IHSA Conference 2024 Archives

IHSA Annual Lecture Reflection: Counting the dead won’t save lives: looking beyond humanitarian disaster in Sudan

By ISS Blog Bliss 4 February 20253 February 2025 1231 views

In this blog, Munzoul Assal, Professor at the universities of Khartoum and Bergen, and Scholar at risk the Chr Michelsen Institute provides an in-depth discussion of the long-term crisis and instability facing Sudan. He argues that in order to reach a better outcome for Sudanese people, we must look beyond the numbers and immediate outcomes of various atrocities and concentrate too on their origins. This contribution was given as a reflection upon the first Annual IHSA Lecture that took place in Bergen, Norway, in May 2024, and is part of a series around the theme ‘War and Humanity’.

A deeply divided country across multiple lines

Sudan has gone through decades of civil wars and political instability. Wars of competing visions have developed into wars of attrition. Wars are first fought in people’s minds before being taken to the physical battlegrounds. For decades, Sudan has suffered from an identity crisis, which to me is the root cause of wars in the country. There are of course triggering factors, and uneven development is one of them.

Divisions such as Arabs versus Africans, Christians versus Muslims, ‘Patriotists’ versus ’Traitors’, etc. have dominated political discourse in post-independence Sudan. The different ruling elites, military and civilian alike, pursued policies of “unity in conformity” instead of “unity in diversity”. It has been held that the Sudanese should conform to an Arab and Muslim identity when in fact the country is quite diverse in terms of religion, ethnicity, climate, and livelihoods systems! Persons deemed not conforming to Arab and Muslim identity are alienated or discriminated against in different ways in public institutions or at best considered outliers. Media institutions, too, do not reflect the rich diversity characteristic of Sudan.

As early as the mid-1950s, people in the South, Eastern Sudan, and Darfur raised objections to the state’s policies that marginalize peripheral areas. The first war started in 1955, one year before independence, and continued for 17 years. It was ended by the Addis Ababa Agreement in 1972 and there was relative peace for 10 years. War started again in 1983 and before it was put to an end by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in 2005 between the government and Southern Sudanese rebels, war then started in Darfur. And the rest is history. But not quite so!

Competing narratives to frame the current conflict

It does not make a lot of sense to talk about death and destruction in Sudan as results of the current war that has been raging for over a year and a half. That is what wars are about anyway. Since the start of the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, about 11.7 million people have been forcibly displaced within Sudan and to neighboring countries. In Khartoum alone, 61,000 persons were killed. The total number across the country is 150,000. Death, displacement, and destruction of infrastructure should alert us to look beyond these numbers. Wars have their own histories that need to be narrated.

When this current devastating war started in April 2023, the Sudanese society had already been divided along ethnic, regional, and religious-ideological; in addition to political divisions that cut across other divisions. Competing narratives are used to describe the current war, such as:

This is a war between two armies: the RSF reneged on its commitments and wanted to seize power unconstitutionally,
This is a war between a regular army and a militia,
This is a war between those who want to see Sudan transition to democracy and those who want dictatorship,
This is a war between Western Sudan and Riverine Sudan,
This is an external invasion supported by the UAE,
This is a war orchestrated by the Islamists who used Sudan Armed Forces to get back to power,

Social and conventional media are the platforms in which these competing narratives are debated. Heated exchanges between political antagonists take place in these platforms leading to the prevalence of hate speech. The widespread looting and killings carried out by the RSF, and the indiscriminate bombing carried out by SAF, plus ethnic targeting and profiling undertaken by SAF’s military intelligence and security services compound the dire humanitarian situation and deepen interethnic hostilities.

Linking competing narratives to historical conflict

The discourse that portrays the war as conflict between Western Sudan and the rest of the country is entwined with middle class predilection of linking the current war to the Mahadist period (1881-1898) that witnessed widespread atrocities in central Sudan. This narrative ethnicizes the war and emphasizes divisions fed by post-independence political failures including uneven development, discrimination, and marginalization of peripheral areas in Sudan, like Darfur, South Kordofan, and the Blue Nile. These areas are currently active war zones and witness deteriorating humanitarian conditions.

