States must act to protect Civilians in Armed Conflict by OCHA, ICRC, Inter-Agency Standing Committee 10:23am 21st May, 2026   20 May 2026    Statement by Principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC)    Protecting Civilians in Armed Conflict is a Responsibility that Member States and the UN Security Council Must Uphold:    "As the Protection of Civilians Week unfolds in New York, we strongly condemn and raise the alarm about the growing and blatant violations of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law meant to protect civilians in armed conflict.    Across conflicts, civilians, including children, are killed, injured, and displaced at an alarming scale. Sexual violence is used as a tactic of war, overwhelmingly affecting women and girls and devastating lives. Homes, schools, places of worship, hospitals, including maternal wards, are destroyed or damaged, as are civilian infrastructure and assets, such as water systems, transport network, markets, food production. Essential services are collapsing. Forced displacement is accelerating.    Conflict-induced hunger and famine are spreading, often driven by unlawful siege tactics, starvation, and the arbitrary denial of humanitarian access. This is happening despite the existence of clear obligations under International Humanitarian Law and the framework reaffirmed by UN Security Council resolution 2417 (2018), which condemns the deliberate starvation of civilians and the use of hunger as method of warfare.    And a decade after the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 2286 (2016) that demands the protection of the wounded, sick, and medical personnel, violence, attacks and threats against healthcare workers and facilities continue with impunity. More than 10,000 incidents against health care facilities and workers have been verified to date.    Aid workers are also under attack and killed in unprecedented numbers. More than 1,000 humanitarian colleagues have been killed over the past three years. Many others are arbitrarily detained. Often the first to respond, staff from national and local organisations and community initiatives pay an unacceptably high toll. Many women-led-organisations addressing lifesaving protection and gender-based violence are being attacked.    From Gaza to El Fasher, and from Kharkiv to Beirut, the use of explosive weapons in populated areas is devastating civilian lives. At the same time, new technologies, including drones and artificial intelligence, are reshaping warfare and expanding the battlefield.    Wars have rules that apply to all parties to conflict. The problem is not a lack of law. The problem is the failure to uphold them consistently, the erosion of accountability and inaction, even in the face of atrocities.    Protecting civilians is a legal obligation and a moral imperative. For the sake of our shared humanity, rules that protect civilians must be upheld.    http://interagencystandingcommittee.org/inter-agency-standing-committee/statement-principals-iasc-protecting-civilians-armed-conflict-responsibility-member-states-and-un http://www.unocha.org/news/un-heads-condemn-failure-protect-civilians-growing-threats-their-security    20 May 2026    Briefing to the UN Security Council on the protection of civilians in armed conflict - by Edem Wosornu, Director, Crisis Response Division for OCHA, on behalf of Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator:    "One civilian was killed approximately every 14 minutes in 2025. These are only the deaths that the United Nations could document across 20 armed conflicts. We know the real toll is far higher in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Sudan, in Ukraine, in the occupied Palestinian territory and beyond.    I saw some of this devastation myself over the past year during my visits to countries affected by war.    Civilians, including children, are killed in their homes, in markets, at work, at school, on roads, and while fleeing for safety. All too often, they are not collateral damage. They are the target.    Explosive weapons continue to tear through towns and cities, destroying not only lives but the systems that sustain them such as power grids, water networks, schools, and hospitals.    Health care is under attack. Ten years after this Council adopted Resolution 2286 on the protection of health care in armed conflict, the situation has only gotten worse.    In 2025, the United Nations recorded more than 1,350 attacks on medical care across 18 conflicts. Hospitals and ambulances were hit. Medical personnel were killed, detained, intimidated, or criminalized simply for doing their jobs.    Conflict‑driven hunger has deepened. 147 million people faced acute food insecurity in 2025, driven largely by armed conflict. Two famines were confirmed – not because food was unavailable, but because of the way parties conducted hostilities, used siege tactics, and denied humanitarian access. Food has become a weapon of war.    Sexual violence remains widespread. The United Nations reported over 9,300 cases last year – the overwhelming majority women and girls – many of whom will struggle to get the basic assistance they need. We know that number unfortunately is much higher.    Children are abducted and recruited to fight. Too many are injured and killed – a direct result of the use of explosive weapons in densely populated areas. Information and Communication Technology, including social media, is used to abduct, to extort, and recruit children.    