The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) head of delegation in Israel and the Occupied Territories, Julien Lerisson, was on a five-day visit to Egypt last week. The delegation he heads is the organisation’s biggest operation in the world today, with a budget of $150 million to help the victims of the war in Gaza.
“The focus today in Israel and the Occupied Territories is on Gaza. The biggest needs are there,” Lerrison said in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly.
Lerisson has 22 years of experience as a humanitarian worker. His work has taken him to various places, including Sri Lanka at the end of the civil war in 2008, to Darfur and Liberia in 2009, and today to the Occupied Territories.
He said he has seen “the horror of human beings and what they are capable of doing to each other.”
He stressed that “wars are never good” and that they invariably leave civilians and the most vulnerable bearing the heaviest burdens. The ICRC stands as both a witness and a legacy to humanity, working to ensure that limits are placed on warfare and that states uphold the Geneva Conventions they have committed to respect.
His visit aimed to engage with national and international stakeholders to exchange views on the current humanitarian situation and enhance understanding of Egypt’s diplomatic and operational efforts to alleviate the suffering of the population in Gaza, he said, adding that the ICRC delegation is working on a wide range of activities to protect and assist the most vulnerable people affected by the conflict.
He likened the ICRC’s work to a person standing on two legs. The first leg, he said, is protection, through a range of activities aimed at safeguarding people’s rights. These include efforts to release hostages, with the goal of reuniting them with their families, and also the monitoring of hostilities.
The ICRC is mandated to monitor how states wage war, and it presses fighting parties to improve adherence and respect for the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law (IHL), he said.
The second leg, Lerisson said, is assistance, where the ICRC focuses on healthcare, which has been severely affected by the war.
It is trying to sustain the health services available inside the Gaza Strip, focusing on three hospitals. The first is the Rafah Field Hospital, which is a Red Cross-Red Crescent hospital run in collaboration with 12 national societies. The ICRC, he added, is working to establish a new hospital to replace the old one that has been operating for two years.
The ICRC has also refurbished the emergency department of the Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, one of the hospitals of the Palestinian Red Cross Society (PRCS). It has provided support for the Palestinian Ministry of Health Hospital in Gaza through delivering medicine, monitoring assistance to patients, and paying incentives to workers.
The strategy of the ICRC in Gaza, Lerisson said, is to focus on supporting existing infrastructure, given that more than half of Gaza was destroyed during the Israeli war on Gaza.
Less than half of the pre-existing 30 hospitals are now operating in Gaza, and it is very important to help them maintain operations and be able to continue, he said. While the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other organisations are helping with the transfer of patients for treatment abroad, the ICRC prefers to focus inside Gaza and support the existing system.
The ICRC is also working on reestablishing the water infrastructure. “We do not do water trucking or bringing water to families in tents, but we repair the system, the pipes, the pumping stations, and the desalination plants,” he said.
The ICRC, in cooperation with the local authorities, he added, sometimes resorts to dismantling pipes in destroyed neighbourhoods in order to put them to use in another neighbourhood to make their water system operational.
Lerisson also called attention to the ICRC’s cash-support programme, through which Palestinians can get the cash needed to buy food and other commodities from markets that have become more functional since the ceasefire last October.
The programme aims at protecting the most vulnerable, including the elderly, orphans and female-headed households, by restoring their ability to purchase food and meet basic needs.
“We cannot cover all the needs, but we try to target specific vulnerable groups to re-empower them to regain some dignity in the terrible situation that Gaza is in today,” Lerisson said.
Regarding the ICRC’s involvement in hostage-transfer operations, Lerisson described this as a very important and delicate mission that involves a lot of coordination with Hamas and the Israeli authorities, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), the US, and Egyptian, Qatari, and Turkish mediators.
The parties had reached the first agreement last January and had managed to agree on the exchange of prisoners and hostages in October last year, he said. They needed to work with an organisation that had the trust of Hamas to receive the hostages, keep them safe and protected, and to bring them back to their families while receiving the Palestinian prisoners and detainees, check their condition, and bring them back across the frontlines, he added.
“When you do that type of neutral intermediary work, you lay the foundation for peace,” he said.
Lerisson called attention to the right of the dead to be returned to their families and properly buried. Today there are still thousands of dead Palestinians that need to be returned to their families, he said.
The ICRC is “reminding the parties, Hamas, the IDF, the US, the mediators and everyone else involved that we still need to collect these bodies and bring them back to their families,” he added.
Lerisson stressed that respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) is not optional. But he also underscored that the ICRC is not an enforcement or accountability body but instead serves as a “guardian” of IHL, working to promote compliance.
IHL is a body of international law contained in the Geneva Conventions and elsewhere. The conventions consist of a set of international treaties that set the basic rules for how wars must be conducted.
“The ICRC has the task to remind states of what they have signed up to. We go to this or that country and remind them to commit to respecting civilians and to spare women and children,” he said.
The same standards apply to the Israeli authorities and to Hamas and to all the parties to a conflict, he added. The ICRC reminds the different parties involved in a war to abide by the IHL through bilateral confidential dialogue.
“We do not comment publicly on potential alleged IHL violations, but we bring them directly to the attention of the parties to the conflict in confidence,” he said.
Lerisson stressed that the ICRC operates under the principles of neutrality and impartiality, but he expressed his frustration that neutrality is sometimes “literally under attack.” There is a limited understanding of the principle today, he added, not only in Israel or the Occupied Territories but in many other parts of the world as well.
The ICRC is “simply here to say that there are basic humanitarian rules that parties need to respect when they fight each other. This is extremely difficult because today’s world is extreme and heavily polarised… We are neither with nor against anyone. We are the grey between the black and the white,” he said.
Lerisson believes that there is still much work to be done in Gaza. But his top priority is twofold: first detention issues and then the humanitarian emergency.
The ICRC, he said, has not had access to Israeli prisons since October 2023. His mission is to recover that access anew to continue being able to visit Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
“This is extremely important. I will continue to work extremely hard on that,” he affirmed.
The humanitarian emergency in Gaza continues despite the reaching of a ceasefire agreement and a plan for Gaza’s reconstruction, he said. More humanitarian aid needs to enter Gaza for the ICRC to be able to stabilise the Strip, he added.
“Gaza used to be the most densely populated area in the world. People are now living on less than 50 per cent of the territory. So, mathematically, it is twice as dense as it used to be. And everything is destroyed. We need to be able to repair the limited essential infrastructure that is still operating in Gaza.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 23 April, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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