War crimes are among the gravest violations of international law, committed in armed conflicts across the world. They include the deliberate targeting of civilians, torture, mass executions, sexual violence, the use of banned weapons, and attacks on humanitarian or medical infrastructure. From Ukraine to Gaza, Myanmar to Sudan, civilians continue to pay the highest price in today’s wars. The Explosive Weapons Monitor has reported tens of thousands of civilian casualties from explosive weapons, with a significant rise in recent years. Over 60 percent of these casualties in 2024 occurred in Gaza. Ukraine, Myanmar, and Burkina Faso are also among the worst-affected regions. Attacks on hospitals, schools, refugee convoys, and marketplaces, many captured on video, often amount to war crimes under international humanitarian law.
Mass atrocities continue to unfold in Africa. In Burkina Faso, government forces have been accused of committing mass killings of civilians, including children. Sudan’s ongoing civil war has resulted in countless war crimes committed by both state forces and paramilitary forces, including sexual violence, massacres of civilians, torture, and summary executions. In Myanmar, the military has bombed houses of worship, schools, and hospitals, killing thousands in indiscriminate airstrikes. In the occupied Palestinian territories, repeated bombardments and blockades have caused thousands of civilian deaths and the destruction of hospitals, UN shelters, and entire neighborhoods. One particularly deadly incident on February 29, 2024, where Israeli forces opened fire on civilians waiting for food aid, is now referred to as the “Flour Massacre,” and drew global condemnation.
Drone warfare has also escalated. In Kherson, Ukraine, Russia has used commercial drones to deliberately attack civilians, with videos recorded by Russian forces acknowledging that they are purposely targeting civilians. These attacks have resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties and prompted calls for investigations by the International Criminal Court. Despite clear documentation, impunity remains widespread. The International Criminal Court and UN bodies have opened multiple investigations, but justice is slow and accountability rare.
Currently, over 110 armed conflicts are active around the world, and nearly 120 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced, an overwhelming number of them civilians fleeing war crimes.
Shiler Sido was born in Afrin, in the olive-covered hills of northern Syria, where 95 percent of her neighbors were Kurdish, and a fragile experiment in pluralism briefly took root. Then came 2018, Turkey’s Operation Olive Branch, and what she describes not as counter-terrorism but as demographic engineering: 18 million olive trees felled, 10,000 homes…
Israel has betrayed the very values that made the Jewish people the world’s conscience for millennia—values forged in our own persecution, meant to bind us forever to the defense of the persecuted. Instead, from the occupation of 1967 to the genocide now consuming Gaza and Israel’s inhumane crimes against the Palestinian people in the West…
Authors: Dr. Wioletta Rebecka, Alain Bayongwa, Aline, Anita Bizimana Espérance, Aziza Aimerance, Bulonza, Bahati Balingene, Charline Kihuo, Diane Kahindo Feza, Esther Faida Feza Josephine, Furaha Joyeuse, MunYerekana Kahiro Collette, Nabintu Angela Nabintu Mulume Josline, Naomi Sharon, Noella Sekola Esther, Nshobole Muderhwa Pascaline, Plamedi Mapendo Marie, Sanganire Anne Marie, Sarah Chance / Bénédicte, Sintia Chance Solange,…
More than a decade after ISIS’s genocide against the Yazidi people, Iraq has begun compensating Yazidi survivors. But justice requires far more than financial support. Introduction On 3 August 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS, also known as ISIL or Da’esh) launched a coordinated attack on the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, home to much of…
Introduction One of history’s most troubling paradoxes concerns the Jewish people. For nearly two thousand years, Jews experienced persecution, expulsions, pogroms, discrimination, and ultimately the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered. Yet within a few decades of establishing Israel, many observers came to view the Jewish state as responsible for the dispossession, occupation,…
More than three decades have passed since the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo. During this period, important legal and political changes occurred. Survivors of conflict-related sexual violence who were largely ignored in the immediate post-war years gradually achieved legal recognition through sustained advocacy by survivor groups, women’s organizations and human rights institutions….
Israel’s international standing has undergone a profound and arguably irreversible transformation. Once regarded, despite criticism, as a flawed democracy grappling with complex security threats, Israel is increasingly perceived as a pariah state—isolated not only because of its adversaries, but because of its sustained conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. This shift is not the…
The West, led by the Trump administration, has enabled the Netanyahu government to commit crimes against humanity and became complicit in the unfathomably horrific disaster that is being inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza The war in Gaza has crossed many red lines, rendering Palestinian lives worthless, trivial, and of no consequence. Much of the…
The ongoing civil war in Sudan is tragic, but the greater tragedy is that if the international community sits on its hands and does nothing to stop this horrific war and prevent further escalation of the conflict, it will come at an unfathomable price The human toll of Sudan’s civil war, now in its third…