OVER 1,000 aid workers have been killed while carrying out humanitarian missions in the last three years, the UN reports — almost triple the number in the previous three-year period.

More than half, 560, were killed by one country — Israel — in illegally occupied Palestine.

UN humanitarian and emergency relief under-secretary Tom Fletcher, a former British diplomat, told the UN security council that of 1,010 humanitarian workers killed from 2023 to 2025 (up from 377 from 2020-22), 560 were killed in Gaza or the West Bank, 130 in Sudan, 60 in South Sudan, 25 in Ukraine and 25 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The surge in deaths has accompanied Israel’s genocidal invasion of Gaza from October 2023, along with accelerated ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, as well as the brutal civil war in Sudan, which erupted in 2023 when the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which had collaborated to seize power from civilian revolutionary authorities in 2021, turned on each other.

Mr Fletcher said that last year alone 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 co-ordinated directly with authorities,” he said.

Human Rights Watch is among organisations accusing Israel of deliberately bombing aid convoys, even though it is provided with their co-ordinates to ensure they are kept free from harm.

Another is Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which is among 19 organisations challenging an Israeli ban on it operating in Palestine because of its refusal to comply with a new law ordering it to provide personal details of all its staff.

“In Palestine, medical and humanitarian workers have been intimidated, arbitrarily detained, attacked and killed by Israel. Therefore, without the necessary assurances that safeguard our staff, MSF will not share a list of our Palestinian staff with Israeli authorities,” the group said last month in an update on its petition to Israel’s Supreme Court — adding that the law itself was “designed to obstruct humanitarian assistance by banning principled, independent and experienced organisations, therefore cutting off lifesaving care, with devastating consequences for people in Palestine.”