It is ironic that the most vocal segments of the Sudanese society (the privileged, educated middle class who have access to media outlets and the international community) about atrocities and the worsening humanitarian situation are the same people who contribute to the reproduction of violence through hate speech, calling for the elimination of foes, and resisting calls for stopping the war. Yet, there are those who are working hard to confront this dire situation. In fact, the humanitarian discourse although prevalent in the Global North’s media is developed in places like Sudan. For instance, much of what comes in the media is provided by first responders and emergency rooms that cater for the immediate need of victims in the war zone. It is important to look at the situation beyond numbers. Addressing the factors behind atrocities is no less important that tackling their consequences.

The deepening humanitarian situation makes everybody suspicious about everybody else. Neighbors do not trust each other, and people accuse each other of being snitches. When SAF recaptures an area from the RSF, it arrests, tortures, and kills those accused of being collaborators with the RSF. The targeting is on ethnic basis. When the RSF occupies an area, it targets those allegedly collaborating with SAF or Islamists loyal to the former regime of President Omer El-Bashir. These types of atrocities do not find their way to the media because revealing them would defeat the narratives of those behind them. Again, these acts widen ethnic cracks and contribute to worsening humanitarian conditions.

From humanity’s perspective, the top priority is to save lives and serve survivors of atrocities. This is work that must continue, but saving lives can be realized better by contributing to addressing the causes of atrocities, and not only by counting the dead. For Sudan, the tragic situation is not dealt with candidly at the present time. There is reporting about the deteriorating humanitarian situation, but the talk about numbers, relief, and justice sweeps the issue of societal rifts under the rug. Perhaps something needs to be done here and now to uncover these rifts and their impacts.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Author

Munzoul Assal is professor of social anthropology at the universities of Khartoum and Bergen, and a scholar at risk at the Chr Michelsen Institute. His research areas include migration and refugee studies, conflict and peace building and citizenship. He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

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IHSA Annual Lecture Reflection: Reconsidering ‘humanitarian values’, shifting the power, and who’s knowledge matters

By ISS Blog Bliss 21 November 2024 1631 views

In this blog, IHSA Board Member and Humanitarian Practitioner (CARE) Carla Vitantonio considers the role of decoloniality, power structures, and humanitarian values. In order to truly affect a ‘decolonial turn’ within the humanitarian sector, it is necessary to first reconsider humanitarian principles, who’s knowledge matters, and the need to transform the discussion into a pluralist discourse. This contribution was given as a reflection upon the first Annual IHSA Lecture that took place in Bergen, Norway, in May 2024, and is part of a series around the theme ‘War and Humanity’.

Source: Lane Hartwell ,Wikimedia Commons

“War and humanity”. Before attending the first IHSA annual lecture I interrogated myself on how I could contribute to this debate. I am a humanitarian professional, and in the past years I have been increasingly engaged in the debate around the decolonization of our sector. The focus is usually especially on resources: the colonial matrix of power has not changed, and resources are still placed in the hands of the so called global north, and we need a shift to a more equitable system. We praise the various attempts to achieve this. The most famous is perhaps the Pledge for Change, led by Adesso and joined by some of the biggest Northern INGOs. But at the same time, I, and many like me, are asking ourselves: is it possible to shift the power and the resources, without changing the full structure? It is the same question that some decolonial movements asked their own governments: are we decolonizing, or are we simply de-westernizing our structure? Are we not keeping the system as it is, by simply choosing a different elite to govern us?

And so, while many are rightly working on a shift of power and resources, some ask: what about the principles, the theory behind the full humanitarian structure? What about the knowledge that informs our sector?

Reconsidering humanitarian values: decoloniality, independence, and universality

My personal belief is that to ignite a decolonial turn in humanitarian action we also need to look at our principles. My generation of humanitarian professionals grew with the assumptions that the humanitarian principles were the unconfutable base of our job: all our action needs to be based on humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality.

The only accepted debate was around the principle of independence, increasingly questioned by those NGOs that rejected some important funding or pulled out of an emergency response in the name of their independence. The NGO MSF did it twice: pulling out of North Korea in 1998 and renouncing its EU funding in 2016 due to EU interference in the Syrian migration crisis. But otherwise, humanitarian principles were considered universal.

