Attachments
For much of the year, humanitarian access in Syria was constrained by ongoing armed conflicts, limiting the ICRC and Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC)’s ability to address needs. Despite this, we focused on long-term needs like restoring health care, livelihoods, water, and electricity for essential infrastructure. We also responded to emergencies, including displacement from Lebanon and national hostilities, by supporting hospitals, ensuring water access, and providing food and non-food items.
Confidential dialogue with authorities aimed to protect civilians and infrastructure under International Humanitarian Law.
As per the ICRC mandate, people deprived of their liberty were a key priority for the ICRC. We remain in touch with families of the missing, and along with the relevant authorities and actors concerned, we continue to seek all avenues to find answers to what has happened to their missing family members.
The events of the final weeks of 2024 brought unprecedented changes in Syria. Families went through moments of hope but also anguish and despair.
Syria remains a country with staggering humanitarian needs. An estimated 90 per cent of people live below the poverty line, over 7 million people are internally displaced, and essential services, such as water, health care, and food production, are operating at less than half of their capacity. Almost the entire population has been affected by over 14 years of crises, including armed conflicts, ever-degrading economic conditions, and natural disasters.
While reconstruction and development are desperately needed, humanitarian action will continue to be required in the interim period, in parallel with early recovery programmes.
Now more than ever, a collective Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement response is required, in close coordination with the wider humanitarian community, as well as the Syrian civil society and concerned authorities.