Journalists are targeted. According to UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 186 journalists were killed while covering wars and conflict zones between 2022 and 2025 – a 67 per cent increase compared to the period 2018-2021.    Persons with disabilities are left behind when bombs fall and warnings fail.    Last month, the Emergency Relief Coordinator, Tom Fletcher, briefed this Council on attacks against humanitarian workers. Since then, eight more colleagues were confirmed killed in 2025. Already in 2026, 144 humanitarian workers have been reported killed, injured, abducted or detained as they try to serve those in need.    New technologies are intensifying these risks. Armed drones and artificial intelligence are accelerating the pace and reach of violence, often in densely populated areas. The use of drones increased by 4,000 per cent from 2020 to 2024 across conflicts. The impact is not only physical. The impact is psychological – constant fear, constant disruption. The consequences for children are alarming.    None of this is inevitable. These patterns are the result of choices. The choice by parties of conflict to ignore their obligations to protect civilians, and, too often, to target them.    The choice by some to adopt increasingly permissive interpretations of international humanitarian law, hollowing out the very rules designed to protect civilians during war. The choice to subordinate the protection of civilians to claims of military necessity or exceptional threat. The choice to let impunity prevail.    The choice to harness technology to increase lethality, sow devastation, and spread misinformation, instead of using it to better protect civilians.    And the choice to attack the United Nations Charter, humanitarian norms, and the tools built over decades – that extraordinary scaffolding meant to protect people from and during war.    My message to this Council and to the United Nations membership is simple: there is another path. Other choices are possible. They must be made. They must be made because protecting civilians, ensuring respect for the law, and ending impunity is not only a legal and moral obligation.    It is also in Member States’ shared interest. In a world where conflicts are rising and rearmament is accelerating, unrestrained force and unapologetic brutality do not make anyone safer. They put everyone at risk.    Those who believe war will never reach them, their families, or their people are living in a dangerous illusion. War does not respect borders. It does not respect privileges.    So, the law exists. The tools exist. What is needed now is the resolve, the leadership, the courage, and the moral clarity to hold the line and to push it forward.    Protecting civilians requires more than expressions of concern. Protecting civilians requires genuine commitment that translates into concrete action. To uphold the United Nations Charter and prevent disagreements from escalating into armed conflict.    To ensure respect for international humanitarian law, without exceptions, without selectivity, regardless of who the parties are. No reinterpretation. No exceptionalism. No double standards.    To avoid the use of explosive weapons in populated areas and call out those who raze entire cities to the ground. To stop the transfer of weapons when there is a clear risk they will be used against civilians. To safeguard medical care, humanitarian personnel and journalists; not stigmatize them, not criminalize them.    To keep human control over the use of force. To steer AI and technology toward greater, not lesser, protection of civilians. To help victims seek justice. And to end impunity.    Protecting civilians in armed conflict is not charity. It is the minimum that humanity and civilization require. It is central to peace and security.    It is a responsibility of this Council and of every Member State that signed the United Nations Charter. And it is what many people around the world expect the Member States of the United Nations to do. It cannot be outsourced, it cannot be postponed, it cannot be diluted. It is the choice we have to make, now.    http://www.unocha.org/news/ocha-tells-security-council-protecting-civilians-cannot-be-outsourced-postponed-or-diluted http://www.unocha.org/news/over-1000-aid-workers-killed-often-hands-member-states-un-relief-chief-demands-action    20 May 2026    Speech given by Mirjana Spoljaric, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, at the UN Security Council Open Debate on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict. (Extract):    "Wars fought without rules transform wars between combatants into wars against civilians.    In recent weeks, I have undertaken several missions to the Middle East, where the impact of conflict on civilians is painfully clear. But brutal patterns of warfare are becoming pervasive across regions from the Middle East to the Horn of Africa, to eastern Europe, and beyond.    We can no longer pretend that what we are witnessing across war zones is in accordance with the law. Not the scale of destruction. Not the scale of suffering. And not the language being used to justify it.    When leaders direct their militaries to act without restraint, when they label their enemies as sub-human, when they threaten entire populations, they do more than incite war crimes. They threaten to destroy the moral foundations of what it means to be human.    