The problem when concepts are considered universal lays often in ‘the who’. Who considers them universal? Usually in our case, a full class of humanitarian professionals and scholars, all educated in institutions located in the Global North, or located in the South but replicating the North’s structures.

The “universalization” of certain knowledge is one form of coloniality of knowledge. It is one of the outcomes of the oppression perpetrated through colonization. The knowledge imposed as universal was in reality created by the dominant European Culture, with other forms of knowledge subjugated.

This assumption shaped a fictitious epistemological hierarchy, and affected all realms of life, from education to governance. Humanitarianism as we know it today was shaped by and in the Global North, and as such it was proposed/imposed as a universal solution to certain problems in the world. This Global North is composed of the same countries that colonized, oppressed, and often contributed to create the issues that humanitarian actors are trying to alleviate.

The limits of humanitarian principles: staying neutral in the face of atrocity

We see the limits of the humanitarian principles in the application of some of them in certain contexts. In 2017/2018, when the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar started, I was the country director for an INGO involved in humanitarian response. I participated into all relevant meetings, especially to those extraordinary meetings organized in the first month after the genocide started.

While hundreds of thousands of people were obliged to flee, many of them dying during the night because of assaults on their houses, and others dying on their way to Bangladesh, many of us were meeting and honestly concerned by the impossibility of providing humanitarian assistance while staying “neutral”.

The flag of humanitarian principles and their “universality” creates an illusion of being neutral. This neutrality is a mirage of coloniality. Neutrality entails the assumption that we, the humanitarian workers, are able to extract ourselves from the context, that we look at the world on fire from somewhere above. This is a manifestation of the Eurocentric belief that we don’t belong here, that we belong somewhere better. This ‘somewhere better’ is sometimes physically embodied by the places where we meet and debate. But as soon as we step into the context we are the context, we have an impact on the context, we change the context. And here we have the great support of all the decolonial and feminist scholarship that drive us to understand that we need to find a solution to the illusion of neutrality, because our locus of enunciation matters.

Could we find solutions to this? If we want to approach this issue from a decolonial perspective, we should not only tell the story in a different way, but we should start telling a different story. In other words, perhaps shifting power and resources within the actors of a structure that remains unchanged is not enough.

A new pluralist discourse

Today the humanitarian discourse is still highly controlled by the hegemonic narrative of certain Global North actors and organisations. As it has been said by many, we need to transform the humanitarian discourse into a pluralist discourse. What does it mean? It is not easily done but I have two suggestions: the first is to look at the deep implications of the Do No Harm approach (DNH), which is at the core of humanitarian action and acknowledges the agency of those we are going to support. Looking at DNH from this perspective and not from a purely procedural and bureaucratic one (accountability) is already a step forward, because it helps reflexivity (reflecting on our own positionality).

A second suggestion is that we open spaces where we talk about the consequences of this assumption of universality, linked to the supposed neutrality of humanitarian action. Spaces within our own organizations, spaces that we can consider safe. We need to talk about this, among practitioners, but I dare saying, above all among donors.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Author

Carla Vitantonio has worked in the humanitarian sector in multiple positions for over 20 years, including as a country director and subject expert for organisations like Handicap International, CARE and OI. Carla has coordinated humanitarian responses and programmes in Cuba, North Korea and Myanmar, and has researched alongside universities including the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the European University Institute. She is the author of “Living decoloniality” a podcast focused on practices of decoloniality in the NGO sector. She was elected as an IHSA Board Member in 2022.

IHSA Annual Lecture Reflection: Starvation crimes, network shutdowns, and obstacles to humanitarian action in Gaza and Sudan

By ISS Blog Bliss 31 October 2024 1929 views

In this blog, IHSA Vice-President and Senior Research Fellow at the Food Studies Centre at SOAS (University of London) Susanne Jaspars summarises and expands upon a contribution to the roundtable that followed the inaugural IHSA Annual Lecture on “War and Humanity” held in Bergen in May 2024. The blog was prepared with the help of Tamer Abd Elkreem and information gathered from their research project on the effects of digitalising food assistance.

