Beyond infrastructure: The protection of essential services personnel in the spirit of international humanitarian law

Abstract

While international humanitarian law (IHL) offers protections for infrastructure indispensable to civilian survival, the personnel who operate, maintain and repair these systems remain largely invisible in legal frameworks and humanitarian discourse. Drawing on operational experience, this article examines the systemic threats faced by essential services personnel in contemporary urban warfare, including direct attacks, mobility constraints and the cumulative effect of protracted conflict, all of which undermine the resilience of essential services. Through exploring existing legal frameworks, recent political initiatives and practical measures already undertaken by humanitarian actors and service providers to enhance personnel safety, the article argues that safeguarding essential services personnel is not only a legal and moral imperative but also an operational necessity for preserving civilian life during conflict. While the authors acknowledge the lack of explicit special protection of essential services personnel under IHL, they advocate for a principled, good-faith interpretation and application of IHL that embraces its humanitarian spirit, arguing that the protection of “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” must logically extend to the people who keep those objects and services functioning. The article concludes by proposing future avenues for strengthening protection, including improved visibility, multidisciplinary and essential service provider-centred preparedness planning, and the potential recognition of a distinctive sign for essential services personnel. Ultimately, the article calls for essential services personnel to be better recognized as indispensable to the survival of civilian populations and urges all actors to move beyond infrastructure to protect the systems – including the people – that sustain life in war.

Introduction

Essential services, such as water, sanitation, electricity and waste management, are lifelines for civilian populations in armed conflict. Rather than mere conveniences, they are fundamental to public health, and their disruption during war has immediate and often devastating consequences for the survival and dignity of entire populations.¹ The delivery of such services relies on intricate, interdependent systems that rest on three primary pillars: robust dedicated infrastructure, a steady flow of consumables and, crucially, the people who operate, maintain and repair these systems.² Thus, disruption occurs not only through the breakdown of infrastructure but also through the loss or obstruction of those personnel.³

Today’s armed conflicts often take place in cities or affect them, and the urban environment presents unique challenges to the delivery and resilience of essential services.⁴ Unlike small, often rural communities that may possess a degree of self-sufficiency or have access to alternative coping mechanisms, urban populations are almost entirely dependent on the smooth and continuous operation of centralized service delivery systems. In cities, these systems are typically large in scale, complex and highly interconnected, requiring the coordinated efforts of hundreds or even thousands of skilled professionals. This dependence leaves urban communities with little room for manoeuvre and particularly vulnerable to shocks in the face of disruption.⁵ When essential services fail – or are sometimes intentionally targeted, cut or diverted – the consequences are immediate and severe, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions.⁶ The lack of individual alternatives and the degree of reliance on centralized services mean that, in many cases, the only recourse is for people to move – that is, if movement is even possible or safe in the circumstances.

The systematic and multifaceted threat to the delivery of essential services is not limited to direct attacks or incidental harm from fighting and the use of certain weapons; it also encompasses the long-term degradation and operational breakdown of entire systems. The effects of a single attack can reverberate across interconnected networks, causing disruptions far from the initial point of impact and persisting long after the event itself.⁷ When conflicts are protracted, which is a current norm, or when entire battles or campaigns unfold over extended periods, these effects accumulate. In such circumstances, full recovery very rarely occurs. Instead, the various components of essential service systems gradually deteriorate, sliding toward a tipping point where restoration becomes impossible, and the population is left without critical lifelines.⁸

Despite their vital role in keeping these life-saving services running, essential services personnel are often overlooked in the – also crucial – efforts to ensure better protection of essential infrastructure during conflict. International humanitarian law’s (IHL) specific prohibition that forbids warring parties “to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population”, such as drinking water and energy installations, has helped focus attention on the importance of protecting infrastructure during hostilities.⁹ In comparison, essential services personnel (at least non-medical, non-humanitarian relief and non-civil defence personnel; see further discussion below) are protected “only” by general, albeit fundamental, rules protecting all civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities.¹⁰ IHL makes no express mention of essential service providers or their personnel.

