It says something troubling about our times that ballistic missiles receive more airtime than the slow deaths of children from hunger.
In doing so, a paradox unfolds: while headlines obsessively chronicle military manoeuvres and political brinkmanship, an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe plays out largely unnoticed, echoing Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil, as indifference quietly exacerbates global suffering.
In Gaza, as highlighted by the International Crisis Group and others, a humanitarian tragedy is unfolding — complex, deeply politicised and entangled in political dynamics.
Since October 2023, humanitarian access has been severely restricted.
The newly-established Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), created to distribute aid following the dismantling of the UN-led deconfliction mechanism, has become a symbol of the crisis: fortified hubs with biometric checkpoints, positioned across active conflict zones, offering insufficient calorie rations to people already debilitated by months of siege.
The optics suggest aid, the outcomes suggest control.
According to assessments by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), nearly a quarter of Gaza’s population is living in Phase 5 conditions — that is catastrophic hunger.
International law prohibits the use of starvation as a method of warfare.
Yet the strategic calibration of aid flows — tightening during periods of low visibility and easing slightly when famine alerts spike — raises urgent legal questions.
The GHF’s structure further entrenches this logic: Palestinians must navigate battlefields to reach controlled sites, with no access to basic services beyond dry food parcels.
Aid has become not only conditional but coercive, its denial or distribution shaped less by need than by geopolitical choreography.
This is not humanitarianism. It is managed deprivation, bordering on the instrumentalisation of human suffering for territorial and psychological ends.
The result is what might be called a doctrine of humanitarian coercion, that is subjugation not only by force but by hunger.
Beyond Gaza, the world bears witness to multiple silent crises.
A closer look at Africa, for instance, reveals the magnitude of need, vividly documented by organisations active in international cooperation.
The lack of coverage is not an accident; it is systemic.
Philosopher Judith Butler describes this in her concept of the "frames of war": the mechanisms by which some lives are rendered visible, grievable and worthy of intervention, while others are made invisible.
These crises do not receive less attention because they are less severe. They are neglected because they are politically inconvenient.
The calculus of global attention is brutally clear: airstrikes and fighter jets are simply more 'engaging' than drought-resistant crops or failing field clinics.
The aesthetics of power attract coverage. The architecture of vulnerability does not.
Yet in the midst of this neglect, communities resist.
Women in Mozambique replant drought-resistant crops. Local health workers in Niger improvise mobile clinics under tarpaulin roofs. What they lack is not resilience, it is backing. And that absence of political solidarity speaks volumes about the hierarchies of global attention.
The Iranian-Israeli conflict further underscores the dangers of a world order unmoored from legal restraint.
Following Israel’s offensive strikes against Iranian military targets, the US joined the fray with a series of high-impact bombings targeting Iranian nuclear facilities. The legal justifications have been vague, contested and will at best be retroactively constructed.
International law, as codified in the UN Charter, allows for self-defence only in cases of an actual or imminent armed attack. Pre-emptive strikes based on projected threats certainly make a thorough discussion necessary.
Both Israel and Iran have invoked Article 51 to justify their actions. Yet legal scholars remain divided, and the consequences are not just academic. Each new erosion of the law’s clarity weakens the normative foundation on which civilian protection rests.
When International Humanitarian Law becomes a matter of interpretation rather than obligation, it ceases to function as a restraint mechanism. The precedent risk is real. Others may observe what is tolerated here and replicate it elsewhere.
We are not drifting into disorder. We are driving into it, eyes wide open.
But this is not merely a descent. It is a reconfiguration. The dismantling of norms and the erosion of institutions do not represent chaos in the classical sense; they represent a new architecture of power, one where legal ambiguity becomes a tool of strategy. This is not the collapse of the international system but the emergence of a post-legal geopolitics, where perception trumps principle and might reshapes what is deemed right
Meanwhile, global military spending continues its upward spiral — $2.7 trillion [€2.31 trillion] in 2024—a 9.4 percent increase from the previous year, marking the steepest rise since the Cold War, while humanitarian appeals go underfunded, with organisations forced to ration life-saving interventions.
According to the Global Humanitarian Overview 2025 — now followed by a 'hyper-prioritised' emergency appeal launched mid-June by OCHA — over 180 million people are targeted for assistance, while less than 13 percent of the required funding has been received halfway through the year. And yet, the institutions designed to help them are overburdened, obstructed and under attack.
This moment demands more than moral outrage. It requires strategic reorientation. We must pivot from the illusion of security through militarisation to the reality of security through human resilience. That means investing in health systems, local agriculture, education and conflict prevention, not because it is altruistic but because it is rational. Because a world where millions are pushed into hunger and displacement is not sustainable, not governable and ultimately, not secure.
Humanitarian aid and development cooperation must no longer be seen as discretionary. They are critical infrastructures of global stability. And they must be defended, not only in budgets and policies but in the narrative frameworks through which we understand power and responsibility.
Yes, the warnings must stand. If we do not act now, we risk entrenching a world defined by perpetual crisis and institutional decay. We will look back and realise that the great undoing did not come through one single war or disaster but through accumulated silences, overlooked deaths, and missed opportunities.
But there is also another path. Around the world, people — often with limited means — are building peace, resisting despair and stitching fragile hope into the fabric of their communities. They do not lack courage. They lack backup.
The alternative to escalation is not naïve pacifism; it is strategic humanism. It is the recognition that human dignity is not a soft value but a hard requirement for any enduring order. And it is the commitment, from each of us, to stop looking away.
Because the world will not change through spectacle. It changes when we stop looking away.
This year, we turn 25 and are looking for 2,500 new supporting members to take their stake in EU democracy. A functioning EU relies on a well-informed public – you.
Lukas Wank is the director of global responsibility at Austria’s platform of 38 NGOs working in international development and humanitarian aid.
Lukas Wank is the director of global responsibility at Austria’s platform of 38 NGOs working in international development and humanitarian aid.