Starvation as a crime against humanity

For about a year now, there’s been talk about imminent famine- and now famine – in Gaza and parts of Sudan, with very little action. In this blog post, I discuss starvation as a war crime and crime against humanity, what can be done in practice to act on starvation crimes, and why blocking communications networks needs to be seen as such a crime.

War causes famine through acts that undermine the means of survival of particular population groups. This includes acts of commission such as attacks on production, markets, restriction of access for humanitarian actors, and the obstruction of relief. Also acts of omission such as failures to act in response to warnings or signs of famine, and acts of provision: the selective provision of food to one side of the conflict. These tactics can be part of counter-insurgency operations but also yield benefits for some. For example from being able to sell food at high prices and buy livestock at low cost, or use cheap labour from displaced populations.

Extreme famines are therefore the result of political acts or decisions (local, national, international), meaning we need to understand: Who committed the famine? How was it committed and why? Who were the victims? Who was involved? In contrast to famine, a crime is not ended, but criminals are deterred, detained, prosecuted.

Legal frameworks such as International Humanitarian law (IHL) and International Criminal Law (ICL), specify starvation as a crime: ‘It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population […] for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance … whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive’. The crime of starvation includes wilfully obstructing humanitarian aid. The term “objects indispensable to survival” includes more than food, encompassing water installations and supplies, irrigation works, medicine, clothing, shelter, fuel, and electricity. There is no pre-defined list as items indispensable to survival are evolving and context dependant.

Also, in 2018, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 2417 which condemns the use of starvation as a method of warfare against civilians and emphasised that it may constitute a war crime. I would like to discuss this a little further, in particular:

How does reporting and accountability for starvation crimes work in practice?

The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) report twice yearly to the UN Security Council (UNSC) on Resolution 2417. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) can also write closed White Papers to the UNSC and individual donors (like FCDO or the EU) too. But how is this being operationalised?  What and how are FAO and WFP reporting?  What are some of the obstacles? 

Consider the February 2024 FAO/WFP report to the Security Council on Gaza and Sudan – which is remarkably apolitical. The report states the facts on displacement, impact on food systems, and obstruction of humanitarian access, and then what is prohibited under IHL. However, these are mostly passive statements such as:

‘Unprecedented levels of conflict-induced displacement … have occurred.’
‘Civilian infrastructure has been damaged (water, fuel, electricity, bakeries, farms)’
‘Conflict has halted production, prices have increased’
‘Humanitarian aid has been restricted’
‘Hostilities have led to telecoms blackouts’

War seems to almost be external to people’s economies or society, something neutral. Using the passive tense to describe acts of war and its effects removes politics and responsibility. This is exactly the opposite of what is needed to understand starvation crimes.

What’s not in the report is who is causing starvation and who should be held to account (although there are some exceptions about Israeli actions in Gaza – e.g on the effect of evacuations without putting adequate infrastructure and services in place). Yet, Sudan has a long history of aid manipulation and since April 2023 there is evidence of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) denying access to humanitarian aid, and of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) looting, destroying farms, and recruiting forces by threatening starvation. This presents an intensification of the long-standing extractive political economy, and involves regional and international actors. Note that exports of gold, and livestock are continuing and crude oil exports were higher in December 2023 than in the previous year.

The recommendations are all clearly needed but bland: restore humanitarian access, pressure warring parties to adhere to IHL, have an independent investigation. With UN organisations reporting, how could it be otherwise? A focus on starvation crimes was supposed to put the politics back into famine analysis. But can UN resolution 2417 do it? Questions remain on who should be reporting starvation crimes (states? resistance movements? activists? students?) and who should act on it.

The South Africa case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) sets an important precedent, in particular the amendment to the provisional measures in March 2024: to take all necessary and effective measures – without delay – for the provision of humanitarian assistance, in response to reports of famine and starvation. Since then the International Criminal Court (ICC) is seeking a warrant for the arrest of Israeli leaders, in another unprecedented move, for war crimes of starvation. Even with these high-level actions, the crimes continue.

In contrast, on Sudan there is mostly inaction. While starvation and genocide in Gaza is played out daily on our television screens, such reports on Sudan are rare. Recent warnings of famine, and statements by UN experts, have had little impact except to pressure warring parties to come to power-sharing agreements rather than holding them to account.

