New IHL in Focus Report – A Global Legal Assessment of Serious IHL Violations
We are proud to announce the release of the ‘War Watch – IHL in Focus Report 2025’, a new 500+ page global analysis examining the most serious violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) committed between July 2024 to December 2025. The report documents widespread and often systematic war crimes committed with impunity across 23 armed conflicts. It warns that while the threat to IHL is not yet existential, it is close to breaking point.
Among the key findings:
- Widespread and often systematic harm to civilians has been perpetrated
- The rapid expansion of armed drone warfare against civilians, revealing how armed drones are no longer the preserve of State armed forces and are falling more easily into the hands of non-state armed groups.
- Unprecedented levels of conflict-related sexual violence
- Systematic targeting of healthcare facilities and humanitarian workers, and the use of starvation as a deliberate method of warfare.
- Journalists are increasingly being targetedas part of a method of warfare. By late 2025, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had reported a historic high of 127 journalists and media workers killed, largely linked to the Gaza conflict. Although the number of humanitarian workers killed in 2025 (329) was lower than in 2024 (385).
- For the first time, the violence in Haiti – between state authorities and the Viv Ansanm coalition controlling Port-au-Prince – has been classified as anon-international armed conflict, meaning serious abuses by any partymay now constitute war crimes under international law.