Ladies and gentlemen,
Colleagues and friends,
It’s a great honour for me to speak today alongside Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland, the Geneva University Hospitals (HUG), the World Health Organization and the Canton of Geneva, on World Humanitarian Day 2026.
We were proud of the unanimous adoption of UN Security Council resolution 2286 ten years ago.
The resolution contained a historic commitment to protect health-care facilities and providers in times of armed conflict. It also recalled an obvious and crucial fact: hospitals, patients, health workers and humanitarian workers must never become targets.
Ten years later, that promise is faltering.
Attacks on health-care and humanitarian workers have reached deplorable new heights. The year 2024 was the deadliest ever recorded for humanitarian workers. More than a thousand have been killed in the past three years.
That’s one humanitarian worker killed every day on average.
Behind those numbers are faces, families and communities.
That such violence exists may not even be the most disturbing thing.
It’s the fact that we’re beginning to accept that violence, justify it, and normalize it.
Even the burden of proof seems to have flipped. Any attack on a hospital should be condemned with an immediate reminder of its protected status. And yet, we now see a different mentality emerging, with the hospital expected to prove that it was not sheltering combatants. As if an accusation could ever negate the need to protect patients and health workers.
And while some of us debate those principles, people are dying.
The human cost
This mural showing the resolution document riddled with bullet holes represents the gap between our principles and the reality on the ground.
In concrete terms, that gap means a surgeon may have to choose between continuing a procedure under bombardment or abandoning their patient.
It means surgery without anaesthesia, patients deprived of essential medicines, the fatal return of a chronic illness, and hospitals left without water or electricity.
These are not abstract concepts. They are an everyday reality for millions of people.
Our field hospital in Gaza, which should be a sanctuary, is regularly hit with gunfire. A 15-year-old patient named Ezedin was killed while inside.
Hospitals in Sudan are closing, leaving children and pregnant women without care.
In Yemen, health workers are risking their lives in facilities without power or running water.
In North and South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, medical staff have fled their posts under threat of attack, leaving thousands of patients without care even as the country is facing a new Ebola outbreak.
And Selydove Hospital in Donetsk had to be moved farther from the front lines to avoid being bombed.
These are not isolated incidents. They are what happens when the most fundamental protections are flouted.
Humanitarian workers are also paying a terrible price.
Thirty-two Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers and staff lost their lives in 2025. And 12 more have already been killed in violent attacks in the first half of 2026.
That’s 44 families who have received the worst possible news.
And when a health or humanitarian worker is killed, it’s not just one person who is lost.
Entire communities lose access to health care, protection, and hope.
A call to action
On World Humanitarian Day, we must reaffirm an essential truth:
Health care is not a privilege. It is a fundamental right. Health workers and facilities must be protected everywhere, without exception.
The law is clear. Hospitals, patients, health workers, and medical transports have special protection. Those rules are not optional. They are binding.
We at the ICRC reaffirm our commitment to defending them.
But we can’t do it alone.
States must translate their promises into action and ensure compliance with the rules they themselves have adopted.
Civil society must continue to bear witness and demand accountability.
And all of us must refuse to normalize this violence.
Solidarity and hope
We cannot accept that some lives are worth less than others. We must not take refuge in indifference.
Coming together here at this mural is a symbol of that commitment.
Taking action means choosing to see, name and condemn the unacceptable.
Upholding humanity doesn’t mean being naïve. It means having the courage to preserve what we’ve built and what binds us together.
Ten years ago, resolution 2286 affirmed that there are still limits in times of war.
Today, those limits are being severely tested.
It’s our responsibility to defend them and ensure they’re followed.
History won’t remember whether it was easy.
It will remember whether we were brave enough to act.
And whether we had the courage to remain human in the face of violence.
Thank you.