Communications networks as objects indispensable to survival

Of course, much of the lack of action in response to Sudan’s crisis is due the prioritisation of geopolitics and economic interests over humanitarian response and – ultimately – stopping the war. Sudan’s invisibility is also a result of blocking and manipulating communications networks and connectivity. Most societies are digitalised, meaning that people are increasingly dependent on connectivity for their day-to-day activities or – in the case of Sudan – their survival. Connectivity becomes important in relation to starvation crimes because:

Blocking communications networks hides information on violations of human rights and humanitarian law.
Internet shutdowns disrupt social networks, remittances, food systems.
Third, network shutdowns also block aid provision, not because it hinders the coordination, information and security of aid organisations, but aid itself is increasingly digitalised: pre-paid debit cards, electronic vouchers, and mobile money.

In Sudan, the Bankak App from the Bank of Khartoum has been a lifeline since the start of the April 2023 war because it could be used to transfer of money to crisis-affected people and local organisations. From early February, however, the RSF disabled all internet providers. Soon after, Starlink Satelites were introduced in RSF-held areas, which ordinary people pay to use for internet connection but which were brought in and managed by the RSF. As such, control over communications has become a way of denying services and resources to the enemy, life or death for ordinary citizens, as well as a new way of profiteering. It also illustrates the moral dilemmas of providing aid in conflict and the challenges of reporting on famine crimes. This does not mean we stop calling out starvation crimes, but rather highlights the importance for humanitarians to analyse famine as a political scandal that requires global as well as local action.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Author:

Susanne Jaspars is a Senior Research Fellow at the SOAS Food Studies Centre. She has been researching the social and political dynamics of food security, livelihoods and forced migration in situations of conflict, famine and humanitarian crises for more than thirty years. Susanne’s geographical focus is has been mostly Horn of Africa, specifically Sudan and Somalia with shorter periods in the Middle East, where she has worked as practitioner and researcher. She is currently the PI of an ESRC funded project entitled: ‘Digitalising food assistance: Political economy, governance and food security effects across the Global North-South divide.’ More information about Dr. Jaspars can be found on the SOAS website.

“The principle of humanity in war’’: a reflection on the IHSA Annual Lecture 2024

By ISS Blog Bliss 17 October 2024 1622 views

In this blog, Andrew Cunningham (Independent Humanitarian Practitioner and Board Member of the International Humanitarian Studies Association, IHSA) considers the principle of ‘humanity’ during conflict, and its interaction with other key humanitarian principles including neutrality, impartiality, and independence. He also looks at how humanitarians can integrate dignity into their work, and how these principles may develop in highly politicised and fast-moving times. This blog summarises a contribution to the roundtable that followed the inaugural IHSA Annual Lecture and is part of a series of blogs produced following the Lecture, which took place in Bergen in May 2024 under the theme of “War and Humanity”.

The principle of humanity is often overlooked when we talk about the humanitarian principles. Focus is normally placed on the ‘big three’ principles – impartiality, independence, and neutrality. The most important of these is impartiality, which is the promise of non-discrimination and lack of bias in aid provision. The idea is to help those most in need regardless of who they are. Impartiality is a central and required aspect of humanitarian’s identity.

Independence, which allows aid organisations to make their own choices outside political interference, is also a foundational principle and facilitates the adherence to impartiality. The promise made by independent humanitarian aid organisations to host governments and non-state actors is that they make their own decisions and are not political tools of foreign governments.

More problematic, and much debated, is the principle of neutrality, which at its core demands that aid organisations do not become involved in political controversies. But some organisations (for example MSF) view it as a limitation on witnessing, speaking-out, and public communications. Do aid organisation have the right, or even obligation, to affect the political situations which lead to humanitarian crises?

But at the top of the list is the principle of humanity. Humanity is the collection of humans, some have the ability to help others, and some are in need of help. For, humanitarian action is simply humans helping other humans in need. Humanity is also a term which denotes a set of characteristics which must be preserved, such as the dignity of the person and a whole set of ‘human’ rights. This may all seem self-evident, yet it is worth reflecting on this lest we stop grounding what we do in the basics.

