UNITED NATIONS (AP) — More than 1,000 humanitarian workers have been killed across the globe in the past three years, nearly triple the death count in the previous three years, the U.N. said Wednesday.
“This is not an accidental escalation — it is the collapse of protection,” U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the U.N. Security Council.
Of the more than 1,010 humanitarian workers killed from 2023 to 2025, he said, more than 560 were in Gaza and the West Bank, 130 in Sudan, 60 in South Sudan, 25 in Ukraine and 25 in Congo. That compares with 377 killed from 2020 to 2022.
The surge in deaths occurred during the war between Israel and Hamas, which began in October 2023. A ceasefire has been in effect since October 2025, although shootings and airstrikes have persisted.
Last year alone, Fletcher said, at least 326 aid workers were recorded as killed in 21 countries. In 2024, a record 383 were killed in global hotspots while distributing food, water, shelter and medicine.
“They died in clearly marked convoys and on missions coordinated directly with authorities,” the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs said.
The Security Council was meeting on a resolution it adopted in May 2024 that strongly condemned attacks on humanitarian workers and U.N. personnel and demanded that all combatants protect them in accordance with international law.
Fletcher asked the 15 members of the U.N.’s most powerful body if the killings were because international law “is no longer convenient” or because “it is more important to protect those designing, selling, supplying and firing lethal weapons?”
“Or is it because member states see these numbers as collateral damage, part of the fog of war? Or worse, are we now seen as legitimate targets?” he asked. “Perhaps the most chilling question: If these deaths were ‘preventable’, why then were they not prevented?”
Fletcher said humanitarian staff are not only being killed but “restricted, penalized and delegitimized” — and told where they can’t go and whom they can’t help.
In Yemen, as a prime example, 73 U.N. staff and dozens of others working for nongovernmental organizations are being arbitrarily detained by Houthi rebels, Fletcher said.
In Afghanistan, female humanitarian staff are banned from doing their jobs, he said. In Gaza, Israel restricts the U.N. and other international organizations, and in Ukraine drone attacks have forced aid workers back from the front line.
“These trends, alongside the collapse in funding for our lifesaving work, are a symptom of a lawless, bellicose, selfish and violent world,” Fletcher said.
He challenged the U.N.’s 193 member nations to uphold the 2024 resolution’s demands to protect humanitarian workers and ensure accountability for crimes against them.