At the conclusion of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) Symposium on Water in Armed Conflicts, held in Montreux in 1994, the participating experts agreed, amongst other things, to “[a]im for absolute protection of water supplies and systems, and to extend legal protection to include engineers attempting to restore water supplies in times of armed conflict”.¹¹ Thirty years on, explicit references to the personnel keeping services running have proven rare, in IHL scholarship as well as in humanitarian diplomacy. Challenges to protection of essential services personnel are compounded by a related absence of practical measures or protocols to identify and mitigate the risks that such personnel face during and after hostilities. As a result, essential services personnel are often left to navigate incredibly dangerous environments without institutional support and are forced to find their own coping mechanisms, negotiate with armed actors in highly polarized contexts, or adapt to rapidly changing conditions with limited and unreliable information.¹² The consequences can be dramatic, not only for the personnel themselves, who may be killed, injured or threatened, but also for the civilians who ultimately suffer from the disruption or collapse of essential services.

Drawing on operational realities and recent field evidence, this article examines the systematic impact of armed conflict on essential services, with a particular focus on the protection of the essential services personnel¹³ who make service delivery possible.

Despite significant challenges, the situation is not without hope. This article builds on the 2024 institutional report of the ICRC and the Norwegian Red Cross, entitled Keeping the Lights On and the Taps Running: Protecting and Facilitating Safer Access for Essential Service Providers in Armed Conflict,¹⁴ taking into account its findings about the challenges faced by essential service providers and their personnel, but also the activities already being undertaken by members of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (the Movement) and other humanitarian actors across multiple contexts to support the access and safety of essential services personnel. The article also reflects on one of the report’s recommendations, amongst many others, that ways of enhancing the protection of essential services personnel should be further explored, including in relation to visibility,¹⁵ linking this back to the 1994 Symposium on Water in Armed Conflicts mentioned above, with its call to extend legal protection to include engineers.

Protection of infrastructure clearly indirectly protects the personnel who work on such infrastructure and must be understood within that logic. Nevertheless, we argue that applying IHL in letter and spirit as repeatedly called for by the ICRC¹⁶ – recalling, in good faith, the humanitarian purpose of IHL norms when interpreting and applying them¹⁷ – requires paying attention beyond infrastructure to the systems as a whole, including the people making the provision of essential services possible. Indeed, it could be argued that attacking or otherwise preventing the work of essential services personnel might “render useless” a service, in violation of IHL’s protection of objects indispensable to the civilian population.¹⁸ We emphasize how the role of these personnel, and the risks they face, must be better understood, as their work is central to holding the entire service delivery together, ensuring that the daily needs of millions are met, even during crisis. This is especially true in the urban environment and in protracted crisis.¹⁹ Considerations around expressly extending legal protections for essential services personnel, including a possible agreed distinctive sign for greater visibility, are important, yet entail challenges. However, we emphasize that numerous concrete, pragmatic measures by warring parties, authorities, humanitarian actors and essential service providers already exist to both strengthen protection of personnel operating in the cross-fire and contribute to better IHL compliance.

To make this argument, the article first outlines the relevant international legal frameworks, including selected challenges and gaps, and follows the recent history of the few explicit mentions of essential services personnel in legal and political instruments and humanitarian statements. The main part of the article then explores the indispensable role of personnel in maintaining the delivery of essential services and the particular vulnerabilities they face during hostilities. It highlights a range of practical protective measures already implemented by humanitarian actors, essential services personnel themselves, and at times, parties to conflict. Finally, the article looks to future avenues for strengthening protection in law and policy, operational practice and humanitarian action, arguing for broader, more systematic application of such measures, while supporting calls for renewed reflection on more ambitious approaches – those that may appear legally or politically complex but hold the potential to significantly enhance protection for those who keep essential services running in war.

Existing international legal frameworks

The rules of IHL and other bodies of law most relevant to the protection of essential services include three main interrelated protections:²⁰

• • Principles and rules on the conduct of hostilities, including on distinction between military objectives and civilians/civilian objects, and on proportionality and precautions in attack. There are also special protections for certain kinds of objects.

• • The responsibility of parties to conflict to ensure the provision of basic needs, including adequate supplies of food and water, to the civilian population.

• • Rules on access for humanitarian relief, which are designed to ensure that people affected by armed conflict are not deprived of supplies essential to their survival or made to starve.