Across history, dehumanization has been a consistent precursor to atrocity. Indiscriminate killing, torture and abuse become far easier to justify when we stop seeing others as equal human beings.    But what happens when brutalizing rhetoric becomes the baseline? It gives your enemy the green light to do the same. The real-world consequences are horrific and undeniable. Entire territories reduced to rubble and hospitals destroyed, patients killed. Aid workers and medics repeatedly targeted. These are the IHL violations that happen in plain sight.    Others happen in the shadows, in jail cells, detention centres and interrogation rooms far from public scrutiny. In the extreme power imbalance between a person in a cell and those holding the keys, moral boundaries can easily collapse.    In too many conflicts, people behind bars are stripped of any shred of their humanity. They are recast as less than human and therefore unworthy of fair treatment or trial. They are robbed of their identities and are at risk of vanishing, as records of their whereabouts are destroyed. Dehumanization is not limited to captured combatants; civilians deprived of liberty are often subjected to similar abuses.    Deliberate cruelty does not happen by chance. There is no such thing as accidental torture or abuse. It is the product of a system designed to rationalize acts born from a disregard of the law and military strategies designed to irreversibly destroy.    The Geneva Conventions are clear that in international armed conflicts - including occupation - prisoners of war, civilian internees and detainees have a right to be visited by the ICRC. We monitor their treatment and conditions, keep them connected with their families and help prevent them from going missing.    Despite states’ obligation to allow ICRC visits, our access is denied or severely restricted in far too many instances today – a dangerous erosion of the norms that risks harming not only people behind bars today, but also tomorrow.    For many people living through war or under occupation, the feeling of imprisonment is not confined to places of detention but extends to daily life. Today, the future of millions of civilians across the world is shackled by a level of destruction that erases their homes and livelihoods, that severs them from their land, that denies them basic human dignity.    Armed conflict does not happen in a vacuum. Where politics fail, wars follow. It is time to invest genuinely in the lasting resolution of conflicts, and not only the cursory management of them.    I call on leaders to make international humanitarian law a political priority. We cannot succumb to a political culture that erases the lessons born out of world wars, out of the ashes of mass destruction and genocide.    It is up to you, as members of the Security Council, as members of the United Nations General Assembly and as State Parties to the Geneva Conventions, to change course".    http://www.icrc.org/en/statement/icrc-president-un-security-council-open-debate-protection-civilians-armed-conflict http://www.icrc.org/en/statement/icrc-ifrc-world-red-cross-red-crescent-day-call-uphold-protections-civilians-medical-personnel-humanitarian-workers-communities-depend-on    18 May 2026    Civilian Protection in 2026: The Deadly Convergence of Advanced Technology and Ancient Warfare Practices    This advocacy note was developed by the Global Protection Cluster (GPC), with contributions from its inter-agency Advocacy Working Group (AWG). It highlights several pressing trends impacting the Protection of Civilians (PoC) across crisis contexts where Protection Clusters are active.    These trends reflect a deadly mix of ancient methods of war considered unlawful under international humanitarian law (IHL), including the use of siege and conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), and modern means including advanced technologies, particularly the use of armed drones.    How such dynamics are driving expanding levels of harm must be taken into account with a renewed push for increased compliance with IHL, strengthened accountability of duty bearers and protection-centered response, from high-level humanitarian diplomacy to community-based protection on the frontlines. The note aims inform discussions during the Protection of Civilians Week.    With grave violations of IHL inflicting increasingly widespread and acute levels of harm on civilians, the opportunity to renew and strengthen actions and accountabilities to protect civilians is urgent.    * The Global Protection Cluster (GPC) is a network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations and United Nations (UN) agencies, engaged in protection work in humanitarian crises including armed conflict and disasters.    http://globalprotectioncluster.org/publications/2474/communication-materials/advocacy-note/poc-advocacy-note-civilian-protection-2026    May 2026    Joint Civil Society Statement Ahead of the 2026 Open Debate on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict - Center for Civilians in Conflict, agencies.    As Member States prepare for the May 2026 UN Security Council Open Debate on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, civilians continue to bear the brunt of hostilities. Parties to conflict kill, injure, and displace civilians, deny humanitarian access, target humanitarian workers and violate international humanitarian and human rights law with near-total impunity. In 2025, one in six people on Earth was exposed to armed conflict.    