MANAMA: Humanitarian workers are being increasingly targeted in Gaza and in Sudan, where five Red Crescent volunteers were killed this week, the International Committee of the Red Cross’s director-general Pierre Krahenbuhl told AFP Friday.
Israel has repeatedly launched deadly strikes on Gaza despite a ceasefire agreed earlier in October and reports have emerged of atrocities by paramilitaries during Sudan’s brutal civil war.
“It is now becoming a pattern of violence against humanitarian workers in Sudan, in Gaza, and others, that we find very dramatic,” Krahenbuhl said in an interview before the Manama Dialogue conference in Bahrain.
“There is a wider erosion of respect for international humanitarian law,” which had “clearly not” been respected in either conflict, he added.
On Tuesday, the ICRC said five Sudanese Red Crescent volunteers were killed in North Kordofan state, a major battleground of the war that has raged since April 2023.
There were also reports of 460 people killed at a hospital in El-Fasher, which recently fell to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries.
The capture of El-Fasher, following an RSF siege of more than 18 months, raised fears of a return to Sudan’s ethnically targeted atrocities of 20 years ago.
The western city has been cut off from all communications since its fall, but survivors who reached the nearby town of Tawila told AFP of mass killings, children shot in front of their parents and civilians beaten and robbed as they fled.
“We are dealing with probably one of the most dramatic conflicts of our time,” Krahenbuhl said, pointing to attacks against civilians, “the extensive use of sexual violence” and the targeting of medical facilities.
- ‘Tip of the iceberg’ -
Krahenbuhl said Gaza’s destruction was beyond anything he had seen before, and warned that aid supplies remained woefully short.
“In the 25 or 30 years that I’ve been working in the humanitarian field, I have not seen that level of destruction,” he said.
“Not enough (aid) is coming into the Gaza Strip yet,” the ICRC official added. “What people need is, of course, far bigger than what we currently are able to deliver.”
The basic needs of Gazans are so immense “that what we are starting to do with improved humanitarian access is only the tip of the iceberg.”
The United Nations also warned this week that although aid had increased since the truce, humanitarian groups faced funding shortfalls and problems coordinating with Israeli authorities.
Separately, Krahenbuhl hit out at Israel’s order this week banning the ICRC from visiting Palestinians held under a law that allows for their indefinite detention.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said resuming the visits, which were suspended during the Gaza war, would “seriously harm the state’s security.”
But there was “no way in which our visits can pose a security threat or a national security threat,” Krahenbuhl said, urging Israel to lift the ban.
