ODI.org 10 June 2025~ Written by. Freddie Carver
Hero image description: A Palestinian healthcare worker wades through the destroyed remains of a pharmaceutical warehouseImage credit:A Palestinian healthcare worker inspects the damage to a pharmaceutical warehouse after it was targeted by Israeli warplanes in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip, in May 2025. Credit: Anas-Mohammed/Shutterstock
Over the next fortnight, crucial discussions will be made in Geneva and New York that will shape the future of humanitarian action, as United Nations (UN) agencies and donor governments try to agree a way forwards after the sweeping cuts of the first half of 2025.
A fight is underway: on one side, those who recognise that this has to be the moment for long-awaited change; on the other, those who are trying to hold on to past ways of working. For anyone still uncertain about the right path, all they need to do is to look at the situation in Gaza.
The failure of the international system in Gaza is nothing new: it stands as a rebuke to anyone who argues that we have to defend existing multilateral institutions at all costs as the only protector of universal human rights. Yet recent events bring into even sharper focus what is at stake. The establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is straight out of Naomi Klein’s ‘mirror world’: a dark reflection of existing arrangements, using the language and structures of the humanitarian sector but with such disdain for its norms that it exposes their emptiness more than ever.
More of the same? The humanitarian system must change
This is what it looks like when humanitarian principles are not just ignored, but annihilated. Aid as a purely private enterprise to provide profits to those in charge, while meeting the needs not of hungry and vulnerable citizens but of a genocidal government and its military. Civilians gunned down in their desperation, desperation caused by the very people firing at them. Humanity finally stripped away altogether.
What should anger anyone with an interest in humanitarianism most is that, while utterly horrifying, this isn’t as far removed from how the current system operates as we would like to believe. Ask the people of Tigray, Sudan or Myanmar how much their interactions with humanitarians have reinforced their own humanity. Ask refugees who have spent generations eking out their existence living in camps in unfit environments how different their experience is from those in Gaza, for all the focus on their so-called self-reliance. Such a system – one that has allowed humanitarian access to be defined by how many trucks oppressive governments allow to cross borders, rather than by the experience of those who receive aid – must ask itself serious questions at this time.
Putting people at the heart of humanitarian action
So what next? In Gaza itself, this must be a moment to return to the real ‘basics’ of humanitarian action. First and foremost, this means humanitarian-led and politically supported diplomacy: collective action to demand that politicians not only recognise the existence of International Humanitarian Law but actually start to act in accordance with it. Countries must challenge themselves as to the leverage they can exercise. Those with greater power and presence in global institutions – especially in so-called Global North states – should follow the lead of many Global South countries that have already spoken out, so that some form of accountability can start to take hold. And operationally, this is a moment for the multilateral system to demonstrate that it can meaningfully act as a protector of these norms: with the UN system creating the space for genuinely independent humanitarian action, willing to calling out abuses and constraints and centring not itself, but the people it is supposed to serve. We must place protection and justice at the heart of humanitarian action.
And for those in Geneva and New York, or making decisions about the future of humanitarian institutions in the coming months, the images from and experiences of people in Gaza must be front and centre. Now is the time, finally, to let go. To recognise that, ultimately, humanitarian action is not shaped by resources, but by power. If it continues to organise itself in ways that hold the power in centralised, top-down institutions, it will never be able to recognise the humanity of the people who are supposed to be at the heart of the system. Real solidarity requires us to meet people where they are, trying to survive through their own means and networks. We have plenty of data about what they want from humanitarian action: let’s finally try to listen to them.
Endnote: The term ‘Global South’ is a ‘geo-historical’ term used to connect regions and nations that have historically been exploited through colonisation (not [just] countries below the equator). While we acknowledge current debates that question the usefulness of this binary and homogenising term, we use it here to refer to a bloc that is diverse yet increasingly rebalancing power dynamics on the global stage in a multipolar world (Tant, E. and Ait Larbi, Y., 2024).
CVD 