Each of the three components of any essential service – people, hardware and consumables – is presumed civilian or a civilian object and therefore protected under the fundamental principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution governing the conduct of hostilities.²¹ This means that these components cannot be intentionally targeted. However, when a lawful target is attacked, IHL anticipates that there may be incidental harm to civilians and damage to civilian objects. Essential services infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to such incidental damage from hostilities, especially where a party resorts to the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area in urban settings.²² IHL sets careful limits on what is legally acceptable – foreseeable incidental harm to civilians must not be excessive compared to the anticipated military advantage.²³ Parties are also required to exercise constant care to spare civilians and civilian objects in the conduct of military operations and to take all feasible precautions in attack to avoid – or at least minimize – incidental civilian harm. Here, both the direct and indirect (or reverberating) effects must be taken into account, insofar as they are reasonably foreseeable in the circumstances.²⁴ Precautionary duties apply to both the attacking and the defending forces;²⁵ in other words, defenders can also take many actions to protect essential service provision such as marking infrastructure and avoiding military action in the vicinity.

In addition to these general protections, certain persons and objects benefit from special (heightened) protection under IHL. This includes a specific prohibition on attacking, destroying, removing or otherwise rendering useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.²⁶ Such objects include crops, food, and drinking water supplies and installations, as well as energy infrastructure critical for the operation of other indispensable objects, meaning that a lot of essential services infrastructure would fall within this category of protected objects.²⁷ While a civilian object would lose its general protection under IHL if it were to qualify as a military objective,²⁸ the specific protection afforded to objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population adds additional restrictions on attacks and other hostile acts against them – namely, Article 54 of Additional Protocol I (AP I) provides that such objects may not be attacked, removed, destroyed or rendered useless unless they are being used in “direct support of military action”.²⁹ Moreover, under no circumstances shall actions against these objects be taken which would be expected to lead to starvation of civilians due to inadequate food or water, or which would force people to displace.³⁰

Regarding people, while IHL protects all civilians from direct attack,³¹ some roles enjoy special or heightened protection, similar in a sense to the “indispensable objects” mentioned above. For example, humanitarian relief personnel (and objects) and medical personnel (and objects) receive special mention in IHL.³² Certain people – components of the Movement, armed forces medical personnel and authorized civilian medical services – are allowed to use the protective emblem of the red cross or red crescent to facilitate their identification. The improper use of those distinctive emblems is prohibited,³³ and attacking medical personnel lawfully displaying the emblems is prohibited and a serious violation of IHL.³⁴

Civil defence personnel are also entitled to protection while carrying out civil defence tasks, and in international armed conflict, IHL provides for a unique distinctive sign to identify them (an equilateral blue triangle on an orange background).³⁵ Civil defence humanitarian tasks involve providing the conditions necessary for the survival of the civilian population, and this can include repairs to public service infrastructure and assistance with preserving objects essential for survival;³⁶ as such, these activities would fall within that specific protection. More generally, while there would be the possibility for essential services personnel to be appointed or called upon by the State to carry out civil defence tasks under its control,³⁷ to better understand whether and to what extent the special protection of civil defence personnel might already protect essential services personnel, further research would be required regarding whether and how the assignment of these tasks occurs in practice in different countries, as well as the appropriateness or challenges that may be involved in the first place given the differences in terms of tasks between civil defence organizations and essential services personnel.³⁸ In that sense, the aforementioned ICRC and Norwegian Red Cross report on this general topic notes that in the contexts examined for that study, civil defence organizations did not carry out such repairs. Likewise, the workforce of an essential service provider will not usually be part of a civil defence unit as they operate for a more general purpose and not only in crisis for emergency repairs.³⁹

The important point is that unlike these roles that enjoy specific protection under IHL (such as civil defence, medical personnel and the broader medical mission), essential services personnel providing water, electricity or food do not enjoy the same legal safeguards, despite performing critical, life-saving functions. Certainly, they remain protected by the fundamental rules of IHL like any other member of the civilian population: they must be respected and protected and must not be attacked.⁴⁰ Yet they do not benefit from heightened protection, except indirectly through that afforded to their workplace, such as a water pumping station, if it is an “indispensable object” as set out above.

