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The Depths of Our Inhumanity
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. In Ethiopia, Haiti, Myanmar, Ukraine, Yemen, and the many other situations of armed conflict described in this report, serious violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) were wrought against those whom the law was supposed to protect on a huge scale and with rampant impunity. 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, twenty years after the Janjaweed’s crimes in Darfur, by that group’s progeny, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), exterminating ethnic Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa in the aftermath of its capture of the city of El Fasher. While the threat to IHL is not yet existential, it is at a critical breaking point.
The Content of the Report
This report summarizes in twenty-three profiles the major armed conflicts in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas that occurred between 1 July 2024 and 31 December 2025 and their impact on civilians. Only situations of armed violence that amounted to an armed conflict under international law are covered (see Text Box 1 for details of the law). Most of the conflicts described below began before July 2024, but a few were short-lived, notably the international armed conflicts between Iran and Israel and between Iran and the United States in June 2025, or have since ended. One situation – the violence between the authorities in Haiti and the Viv Ansanm gang coalition that controls Port-au-Prince – is identified as an armed conflict for the first time. This classification means that serious violations of IHL by any party must now be treated – and prosecuted – as possible war crimes.1 Each of the twenty-three profiles details the classification of the salient armed conflicts; multiple conflicts may run in parallel in a single State. Recorded and reported violations of IHL are summarized in three main sections – attacks on civilians (anyone who is not a member of the armed forces); attacks on civilian objects (eg homes, hospitals, or schools); and the treatment of detainees and others who fall under the control of a party to an armed conflict. The manifold serious violations of IHL described, however, are no more than illustrative of the plethora of war crimes perpetrated during the report’s eighteen-month reporting period.
