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How to help everyday people suffering in Iran — and beyond

Getting aid to civilians during wartime is difficult. Here’s the best approach.

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In the less than two weeks since the US and Israel began bombing Iran in late February, the war has already killed over 1,900 people across 11 countries and displaced more than 700,000. It has destroyed schools, hospitals, and critical infrastructure across the region, and threatens to plunge countries near and far — many of which rely on now-disrupted shipping routes for fuel and fertilizer — into economic and humanitarian crises.

If the escalating conflict feels to you like one more in a long slog of painfully violent, complex global crises, then you are not wrong. There are indeed more wars and armed conflicts today than there have been at any time since the end of World War II. Over one-fifth of the world’s kids now live in places warped by conflict, which magnifies poverty and hunger. And conflict doesn’t just worsen conditions on the ground — it makes getting humanitarian aid flowing to those who need it most an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous task.

But difficult doesn’t mean impossible. Local aid workers across the region have been working nonstop to get civilians safely fed and cared for, while new methods of crisis response mean that the world may soon be able to move money much more quickly to the people and places that need it most. And while just how long this war will continue may only be known to President Donald Trump, these organizations will need support to fuel long-term recovery for those both directly and indirectly affected by the violence. The fighting has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping lane between Iran and Oman that supplies about a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade and more than a third of the world’s fertilizer. A prolonged closure could quickly devolve into a major global food crisis, including a spike in hunger in the countries most vulnerable to it.

For the average person, thinking about how to help in a conflict like this can feel daunting, to say the least. It might even seem pointless against the sheer momentum of war. If you can’t solve everything — if the war has no end in sight — then why bother with Band-Aid solutions at all?

But people need help now, so they can make it to the day after. And with global aid cuts siphoning off support for humanitarian relief organizations even as........

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