While the history of the development of IHL and its key original focus on the provision of medical aid to wounded soldiers is well known, today, one can also observe the reality that medical services themselves, as well as the civilian population generally, absolutely rely on the provision of essential services like water and power. They could usually not provide their own life-saving services without them. While acknowledging that the lack of compliance with IHL in recent conflicts means that even those persons and objects with heightened protections in the law have not been protected in reality,⁴¹ it is for these reasons that this article draws attention to the experiences of essential services personnel and contemporary experiences in supporting their safety and access, including questions related to facilitating increased visibility for who they are and what they do.

Other existing tools

As well as the applicable rules of IHL, several instruments and political initiatives have been recently adopted or launched in response to the growing threats to critical civilian infrastructure and essential services. Such initiatives can serve as useful tools to complement relevant IHL provisions, as they help to articulate the collective concerns and expectations of parts of the international community, to reaffirm political support for applicable law, and often to formulate practical and sector-specific commitments.

For instance, the 2022 Political Declaration on Strengthening the Protection of Civilians from the Humanitarian Consequences Arising from the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas, endorsed by eighty-eight States at the time of writing, recognizes the devastating effects of such weapons on critical civilian infrastructure and essential services, and seeks to reduce those effects by curbing their use.⁴² Focusing specifically on the water sector, the Global Alliance to Spare Water in Armed Conflict⁴³ highlights the reverberating effects of armed conflict on water services and disseminates existing legal and technical tools to protect freshwater and related installations.⁴⁴ The Global Initiative on IHL, launched by the ICRC, Brazil, China, France, Jordan, Kazakhstan and South Africa, aims to “galvanize” a stronger and more sustained commitment to IHL, making it more of a political priority; the Initiative is working to develop concrete recommendations to enhance protection for civilian infrastructure as one of its seven workstreams.⁴⁵

While these instruments focus on the protection of physical infrastructure, there has been in parallel a promising turn over the last five years in which some recent instruments and initiatives have signalled a wider recognition of the need to safeguard not just the infrastructure but also the people who keep it functioning. United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 2573 of 2021, on the protection of civilian infrastructure, unequivocally asserts the link between the protection of infrastructure and that of essential services personnel, and calls for their enhanced protection when encouraging

all efforts to protect … civilian infrastructure that is critical to enable the delivery of essential services in armed conflict …, including by … [p]rotection of civilians operating, maintaining or repairing these objects, as well as their movement for the purpose of maintaining, repairing or operating such objects.

Similarly, Principle 7 of the 2019 Geneva List of Principles on the Protection of Water Infrastructure details how relevant IHL rules apply to the protection of civilians working for or at water infrastructure or water-related infrastructure.⁴⁶

Finally, the most recent 2025 Call to Action for Survival and Resilient WASH – an initiative primarily led by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) but supported by several countries – calls for compliance with IHL provisions related to the “protection of WASH [water, sanitation and hygiene] systems, personnel, and civilians”.⁴⁷

While we are in favour of explicit statements ensuring that essential services personnel are not forgotten in debates about the protection of essential services, we suggest also that the logic of even those instruments or initiatives focusing on infrastructure can and should be interpreted as extending this protection to the personnel operating, maintaining and restoring the infrastructure. In short, the purpose behind IHL’s rules requiring protection of objects indispensable to the civilian population cannot be ensured robustly without protection of those systems’ operators, especially when those rules are considered in conjunction with other IHL rules protecting civilians from starvation and requiring their humane treatment. It remains too early to know if consultations within the Global Initiative on IHL might result in public recommendations specifically mentioning personnel.⁴⁸ Meanwhile, while the Global Alliance to Spare Water in Armed Conflict refers predominantly to infrastructure and maintaining the dignity of civilian populations through maintenance of essential services, it also aims to work to promote the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2573 and the dissemination of the Geneva List of Principles on the Protection of Water Infrastructure, which, as mentioned above, both do specifically refer to civilian personnel.

Overall, this evolving landscape demonstrates a growing acknowledgement that the protection of essential services personnel is a key part of the protection of the delivery of essential services and as such should guide how IHL is interpreted, implemented and supplemented. The next section turns to look at why the protection of essential services personnel has become crucial for the maintenance of life-saving civilian services and for ensuring compliance with IHL.

