments in Europe and the United States issued mild criticism against Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's response was terse and predictable: “This happens in a war.” To this rudeness, the Western powers responded, some with a resigned and complicit silence, and others, like the United States, by renewing sending weapons to Israel. The message is clear: the lives of humanitarian workers have little value; If they are Palestinians, even less so.
The anger of humanitarian workers has been building month by month. Four weeks after the start of the conflict, when 89 colleagues had already died under bombs or gunshots in the Gaza Strip and Israeli soldiers had carried out more than 100 attacks against health centers, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) in English), coordination body of the main humanitarian agencies, published a statement denouncing non-compliance with international law and demanding a humanitarian ceasefire. However, the resolutions presented to the United Nations Security Council in defense of this ceasefire were vetoed by the United States and Israel continued to indiscriminately kill civilians and humanitarian workers.
The message is clear: the lives of humanitarian workers have little value; If they are Palestinians, even less
When the International Court of Justice, on January 26, ruled that Israel was plausibly violating the Gaza Genocide Convention and demanded that its government, among other measures, allow the entry of humanitarian assistance, it may have seemed that international pressure would force Netanyahu to abide by the verdict. There was no pressure or compliance. Hours before the International Court of Justice announced its verdict, Israel accused 12 members of UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, of having participated in the crimes committed by Hamas on October 7. That Israel did not present any evidence to support its accusations, that UNRWA has 13,000 employees in Gaza or that it is the only organization with the infrastructure and personnel capable of distributing aid in the midst of the Palestinian famine did not prevent 18 donor countries, including The United States, Great Britain, Germany and Italy suspended their financing. Almost no OECD country seemed concerned about the consequences of undermining the work of a United Nations organization during a terrible humanitarian crisis based on unsubstantiated and unverified accusations. Anger, we said, is easy to understand.
And there were consequences. In March, the FAO Integrated Food Safety Phase Classification (IPC) showed that, “the catastrophic levels of hunger in Gaza are the highest ever recorded on the CPI scale, both in terms of number of people and percentage of the population. “Never before have we seen such rapid deterioration into widespread famine.” Numerous international organizations, including Oxfam, have detailed how Israel continues to block aid access to Gaza. The stubborn non-compliance with the measures imposed by the International Court of Justice with the aim of preventing a genocide, in the face of the rage of those fighting on the front lines to save lives, does not dent the support for Israel from the major Western powers.
When humanitarian aid manages to penetrate the Strip, the results can be equally tragic. On February 29, Israeli soldiers accompanying a humanitarian convoy in northern Gaza opened fire on a crowd of starving Palestinians, killing more than 100 people and wounding 700. The army claimed it had only fired into the air to prevent crowds, but a shocking investigation by the American network CNN dismantled this version. After the massacre, the United States blocked a statement of condemnation in the United Nations Security Council proposed by Algeria. Instead of forcing Israel to allow food and medicine into Gaza, President Biden decided to drop aid from planes, against the opinion of all experts who consider this system expensive, ineffective and dangerous. In the first days of the operation, five people were crushed to death by the packages, according to some media. No wonder this whole tragedy provokes anger.
The despondency is more complex to explain and, perhaps, has penetrated deeper. A Syrian worker from the World Food Program told privately, with tears in her eyes, what she and her colleagues felt when the Executive Director of the World Food Program (WFP), Cindy McCain, was appointed to this position by the United States Government. Joined, He participated in the front row last November at an event honoring Israel when more than 100 United Nations humanitarian workers had already been killed by his army.
While their staff die in Gaza, many UN agencies are run by diplomats or executives appointed by countries that support and often arm Israel. The consensus of powerful nations means that the World Food Program will be directed by an American—like Unicef, or that the Office of Humanitarian Affairs will be directed by a Briton and the Department of Peace Operations by a Frenchman. These appointments occur outside any democratic system and mean that the top of the global government pyramid is always dominated by the countries that now justify or participate in the alleged war crimes of the Israeli Government.
It is difficult to talk about gender policies or human rights in the name of institutions promoted and sustained by countries that finance, arm or look the other way.
The humanitarian workers of the Middle East, Palestinian, Yemeni, Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi women and men, opted for a world order emanating from the United Nations Charter and protected by a series of international agreements, from the Geneva Conventions to the Rights of the Child, which in times of peace and, above all, in times of war, oblige all States in the world to respect human and humanitarian norms, in the confidence that failure to do so entails consequences. When the Prime Minister of Israel, after the murder of more than 200 humanitarian workers, in addition to the death of 35,000 Palestinian civilians – more than a third of them children – affirms that “this happens in a war”, and nothing happens, that world order is either broken or downright criminal.
Humanitarian workers tell you how in many communities they are insulted for working for organizations linked to Europe and the United States. It is difficult to talk about gender policies or human rights in the name of institutions promoted and sustained by countries that finance, arm or look the other way when Israel bombs and machine-guns Palestinian women, the elderly and children. In the voices of those professionals who believed in a collective ideal of universal principles and values, disillusionment is heard, perhaps deeper than anger.
After World War II, Western countries that had benefited from centuries of colonialism and oppression proposed a new order based on justice rather than the power of the strongest, on global governance over brute force, on human rights. human rights overriding geopolitical interests. The Gaza war has shown that the world order is actually the world order: order in the sense of mandate, not concert. The West appeared before the tribunal of humanity with a mendacious plea for global justice. The West has lost its mind.
Gonzalo Sánchez-Terán is Deputy Director of Humanitarian Programs at the Center for International Humanitarian Cooperation. Gonzalo Fanjul is co-editor of the Planeta Futuro 3.500 Millions blog. You can follow Future Planet inx ,Facebook , instagram and TikTok and subscribe hereto our newsletter
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