The courage that refuses to look away
On August 19, 2003, a truck bomb tore through the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, the UN’s headquarters in Iraq, killing 22 people, including the gifted diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. Five years later, the UN General Assembly turned that tragedy into an annual reminder: humanitarian work is not safe, comfortable, or thankless in the abstract - it is dangerous, specific, and carried out by people with names and families. That is why World Humanitarian Day matters.
In a world numbed by the scale of suffering — Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the slow-moving disasters of climate change — humanitarian workers are the ones who still walk towards the wreckage rather than walk away from it. They are proof that decency has not been argued out of existence. In an age of cynicism about institutions, the aid worker distributing vaccines in a flooded village or negotiating a ceasefire corridor for food trucks offers something rarer than optimism: evidence.
This year’s UN campaign, #ActForHumanity, captures that plainly - humanity is not a slogan; it is a practice, renewed daily by people who choose it under fire. Yet the record now being set is not one to celebrate. The UN reported 390 aid workers killed in 2024, the highest toll ever recorded, and humanitarian groups warn 2026 is set to be worse still, with more aid workers coming under attack — killed, injured, kidnapped, or detained.
Palestinians account for close to a fifth of all aid workers killed since records began. Impunity compounds the crisis: attacks go uninvestigated, perpetrators unpunished, and humanitarian access is increasingly treated as a bargaining chip rather than a legal obligation under international humanitarian law. Reversing this requires more than tributes. Warring parties and states must be held to the Geneva Conventions’ protections for humanitarian personnel, with credible investigation and prosecution of attacks, not just condemnation.
Humanitarian access needs to be negotiated as non-negotiable, insulated from political leverage. Funding - chronically underpaid and precarious — must shift towards predictable, multi-year support so organisations can retain trained staff rather than burn through them. And local responders, who absorb the greatest risk and know their communities best, deserve a far larger share of both resources and decision-making power than the current aid architecture gives them.
India’s own experience offers a useful counterpoint to despair. From Operation Dost’s medical teams in earthquake-hit Turkey and Syria in 2023, to Operation Brahma in Myanmar and Operation Sagar Bandhu’s rescue of over 2,500 citizens and treatment of 2,200 patients after Cyclone Ditwah in Sri Lanka in 2025, to Operation Amistad’s earthquake response in Venezuela this year, India has steadily built a reputation as a first responder abroad — backed at home by the NDRF’s disaster machinery. Indeed, humanitarian capacity, built patiently, becomes a form of soft power rooted in something sturdier than diplomacy alone.