In the grey zone: A deadly operating environment for essential services personnel

The degradation or collapse of essential services has become a defining feature of contemporary armed conflicts;⁴⁹ these systems are especially vulnerable to the cumulative and indirect effects of hostilities.⁵⁰ Less visible, however, is the toll that these disruptions take on the personnel who keep those services running. The personnel of essential service providers – engineers, technicians, operators – work under extreme risks.⁵¹ This deadly operating environment is the result of several factors. Firstly, since essential services personnel are part of the civilian population, they face the same risks as all civilians in armed conflict. Those risks are reduced or exacerbated by the way in which parties conduct their hostilities. Today’s evolving landscape of hostilities is marked by a clear disregard by some actors for humanitarian norms and legal protections, and in other cases by a trend toward increasingly permissive interpretations of these frameworks.⁵²

Beyond this general problem, essential services personnel face risks shaped by their specific roles and tasks – the inherent characteristics of essential services systems and of the requirements to keep them running, maintained and repaired. It is these roles and tasks that we will focus on in this section.

Service delivery systems are neither static nor self-contained; they function more like sprawling living organisms, made up of continuous flows, pulses and moving parts that expand, contract and reconfigure in response to shifting needs and environments. In many cities, water and power networks stretch across wide areas, frequently well beyond urban boundaries. Essential services personnel cannot operate remotely and must move constantly through this operating environment – including into the so-called “grey zone” where weapons-bearers and related insecurity are present⁵³ – to reach critical nodes and work physically on-site, often for extended periods. Many stations require round-the-clock operation and, thus, staff presence organized into work shifts and regular commuting. Repairing power lines, operating water treatment plants or restarting pumping stations cannot be done from afar. The duties of essential services personnel require repeated access to exposed infrastructure, which, and in particular when damaged by hostilities, are often located near or across front lines. This exposes essential services personnel not only to the risks of shelling and being caught in crossfire but also to unexploded ordnance (UXO), landmines, and booby traps.⁵⁴

The challenges of this necessary mobility are compounded by the scale of the workforce needed. In large urban areas, hundreds or even thousands of personnel may be required to maintain routine operations.⁵⁵ Deploying these teams in times of active hostilities, usually without armoured vehicles, reliable communications, or coordination mechanisms with conflict parties, is obviously fraught with enormous risk.

The materials and equipment needed to deliver essential services generate further challenges. Essential services personnel routinely work with hazardous substances such as chlorine gas, widely used for drinking water disinfection. These substances are already tightly regulated in peacetime, but in conflict settings they become major security risks and are often considered as dual-use items, or even as potential weapons.⁵⁶ Moving heavy equipment like excavators, bulldozers, large generators or fuel trucks – another operational necessity – brings more logistical complications, on the one hand, and may be misinterpreted as military activity, increasing the risk of being stopped, delayed or attacked, on the other. Furthermore, such valuable equipment is also at high risk of hijacking or diversion by armed actors.

Security at work sites is rarely guaranteed. Unlike hospitals or humanitarian compounds, essential services facilities often lack clear identification, perimeter protection or passive security (e.g. safe rooms). Infrastructure facilities such as pumping stations or substations are frequently located in open, unsecured and exposed areas; even critical buildings may have little more than a locked gate separating them from active combat zones. Essential services personnel working alone or in small teams at these sites are acutely vulnerable to attack, incidental harm, arrest or intimidation, or being trapped at their work location.

In many contexts, essential services personnel face perception challenges. Public utilities are often associated with State institutions, and in polarized environments, especially where the State is a party to the conflict, this affiliation can lead personnel to be perceived as enemies or collaborators by the opposing side, regardless of their civilian role. As a result, they may be denied access, harassed at checkpoints or even detained, despite their public service function.

Changes in control of territory bring further, related complications. Following the takeover of an area by one of the warring factions, essential services personnel may face suspicion, forced loyalty declarations from either side, or even accusations of treason or involvement in terrorist activity if they remained and worked, wilfully or not, in an area that came under the control of a non-State armed group.⁵⁷ This places them at the centre of politically and personally dangerous dynamics.

This complex risk environment is rarely mitigated by adequate or specific coordination mechanisms. Access negotiations with the fighting parties are mostly ad hoc or absent, and service providers often lack trusted intermediaries or formal procedures to secure safe passage for staff and supplies. Essential services personnel are generally not trained in negotiating access or mitigating operational risks.

