As the World Food Programme slashes food assistance in Palestine and Sudan, the same governments cutting aid continue pouring billions into military spending and arming Israel. The headlines call it a “funding shortfall.” We call it what it is: funding the machinery of death, while rationing the survival of its victims.
In Gaza, the humanitarian spectacle turns genocide into an emergency to be administered and the deliberate cruelty of starvation into a logistical problem, a question of supplies and access. Meanwhile governments and profiteers use the crumbs of aid to evade accountability for the genocide they enable.
In Sudan we recognize the same political logic, despite different histories: when people rise to challenge domination, aid and development become tools for containing that possibility. In Sudan too this unfolds against a history of colonial extraction, imperial intervention, and an economy in which land, resources, and people's lives are subordinated to the interests of those who profit from them.
The war that began in April 2023 followed a revolution led by people demanding liberation and justice. That revolutionary possibility was crushed by counter revolution, genocide, and mass atrocities. The perpetrators are well known. The United Arab Emirates’s support for the Rapid Support Forces, the involvement of regional powers, and the interests of the United States, Israel, and corporations in a militarised, extractive regional order are part of the political economy sustaining this war. Gold and other resources continue to generate wealth while Sudanese people bear the cost in death, mass displacement, and starvation. And as people face all of this, humanitarian aid operates to manage the consequences of the political destruction of life and the suppression of revolutionary possibility, while the external powers, military actors, and extractive interests sustaining the genocide remain largely untouched.
But there is another story that these headlines rarely tell.
Across Sudan, Emergency Response Rooms, rooted in the organizing infrastructure of the resistance committees, have transformed schools into shelters, reopened clinics, coordinated food distribution, and mobilized people to care for their neighbours. In Gaza, grassroots networks organize food, education, mutual support, and collective life amid genocide and the destruction of essential infrastructure. The point isn’t that these are substitutes for adequately funded international aid. Rather, they are expressions of people's agency, knowledge, relationships, and capacity to organize; they are the infrastructure of care within a struggle for liberation.
The international system itself depends on this kind of grassroots response while failing to recognise, protect, or resource it. In Palestine we have seen the highest number of local humanitarian workers killed globally, with Sudan second. In Sudan, many killings go unrecorded beyond the communities that bear their loss. This is not incidental to how the humanitarian system operates. Its colonial hierarchies determine whose lives are considered disposable, whose deaths count, and who is recognised as a humanitarian worker deserving protection in the first place. In contexts of organised abandonment, people are pushed into dangerous work simply to survive, including within a humanitarian sector that often relies on local people to take risks international staff will not. The blurring of the line between the administration of genocide and the systems tasked with responding to it becomes impossible to ignore.
Dear comrades, we do not need another promise to improve the system. We need to move wealth towards the infrastructure people are already building, on their own terms. From Palestine, we send our solidarity to the people of Sudan who continue to organize, care for one another, and struggle for a future they can determine themselves. █
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Inspire
We invite you to read and amplify We Are Here: Sudanese Girls and Youth Hold Their Ground in Resistance and Remembrance which brings together the lived experiences, resilience, and political wisdom of eight Sudanese girls and young people, organizers, and activists who have been forcibly displaced within and beyond Sudan. Through their own words, the publication by The Global Resilience Fund at Purposeful bears witness not only to what has been lost, but to the resistance, memory, relationships, and collective struggle that continues to shape their lives and visions for the future.