This World Humanitarian Day, we honor all who risk their lives every day for others under unthinkable circumstances.
Imagine a mother coming home after a long day of work.
Her two-year-old kid greets her at the door, holding a purple toy car, alongside her husband.
She lifts him up.
Now imagine that parent works in Gaza.
Because she does.
“I am trying to calm myself because I don’t want to go back home holding all these tragedies with me,” said 29-year-old Khloud Jwefil, an Oxfam aid worker in Gaza, shortly after arriving home one day last month.
“Because I want to go back home trying to care for my child.”
Why we celebrate World Humanitarian Day everyday
Today is World Humanitarian Day—a day to honor the humanitarian workers who show up for their communities in unthinkable circumstances across the world. Workers with families of all kinds, trying to ease suffering.
Humanitarian aid workers should never be a target of war. But the United Nations says at least 274 aid workers like Khloud have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank since the Gaza-Israel war began.
Khloud works with Oxfam partners to make sure that people in Gaza have access to lifesaving food, water, and hygiene kits in camps without any basic sanitation services. But the war makes delivering humanitarian aid a very dangerous exercise.
"Working in a situation where there is no ceasefire—where there is continuous bombing, continuous shelling over your heads while you are working...” she said. “For sure it’s really difficult.”
Why humanitarian aid workers do the work they do
Khloud calls and texts her family constantly. To make sure they are safe.
But the work must continue, she believes.
“We believe that humanitarian work is one of our responsibilities,” she says.
Every death of a humanitarian aid worker who has been killed while delivering aid is tragic, appalling, and inexcusable. This World Humanitarian Day, and every day, we remind the world: Humanitarians are #NotATarget.