The absence of reliable information and communications systems further compounds the danger. Field teams may lack radios, GPS or live updates on combat activity, whether due to collateral damage or deliberate shutdowns, or as a direct consequence of the cyber operations that are increasingly deployed in modern conflicts. With no liaison mechanisms with military actors, essential services personnel must operate somewhat blind, unable to signal their presence, gather timely updates, alert others, or call for help if trapped or hit.

Several additional factors compound these practical risks. Protracted conflict often also leads to the financial collapse of utilities, salary suspensions, and shortages of all resources. “Brain drain” due to low salaries, migration, death or conscription reaches a point where recruiting and retaining skilled personnel becomes nearly impossible. Those who remain must stretch limited resources across deteriorating systems, often without training, equipment or support. The loss of institutional memory and the destruction of files, blueprints or records make technical interventions harder and slower. In extreme cases, essential services personnel no longer have the documentation needed to locate buried pipelines or electrical lines, let alone repair them.⁵⁸

Finally, demographic pressures following large-scale displacement can overwhelm systems and necessitate rapid redesign or expansion. Influxes of displaced persons increase demand on already strained infrastructure and may accelerate collapse if systems cannot be adapted in time – a task that falls directly on essential services personnel.

Faced with these threats, although the workforce has the necessary skills, experience and strategies,⁵⁹ many essential services personnel are left with little choice but to operate without clearance or explicit protection, eventually resorting to dangerous coping mechanisms and accepting a high level of personal danger as part of the job. They may bypass checkpoints unofficially or attempt negotiations on the spot, work at night to avoid detection, or continue operations under shelling. Some choose to stay silent when infrastructure is damaged, in order to avoid blame or retaliation; others stop wearing uniforms or ID badges to reduce visibility. These coping strategies may sometimes allow essential services personnel to survive, but even then, they come at a cost: exhaustion, trauma and increased risk of error or suspicion.

The result of all these factors is a deadly and unsustainable operating environment, one that exists across nearly all contemporary conflicts, from Iraq, Syria and Yemen to Sudan, Ukraine, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Myanmar.⁶⁰ Not only are essential services personnel exposed to life-threatening dangers – like the workers of Ukraine’s Voda Donbassa or the Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU), both of which reported dozens of casualties even before 2022 and 2023 respectively⁶¹ – but they are also systematically unsupported and under-recognized. This disconnect between the essential humanitarian function of essential services personnel and the lack of specific legal and operational safeguards is at the heart of the case for a much better, more good-faith and more principled response by all actors, in particular parties to conflict.

Existing practical avenues to better protect and facilitate safer access for essential services personnel

While some residual risks for essential services personnel will always remain when operating during active fighting, practical measures to support them and mitigate harm exist and can be implemented by all stakeholders with a responsibility for or involved in ensuring the uninterrupted delivery of basic services to the civilian population. These stakeholders include, first and foremost, the parties to armed conflict and other military actors, on whom the primary responsibility lies, but also civilian authorities, humanitarian organizations and the essential service providers themselves.

Several armed forces already implement measures to mitigate civilian harm and protect essential services infrastructure.⁶² While these good practices rarely – if ever – explicitly focus on the protection of essential services personnel, they often contribute to that goal in practice. By fostering a safer environment, both for civilians and for those working on critical infrastructure, such measures can enhance the security of essential services personnel in both their professional roles and their civilian lives. Examples of such measures include:

• • seeking the advice of subject-matter experts – such as engineers – during the planning of, and as part of the intelligence support for, military operations, as well as in exercises, war games and simulations;

• • ensuring intelligence-gathering on the presence of civilians, civilian objects and the broader pattern of life in and around potential targets;

• • designating areas where critical civilian infrastructure is located as no-fire areas, restricted-fire areas or areas requiring high-level authorization to be targeted;

• • placing critical infrastructure – such as hospitals, water, electricity and communications – on no-strike lists, and applying strict criteria to the removal of such infrastructure from no-strike lists;

• • training military personnel on the effects of explosive weapons with a wide impact area in populated areas, and the limitations applicable to their use, as well as on alternative weapons and tactics better suited for use in populated areas;

• • taking appropriate measures to reduce civilian presence, including essential services personnel, where attacks may be carried out, inter alia by means of warnings and evacuations; and

• • performing collateral damage estimates prior to attacks.

