AFP and AP

The newspaper La Jornada
Tuesday, August 20, 2024, p. 21

New York., The United Nations Organization (UN) yesterday denounced the violence inadmissible which killed 280 aid workers in 2023, a record driven by the war in Gaza and which threatens to be surpassed in 2024.

The normalisation of violence against humanitarian workers and the fact that no one pays for it is unacceptable and extremely dangerous for humanitarian operations around the world.said Joyce Msuya, acting head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in a statement on the occasion of World Humanitarian Day.

Dear world leaders, what more is needed for you to do something?he snapped.

In Gaza, Sudan and many other places, humanitarian workers are attacked, killed, injured and kidnapped. We demand an end to impunity so that those responsible can be held accountable.UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres posted on X (formerly Twitter).

The deadliest year on record for humanitarian workers was 2023. Honouring them on World Humanitarian Day is not enoughhe insisted.

According to the Aid Worker Security Database, 280 workers in 33 countries perished last year.

This is 137 more than in 2022 (118 killed), OCHA said in a statement, which uses figures from the Aid Worker Security Database, a database created in 1997.

Most of them in Gaza

More than half of these deaths (163) were recorded in Gaza during the first three months of the war between Israel and Hamas, mainly in air strikes.

South Sudan, the scene of inter-communal violence, and Sudan, where two rival generals have been at war since April 2023, were the other two deadliest conflicts for humanitarian workers, with 34 and 25 deaths respectively.

The UN marks World Humanitarian Day on 19 August, the anniversary of the 2003 bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad. Twenty-two people were killed, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN representative in Iraq.