By mid-2025, an estimated 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide and 363 million faced acute hunger. UN-verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence and grave violations against children have surged to record highs. Attacks on hospitals, schools, water systems, and other civilian infrastructure have become commonplace.    These harms are not inevitable. They reflect persistent failures by parties to conflict to comply with international humanitarian law, compounded by the failure of Member States and international institutions to act and hold violators accountable.    Protection of civilians is ultimately shaped by political choices – especially those of States and members of the Security Council – and by the persistent failure to hold all parties to the conflict, including non-state armed groups, accountable. Norms and tools exist. What is absent is consistent compliance, political will to enforce them, and accountability for those who violate them. Compliance with international humanitarian law, while indispensable, is only the starting point.    It is precisely against this backdrop of rising violations and collapsing accountability that the international community is conducting a sweeping reset of humanitarian funding, UN structures, and peace operations. Humanitarian funding fell by roughly 25% in 2025, even as global military spending reached record levels.    Climate change is compounding these pressures, driving displacement, resource competition, and conflict in already fragile contexts. Ongoing UN and peace operation reforms, combined with reduced resources, are reshaping how protection is delivered and raising urgent questions about how responsibilities will be funded, shared, and sustained.    Protection of civilians must not become the collateral damage of this institutional reconfiguration. The reform moment is not separate from the protection crisis; it is directly shaping it. The value of any reform must be judged by a single standard: whether it strengthens protection outcomes in practice. Any reform that weakens the ability to prevent, mitigate, document, or respond to civilian harm is not an efficiency gain. It is a failure, measured in lives.    The harms of conflict are not experienced equally. A civilian’s identity – including their gender, age, disability, displacement status, or ethnicity – shapes the specific risks they face and must be central to protection analysis and response. Women, children, youth, persons with disabilities, older persons, LGBTIQ people, displaced persons, and other marginalized groups face specific and compounded risks, including sexual and gender-based violence, exclusion from lifesaving services, barriers to evacuation and assistance, and long-term social and economic harm.    Funding cuts, reduced field presence, and the weakening of specialized capacities have already worsened outcomes for those most at risk. Further reforms that compound these losses will deepen that harm. At a minimum, states should ensure that reforms preserve and strengthen civilian harm tracking, monitoring and reporting, investigative capacity, and avenues for civilian-centric redress and remedy. A system that further reduces its ability to attribute and address harm, confront impunity, or protect civilians from the foreseeable effects of military operations is not adapting responsibly to current realities.    Reforms will fail if they are designed without those closest to the harms they are meant to address. Civil society organizations, local peacebuilders, and affected communities play indispensable roles in early warning, documentation, community-based protection, and accountability.    Local actors are the first to respond and the last to leave – yet they are increasingly expected to do more with fewer resources, without access to duty of care systems, and at greater personal risk.    A reconfigured UN system must not offload responsibility and risk onto local actors under the banner of localization, without quality financing especially at a time when attacks against aid workers are on the rise. Meaningful, safe, and sustained engagement with diverse civil society must remain a core protection safeguard.    As states and institutions adopt new technologies, those tools must reinforce – not replace – existing legal obligations and operational protection commitments. Technologies linked to artificial intelligence do not reduce states’ obligations under international law, nor substitute for field presence, community trust, or accountability. Systems deployed for the use of force must remain under clear human responsibility and be subject to transparency, oversight, and accountability. States must also address the role of digital technologies in enabling civilian harm, including disinformation, incitement to violence, and the misuse of data and AI systems.    The choices being made today on mandates, resources, technologies, and institutional architecture will determine whether civilians in armed conflict receive the protection they are owed under international law and by the basic obligation of humanity.    At the center of those decisions must be the civilians most affected, supported by the resources they need and the action they are owed..    http://civiliansinconflict.org/press-releases/joint-civil-society-statement-ahead-of-the-2026-open-debate-on-the-protection-of-civilians-in-armed-conflict/ Visit the related web page
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