GENEVA: The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Tuesday insisted on the organization’s neutrality and said criticism was making it increasingly hard to operate in the Israel-Hamas war.
The Swiss-based organization, founded 160 years ago to serve as a neutral intermediary between belligerents in conflict and to visit and assist prisoners of war, has been accused by both sides in the conflict of not providing adequate help to those being held hostage.
“The pressure we experience now in the context of Gaza and Israel is so much more than what we experienced a year ago on Ukraine and Russia,” ICRC chief Mirjana Spoljaric told journalists at a Geneva roundtable event.
But she said that abandoning neutrality and “adopting a practice of public denunciations is going to make us irrelevant.”
Spoljaric spoke after returning from a visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank last week, following a visit to Gaza in early December.
She met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who asked her to “place public pressure on Hamas” in a video of the meeting published on X.
“Public denouncements are not a tool that has proven effective,” Spoljaric said, adding that “it exposes us to a lot of criticism all the time.”
“With the high levels of mediatization and the impact of social media campaigns, combined with artificial intelligence, this criticism is becoming more problematic also for the security of our staff on the ground,” she said.
Spoljaric spoke of a recent deadly attack on an ICRC humanitarian convoy in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, which was due to evacuate more than 100 vulnerable civilians.
“What happens in Sudan is not unrelated to what’s happened in Gaza… We cannot in one context renounce on our neutrality a little or just once,” she said.
“Without neutrality, we wouldn’t be able to operate, without confidentiality… we wouldn’t be successful.”
The visit of the ICRC president to the region followed the outbreak of the bloodiest-ever Gaza war, which started when the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on October 7.
The militants killed around 1,140 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and abducted about 250, according to the latest Israeli figures.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says Israel’s withering military response has killed more than 19,660 people, mostly women and children.
Around a hundred hostages were released as part of a truce at the end of November, with several dozen transported in ICRC vehicles.
But instead of being hailed for its role in bringing out many of the freed hostages, the ICRC has been slammed on social media as a “glorified taxi service” or “Uber.”
Spoljaric called the comparisons “unacceptable and outrageous.”
The ICRC chief said talks to release more hostages and Palestinian prisoners had resumed in Doha, with the organization not involved in negotiations but facilitating as a neutral intermediary.
“Our conversations with Hamas, including my own, are very concrete, very detailed, very direct and ongoing on a daily basis. And the same happens with Israeli authorities,” she said.
Spoljaric also warned that despite support from donor countries, the Red Cross was on the verge of a “liquidity crisis” that is requiring a hard look at its staffing levels.
“It’s actually not a decline in donor funding that has caused the liquidity crisis, but it’s an increase in demand, because the business model of the ICRC is such that when a crisis happens, we go immediately,” she said.