Humanity, dignity, and solidarity

Dignity is a consequence of attending to the humanity of those caught in a crisis. We all want to be treated with dignity at all times, of course. But those caught up in conflict are even more starved of dignity as their isolation, sense of abandonment, and fear of violence grows.

Humanitarian action doesn’t always do the best job at attending to the dignity of the individual, as so often masses of people are affected by war and are engaged with by organisation as populations. One way in which people in danger can be afforded dignity is the proximity of aid workers to those being assisted. No one wants to ‘feel like a number’ and be just a recipient of material aid or a beneficiary.

A feeling of human solidarity is also important, as this example of my work in Chechnya shows: After several years working in Chechnya during the last war, I was checking-in with the staff at a hospital we had long been supporting. We had been providing a lot of medical supplies and I was asking about its usefulness. But the chief doctor stopped me at a certain point and said that yes, the material aid had been needed, and appreciated. But that was not the most crucial factor. In turns out that not being forgotten, being treated with dignity by people who cared, was the most important aspects of our intervention. Solidarity can be seen as a mix of caring enough to help and being willing to share a moral, if not always a physical, space, with those caught-up in a crisis.

Does digitalisation lack humanity?

One way in which humanitarian aid may be diverting from this idea is through the ‘digitalisation’ of aid delivery. No one wants to only deal with an app on their smart phone or be forever linked to a set of biometrics which defines one’s aid category. There is more to aid than this transactional way of providing it. Proximity to human aid workers is vital to reinforce a person’s sense of dignity. In the search for efficiency and greater outputs (as opposed to outcomes), have we gone too far? Is there still room for the proximity of humans helping other humans? And where is the locus of dignity in this version of aid?

Wars provide a difficult terrain to navigate. The threat of violence to aid actors as well as those living in the crisis makes being proximate hard. The chief doctor I mentioned above had not been visited for quite some time by anyone form my organisation due to the violence in the area. But yet he knew we were sill ‘there’.

Conclusion

Let us return to the principle of humanity which is the highest order principle from which everything else is derived. Impartiality helps guide our operational choices – who we help and why. And independence and neutrality are ways of working which help provide the space to work. Together these all help make state and non-state actors comfortable with our motivations.

At its essence, we should never forget that humanitarian aid is humans helping humans, which requires proximity, dignity and solidarity. We should all remind ourselves periodically of the importance of the principle of humanity as the foundational humanitarian principle.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew has thirty years’ experience in the humanitarian sector, twenty-five years of which with MSF. Andrew has worked in a wide variety of contexts and geographical locations in Africa, the Former Soviet Union, and Asia. He has a PhD in War Studies from King’s College and has published a professional book in the Routledge Humanitarian Studies series on the topic of INGO-State relations. Andrew has served as a member of the Board of MSF International and is currently a board member of the International Humanitarian Studies Association. Andrew works as a researcher, strategic and operational evaluator, and governance advisor for various humanitarian organisations.

War between successive peoples is considered a moral evil, and indicates an increasing collapse of the values of human rights and law

By ISS Blog Bliss 3 October 2024 1947 views

The International Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA), held its inaugural Annual Lecture on 23 May at the Literature House in Bergen, Norway. The lecture was given by Khaled Quzmar, General Director of Defence for Children International: Palestine (DCIP), and was held in collaboration with the Rafto Foundation and WAR-FUN project at the Chr Michelsen Institute in Bergen.

As the first part in a blog series to mark the lecture, IHSA Coordinator Tom Ansell has put together this blog in collaboration with Khaled Quzmar. It starts with an interview and is followed by the key points from Quzmar’s lecture.

How important is it that we see accountability for military crimes in the current Gaza war (especially in light of the indictment of the Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister for war crimes by the ICC)?

‘The decision of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to indict is an historic decision par excellence. We have been waiting for this since 1948 and later since 2014: after the entry of ICC jurisdiction over Palestine. It is a first step to achieving accountability for the international crimes committed by the Israeli army against Palestinians over many years.

‘Whilst the indictment did not address all the crimes committed against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it is a symbolic message. It has a legal and political dimension indicating the possibility of no more immunity for criminals and no impunity for violence against Palestinians in the future.’

With ongoing atrocities in Gaza, there is likely to be a collective trauma amongst Palestinians. In your opinion, how might it be possible to re-humanize this conflict and the people in it once direct military action has ceased?

