International humanitarian laws introduced after World War II are under unprecedented strain, the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights has said in a new report.<\/p>\n
In the full glare of the world\u2019s media spotlight, Israel has been conducting its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza while the mass killing of civilians in Sudan has not stopped since the outbreak of that country\u2019s war in 2023. Violence is ongoing elsewhere \u2013 from Myanmar\u2019s civil war to conflict in Nigeria. Drone attacks targeting noncombatants have become commonplace in Ukraine while massacres of civilians across multiple conflicts continue, including in Ethiopia, Haiti, Myanmar, Yemen \u2013 all with apparent impunity.<\/p>\n
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The United States, historically the self-appointed world\u2019s police officer, is in retreat<\/a> and unwilling to uphold the humanitarian laws that for decades have provided some protection for civilians trapped in conflicts. That has left those laws under unprecedented strain around the world, the study<\/a> of 23 of the world\u2019s conflicts conducted by the academy concluded.<\/p>\n \u201cThe years 2024 and 2025 proved devastating to civilians with little evidence of willingness among warring parties to limit the barbarity inflicted upon the most vulnerable,\u201d begins the report, War Watch, which tracked breaches of international humanitarian law in the conflicts from July 2024 to December.<\/p>\n The Geneva academy is a joint initiative of the University of Geneva\u2019s Faculty of Law and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.<\/p>\n \u201cMurder, torture, and rape were widespread; civilians and their homes, schools, and hospitals were bombed regularly and sometimes systematically. Genocide \u2013 the intended destruction of a protected national, ethnic, religious, or racial group \u2013 was found by a United Nations Commission of Inquiry to have been perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza by Israel. In October 2025, the spectre of genocide was revived in Sudan,\u201d it said in the report, released on Monday, adding that while the threat to international humanitarian law was not yet existential, \u201cit is at a critical breaking point.\u201d<\/p>\n Few consequences<\/p>\n The academy\u2019s report cast the world in an unforgiving light. Over the reporting period, civilians were abused, dispossessed and slaughtered on an almost industrial scale, it said.<\/p>\n Beyond Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 71,000 Palestinians, the research noted the ongoing carnage of Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, where the killing of civilians is escalating as the conflict grinds on and more people have been killed in the past year than during the conflict\u2019s previous two years.<\/p>\n Rape and gender-based and sexual violence have been documented across a series of conflicts, from Sudan, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was accused<\/a> of massacring civilians in the western city of el-Fasher, to what the report called the \u201cepidemic\u201d of rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.<\/p>\n Drone attacks against civilians have become a defining feature in multiple conflicts while, in Myanmar, the military government was accused of continuing to attack civilians. In one village, the report noted, residents who had fled returned to find that the few neighbours who remained behind had been dismembered and their heads placed upon a fence.<\/p>\n All appeared to be taking place with few consequences for the perpetrators.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you don\u2019t sanction or communicate that there will be a sanction, illegal acts will continue,\u201d the report\u2019s lead author, Stuart Casey-Maslen, told Al Jazeera. \u201cGenocide isn\u2019t new. We saw evidence of genocide in [Sudan\u2019s] Darfur around 2004, but as one of the UN experts that helped launch the report pointed out, extermination is ongoing in multiple areas of Sudan. We\u2019re seeing gang rape being carried out by Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the street with impunity, and the US, which could bring pressure on the UAE [which is accused of but denies arming the RSF] isn\u2019t acting.\u201d<\/p>\n Decline<\/p>\n The strain upon international humanitarian law is not the fault of the US alone, Casey-Maslen said,\u00a0 Equally responsible were other actors, such as Russia, whose disregard for humanitarian law in Ukraine, the report\u2019s authors said, has become almost systematic.<\/p>\n However, few would doubt that the US\u2019s unquestioning support for Israel in its war on Gaza has gone a long way to undermining<\/a> the principles of the humanitarian law it had historically claimed to champion.<\/p>\n Through two years of unremitting war, Israel has been accused of targetting civilians<\/a> and engaging in torture<\/a>, including rape<\/a>, and the slaughter<\/a> of civilians, all with US support.<\/p>\n \u201cIt has been obvious for some time that international humanitarian law has been dying in front of us,\u201d said Geoffrey Nice, a human rights lawyer and former lead prosecutor in the war crimes trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. \u201cThere has been a time lag between those with prescience but no official responsibility pointing this out and governments with responsibility explaining it to their voters, but here we are.\u201d<\/p>\n US President Donald Trump\u2019s second term in office has made observers particularly worried about the future of international law as his administration makes clear it is willing to ignore key aspects of it and carry out acts that are at best dubious under international law, such as the abduction<\/a> of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.<\/p>\n And according to Nice, Trump\u2019s policy was already clear from his first term in office.<\/p>\n