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.
In the full glare of the world’s 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’s war in 2023. Violence is ongoing elsewhere – from Myanmar’s 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 – all with apparent impunity.
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The United States, historically the self-appointed world’s police officer, is in retreat 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 of 23 of the world’s conflicts conducted by the academy concluded.
“The 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,” begins the report, War Watch, which tracked breaches of international humanitarian law in the conflicts from July 2024 to December.
The Geneva academy is a joint initiative of the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Law and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.
“Murder, torture, and rape were widespread; civilians and their homes, schools, and hospitals were bombed regularly and sometimes systematically. Genocide – the intended destruction of a protected national, ethnic, religious, or racial group – 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,” it said in the report, released on Monday, adding that while the threat to international humanitarian law was not yet existential, “it is at a critical breaking point.”
Few consequences
The academy’s 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.
Beyond Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 71,000 Palestinians, the research noted the ongoing carnage of Russia’s 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’s previous two years.
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 of massacring civilians in the western city of el-Fasher, to what the report called the “epidemic” of rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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.
All appeared to be taking place with few consequences for the perpetrators.
“If you don’t sanction or communicate that there will be a sanction, illegal acts will continue,” the report’s lead author, Stuart Casey-Maslen, told Al Jazeera. “Genocide isn’t new. We saw evidence of genocide in [Sudan’s] 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’re 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’t acting.”
Decline
The strain upon international humanitarian law is not the fault of the US alone, Casey-Maslen said, Equally responsible were other actors, such as Russia, whose disregard for humanitarian law in Ukraine, the report’s authors said, has become almost systematic.
However, few would doubt that the US’s unquestioning support for Israel in its war on Gaza has gone a long way to undermining the principles of the humanitarian law it had historically claimed to champion.
Through two years of unremitting war, Israel has been accused of targetting civilians and engaging in torture, including rape, and the slaughter of civilians, all with US support.
“It has been obvious for some time that international humanitarian law has been dying in front of us,” said Geoffrey Nice, a human rights lawyer and former lead prosecutor in the war crimes trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. “There 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.”
US President Donald Trump’s 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 of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
And according to Nice, Trump’s policy was already clear from his first term in office.
“For those paying attention, the first real sign was Trump’s speech to the UN during his first term when [in 2018] he withdrew from the Human Rights Council and expounded on a theme of sovereignty that seemed to evoke a kind of Westphalian world,” he said, referring to the principle in international relations in which each state retains absolute sovereignty over their own territory.
In the wake of his attack on Venezuela in early January, Trump went further still, telling The New York Times that the only constraint upon him was, not international law, but his “own morality”.
Outlook
Richard Gowan, the International Crisis Group’s programme director, said the report aligns closely with his organisation’s reporting from various warzones.
”Tragically, we see a growing number of armed groups targeting civilians in the knowledge that they are unlikely to face real political or legal penalties.
“There is a widespread sense that the laws of war are breaking down, and this is likely to lead to a vicious cycle in which combatants increasingly resort to atrocities to gain tactical or strategic advantage,” he said.
However, while international humanitarian law has been under unprecedented strain, its centre could still hold, Casey-Maslen suggested.
Organisations such as the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court still have a huge role to play in ensuring that the protections afforded civilians under humanitarian law are maintained as long as those organisations themselves are respected, funded and not regarded as a convenience.
Likewise, states that still cling to the idea of international law could still exert influence over how their allies behave, Casey-Maslen said, pointing to the relatively limited number of civilian deaths that Western-equipped Ukraine had been accused of causing in comparison with Russia. What is critical, he said, was to retain the value of international law for all.
