Israel, Gaza and the challenge to humanitarians

2024 dawns, and the United Nations in Geneva is a strange place. First of all, the grand Palais des Nations is dark – the electricity and heating mostly off, in a somewhat desperate cost cutting measure by a severely cash-strapped organisation.

But adding to the gloomy atmosphere is something worse; a real sense of unease, distress even, among Geneva’s humanitarian agencies. Even before the dreadful attacks of October 7 and Israel’s furious retaliation, the UN and the ICRC were stretched to the limit, coping with ever more crises with ever less money.

The UN, appealing for cash to fund its work in 2024, actually asked for less money than it did for 2023, despite the ongoing war in Ukraine, and new conflicts in Sudan and the Middle East. The ICRC, in a bid to tighten an ever expanding budget, has announced 4000 job cuts.

Make no mistake, these cuts will hit some of the most vulnerable people on the planet; already UN agencies have had to reduce programmes, including food distribution in Afghanistan.

Polarisation and misinformation

In this week’s Inside Geneva podcast, we take a look at a different threat; hostility to the very idea of aid agencies, to the work they do, and the principles – humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence – that guide them. That hostility is being fuelled by the bitterly polarised opinions around the conflict between Israel and Hamas, but also by misinformation.

When, back in late October, the ICRC retrieved the first hostages from Gaza and delivered them home, the reaction from some in Israel was not relief, but anger. “Nothing but Uber drivers” is one of the less unpleasant accusations on social media.

When I put these criticisms to Fabrizio Carboni, the ICRC’s director for the Middle East, he accepts them without rancour. “I can take it,” he tells Inside Geneva. “I didn’t join the ICRC to increase my followers on social media.”

But, he admits, the ICRC’s tradition of confidentiality may lead to misunderstandings about what the organisation is realistically capable of. “People tend to believe we can do things that actually we can’t. I mean we have no army, we have no weapons.”

Confronted with accusations that the Red Cross had “failed” to visit hostages, Carboni points out that the ICRC has been asking to do so since October 7. But it doesn’t know where they are, and the entire Gaza Strip is an active war zone.

Visiting the hostages, supplying them with much needed medicines, taking proof of life to their desperate families, requires the agreement and cooperation of both Hamas and Israel. Without that, the lives of the ICRC delegates (at least one member of the Palestinian Red Crescent has already been killed) but crucially, of the hostages themselves, would be at risk.

“If we could release them all we would do it as soon as possible,” says Carboni. “If we could visit them we would visit them.”

‘I’m furious’

Our second guest on this week’s Inside Geneva is James Elder of United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). I talked to him just days after he had returned from Gaza, and I heard him, not mincing his words, tell UN correspondents in Geneva that he was “furious” at the level of suffering among children that he had witnessed.

The bombing and deprivation, he told me, had made the humanitarian situation “as desperate” as he had ever seen.

“I could objectively see and learn that many attacks were indiscriminate, and that the south was going to be battered just like the north” he said. “And safe zones had nothing to do with legal or moral safety. Those things created an anger.”

Two thirds of the estimated 22,000 dead in Gaza are thought to be women and children. Research published by the NGO Save the Children suggests that, since the conflict started, an average of 10 children a day in Gaza have lost one or both their legs. So if, like Elder, you have spent years working for an aid agency that seeks to support children caught up in war, perhaps it’s understandable that you are furious.

But, I ask him, in making his anger on behalf of Gaza’s children so very clear, is he neglecting the Israeli children in this crisis, some of whom were taken hostage? He admits that he has received some “hate mail”, but insists that for him, and for UNICEF “a child is a child”, and points out that he has regularly spoken out about the plight of Israeli children too.

“I will always still speak for those hostages, getting those children home. And that’s not to do that to placate any audience. That again speaks for a ceasefire, that is the right thing to do.”

We don’t take sides

Perhaps in this war more than any other, the polarisation of opinions means that many expect the aid agencies to take sides – to suggest for example that Israel is right whatever it does, and that Hamas is pure evil. Or vice versa. And that is precisely what aid agencies won’t and can’t do. That’s what Elder means when he says “a child is a child” – UNICEF is there to support children, whoever and wherever they are, and whatever their parents may have done.

Carboni, talking about the ICRC’s tradition of talking to all warring parties, puts it more bluntly. “We don’t need to like them. We don’t need to agree with them. We just need to agree that we are here for a humanitarian objective, and often a very humble humanitarian objective.”

It’s possible, he continues, for aid agencies to care about all those suffering in this conflict, Israeli and Palestinian. “One does not exclude the other. We’re not doing accounting.”

Those humanitarian traditions of impartiality and neutrality can be hard to understand if you have suffered terribly in a conflict. But they are there precisely because we need someone – independent of the warring parties – to try to help civilians affected by war. The more opinions are polarised, the more the humanitarian agencies are criticised, the harder it will be for them to do their work. And that’s why aid workers in Geneva are worried about more than just funding.

Listen to the latest episode of our Inside Geneva podcast and join host Imogen Foulkes to find out more about the situation in Gaza.

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