‘In my opinion, the civilian population in the Gaza Strip has been under a racist colonial military occupation since 1967, and the people have been refugees for 76 years. For the last 17 years they have lived under a strict military siege from land and sea, and under direct bombardment. Since the beginning of the Israeli military operation in 2024, they have cut off water, food, medicine and electricity, and destroyed homes and infrastructure. In this situation the civilian population do not expect justice, they just want the aggression and killing to stop.

‘The Israeli military and authorities need to treat people in Gaza as human beings that are part of society. People with the right, like other peoples of the world, to self-determination and to live in dignity, security and safety without occupation.

‘[After a ceasefire has been called] massive interventions will be required to provide all the necessities of life and to enable the population to enjoy human rights according to international law. Work will also be needed to help rid children of the psychological issues resulting from the aggression and deprivation of the last 230 days on top of the siege of the 17 years before that.’

In your role as Director of DCI-Palestine,you have direct experience of the importance of humanitarian organizations. What is their importance in the current conflict, and how can children’s rights in particular be safeguarded?

‘The work of human rights and humanitarian organizations is very important in order to help the victims and provide some services and assistance to them. But they also work to preserve hope for future generations, especially children. We are aware that the Israeli occupation wants to kill the hope of children and youth. Our work is to help victims build their capabilities in accordance with international law. Working as human rights defenders is to preserve hope and aspire to a better future and a just peace free of occupation and crime.’

The IHSA Annual Lecture 2024: ‘War and Humanity’

‘Human scientific efforts have been put towards generating ever-more deadly weapons, and conflicts are now most often settled militarily, rather than diplomatically; conflicts are no longer resolved through moral reason and law, nor through political negotiations, but through wars with well-organized armed forces.

‘Warring parties target civilians and civilian infrastructure as a weapon of war: war is no longer limited only to the battlefield. The different types of weapons and the killing, destruction and atrocities targeting the civilian population are now more prolific than ever before. It takes successive generations to overcome the results and consequences of war, to rebuild what was destroyed and provide the necessities of life.

‘The various legal and judicial efforts to enshrine the value of humanity in times of war have a number of shortfalls. Given that humanity is the opposite of war, human dignity requires the peaceful settlement of conflicts between and within societies. Individuals and groups should be treated in accordance with human rights standards. They have the right to live in peace and their human rights should be protected through legal systems and international human rights standards. Commitments within and between communities should be permanently respected.

As the war on Gaza continues to unfold, Israeli forces (and Hamas) have violated international humanitarian law – including the fundamental right to life, the massive destruction of infrastructure and a growing famine in the territory – many times. Their rights infringements include administrative detention for civilians in the West Bank, including children and a lack of information about detainees in the Gaza strip.

There is a significant issue here with double standards, especially when we look at the refusal of Israel to follow decisions made by the International Court of Justice. If International Humanitarian Law is to be upheld, it must be upheld by everyone, regardless of their international alliances.

‘It is now time to activate the international accountability system by stopping the policy of impunity, eradicating hypocrisy and double standards, in order to reach a world free of wars, where justice and humanity prevail.

We cannot have a “two-level” system of international law and accountability. States and warring parties should not be free of their international obligations, especially around protecting civilians and the most vulnerable. If we fail to uphold standards within this war, we may find far-reaching repercussions in the future.’

The 2024 IHSA Annual Lecture was followed by a roundtable discussion on the theme of ‘War and Humanity’. The next blog in this series will include the contributions from expert panellists from that discussion.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Authors:

Khaled Quzmar has worked with Defence for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), since 1985. He is a lawyer by training and profession, and as part of his work with DCIP he has represented hundreds of children held in arbitrary detention, tortured and otherwise mistreated by the Israeli government.

DCIP as an organization works on documenting human rights abuses, advocacy and campaigning on the right to a childhood. The organization also works within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including with the Palestinian Authority, on child protection, education and access to justice. For their work on protecting the rights of children, Khaled Quzmar and DCIP were awarded the 2023 Rafto Prize.

Tom Ansell is the Coordinator of the Humanitarian Studies Centre and International Humanitarian Studies Association.