The world’s largest humanitarian crisis is continuing to spiral in Sudan, where the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and its former ally, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), is poised to enter its fourth year. The impact on civilians has been severe. In a briefing to the United Nations Security Council on January 19, Nazhat Shameem Khan, the deputy prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), described a campaign of “widespread mass criminality” and characterized the situation as one of “collective torture.” The U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan released a report on Feb. 17 documenting RSF war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Now, new evidence is available about a specific set of international crimes carried out by the RSF. This morning, March 10, the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL) published a report that relies on remote sensing technology to establish a devastating pattern of RSF conduct in the vicinity of El-Fasher, Sudan between March 31 and June 12, 2024. The report draws on multiple data sources to expose the RSF’s systematic razing of agricultural communities, destruction of livestock corrals, and displacement or killing of inhabitants in the agrarian villages that are a critical local source of food for El-Fasher. During the 10 weeks under analysis, the RSF attacked, sometimes repeatedly, 41 rural farming communities on some of the most fertile land in Darfur. Together with the RSF’s denial of humanitarian access to El-Fasher (including through constructing an earthen wall to block entry and exit completed in October 2025) and targeting of markets and community kitchens within the city, attacks on agricultural communities and systems in the surrounding area formed a critical component of the group’s starvation strategy during the 18-month siege that culminated in the fall of El-Fasher on Oct. 26, 2025.

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On Feb. 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a war of aggression against Iran, in clear violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and customary international law, according to a consensus of international law experts with whom we agree. Iran responded with a series of unlawful attacks against States in the region.

In a piece published last week by Just Security, Professors Yuval Shany and Amichai Cohen suggested the U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran, and the notably mild or even supportive response by certain western States, reflects a general dissatisfaction with international law on the prohibition on the use of force. They suggest that international law must change to accommodate such States’ frustrations if a viable international legal order is to survive. We disagree.

There is no doubt that there are systemic and structural problems with the international architecture to respond to States that transgress international law. Yet, the inference of a general dissatisfaction with the substantive rules of the U.N. Charter is unfounded. For the overwhelming majority of the 193 Member States in the United Nations, the prohibition on the use of force remains evidently in their interests. Many have made this clear, with varying degrees of directness, in their responses to the current war. 

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In one of the most striking lines of the new International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary on Geneva Convention IV, the authors describe Article 23 — the treaty’s key provision governing the duty to allow the passage of essentials to civilians — as “significantly diminished” in importance in the contemporary context. Put simply, the law has moved on since 1949. This is important in no small part because Article 23, which is subject to several significant limitations and caveats, has been invoked to curtail as much as to ensure humanitarian access (and the delivery of essentials more broadly) in war. As the Commentary aptly implies, today, analyses that rely on the intricacies of Article 23 to defend the denial or limitation of humanitarian access are far more likely to mislead and obscure than they are to illuminate. With tactics of mass deprivation resurgent, the new Commentary’s clear position on this is a vital corrective.

Historically Important, But Deeply Flawed

Geneva Convention IV was the most innovative of the four conventions at the time of their agreement in 1949. In the three quarters of a century since then (and since the ICRC’s original 1958 “Pictet Commentary” the definitive ICRC interpretation of the Geneva Conventions led by Jean Pictet), the subject matter of the treaty has also undergone the most significant evolution in customary international law. Article 23 exemplifies both realities.

In 1949, it was a landmark in the restriction of weaponized deprivation — specifying, for the first time, a legal obligation to allow the free passage of certain essentials, namely those necessary for medical care, religious worship, food, clothing, and tonics, even in contexts of siege or blockade. And yet that advance was deliberately and severely limited. Article 23 defined the core obligations of access narrowly and supplemented them with gaping exceptions that threatened to swallow the rule. The Fourth Convention was significantly more demanding on related issues in contexts of belligerent occupation (Articles 55–62). But outside of that distinctive context, Article 23 was definitive. 

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In international diplomacy, economic sanctions are often portrayed as a clean and humane alternative to war, a supposedly civilised way to pressure governments into compliance with international law without shedding blood. Yet this reassuring narrative hides a devastating truth: sanctions can destroy the health and wellbeing of ordinary people. While they are intended to weaken regimes, they often end up crippling the targeted state’s ability to provide basic healthcare to the very citizens those measures claim to protect. The mechanisms meant to safeguard civilians and allow humanitarian aid frequently collapse, leaving the most vulnerable to pay the highest price for political decisions made far from their reach.

The result is a form of economic warfare that kills not through bombs or bullets, but through the slow erosion of health systems, medicines, and human dignity.

Our recent correspondence in The Lancet examines this reality in the context of the United Nations Security Council’s decision on September 28, 2025, to reimpose multilateral sanctions on Iran. In the piece, we do not take a position on the Security Council’s decision to reimpose multilateral sanctions; rather, our focus is squarely on the potential consequences of this move for Iran’s population, particularly given the severe health impacts seen under previous sanctions. Drawing on evidence from the pre-2015 sanctions period, our analysis in The Lancet shows how these measures shattered Iran’s health system and reveals a deeper structural failure within the international sanctions regime to protect the fundamental right to health.

Continue reading at aljazeera.com.

On Sept 28, 2025, the UN Security Council snapback under Resolution 2231 reinstated multilateral sanctions on Iran related to insufficient compliance in international oversight of its nuclear programme.1 This Correspondence does not take a position on the UN Security Council decision to reimpose multilateral sanctions. We focus on the implications of these geopolitical decisions for Iran's population, against the backdrop of devastating impacts on at-risk populations under previous sanctions.

Continue reading at thelancet.com.