While it is encouraging that these measures exist, they must be expanded on and implemented more consistently and systematically across all theatres of operation.⁶³ Lessons learned in one conflict should inform practices in others, and importantly, more deliberate and focused efforts by militaries and other armed forces are needed to address the specific protection needs of essential services personnel. Achieving this will require not only technical adjustments but also a shift in mindset and operational culture.

Turning to the humanitarian sector, the ICRC and National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have routinely engaged in a wide range of operational interventions to protect and facilitate safer access for essential services personnel trying to keep systems running in volatile urban environments or during active hostilities. The Movement’s collective experience substantiates that impactful action depends on effective partnerships and coordination between concerned stakeholders.⁶⁴

Throughout the Syrian conflict (2011–25), over the whole country and across the front lines, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and its volunteers played a key role as neutral intermediary countless times in support of essential service providers. As a crucial example, the SARC liaised as a neutral intermediary with parties to the conflict in Aleppo in 2012–16, when the city was divided between government forces and armed opposition groups. Aleppo’s two main water pumping stations, Bab al-Nayrab and Suleiman al-Halabi, were under the control of armed opposition groups in the eastern part of the city, while the water board management and many employees had moved to the west. Due to this conflict-induced intra-urban brain drain, the remaining technical expertise in the east for system maintenance and repair was insufficient. As part of its principled humanitarian action, the SARC, partnered with actors such as the ICRC and the UN, worked with the municipal water board to coordinate access and pauses in the fighting with the parties on the ground in order to facilitate movements across the front line for water service personnel and to deliver fuel to the pumping stations.⁶⁵ Once access approvals were granted from both parties, the SARC escorted the technicians through the official corridor, with vehicles marked with red crescent flags and staff wearing their usual red uniforms for enhanced visibility. Providing protection by physical presence, SARC staff remained with the water service personnel during their work and then escorted them back across the line to their office or depot.⁶⁶

In interviews, staff from water services in Ukraine and Gaza have noted that being more visibly identifiable as essential services personnel is a crucial element of staff safety.⁶⁷ Following the 2014 Israel–Hamas hostilities, the Gaza Electricity Distribution Company (GEDCO) and the CMWU partnered with the ICRC, which had been present with water and habitat programmes in Gaza since 2006,⁶⁸ to make these personnel more easily recognizable as people (and related vehicles, equipment and buildings) who pose no threat and who should be protected. As well as “branded” clothing, vehicle registration numbers in large numerals, together with large water drop or lightning bolt symbols based on their respective institutional logos, were displayed on the sides and roofs of vehicles.⁶⁹ The registration numbers were also listed in a catalogue of service provider vehicles supplied to the Israel Defense Forces in order to facilitate pre-movement notification and situational identification. The ICRC further supported these services by reinforcing civil–military coordination by reinforcing for notifying and getting clearances for movements, and through escorts.⁷⁰

In Ukraine prior to the 2022 escalation, the ICRC, which had started working with water utilities in the country in 2014,⁷¹ worked with the municipal water utility company Voda Donbassa to revise the latter’s visibility approach. In the Donbas, it was not uncommon for service providers’ clothing and vehicles to resemble military styles, in some cases using camouflage patterns and colours. As part of the ICRC-supported visibility programme, vehicles were repainted and stickers were attached showing the Voda Donbassa logo and “water utility worker” or “Donbas Water” in large Cyrillic characters. Repair teams and operators in facilities near the line of contact also received orange high-visibility vests. In both cases, the logic was that more visible, clearer and consistent identification would help the parties to the conflict to distinguish water and power personnel and assets from combatants and military objects.⁷²

In other contexts, personnel have often been equipped with at least high-visibility vests or work overalls, with or without an institutional logo or name, and have often worn hard hats.⁷³

Essential service providers and the ICRC have in various contexts also collaborated on emergency preparedness and resilience-building measures. While such efforts do not survive in the most intense hostilities, in Gaza prior to 2023, the ICRC donated materials and spare parts that were pre-positioned across a decentralized warehouse structure to reduce the movements of essential services personnel in crisis situations, minimizing staff exposure during hostilities. The ICRC also supported broader systemic efforts including strengthening supervisory control and data acquisition systems for remote monitoring and operations of services, ensuring necessary redundancies to protect critical facilities, and developing standard operating procedures and emergency protocols.⁷⁴ In early 2017 in Mosul, Iraq, the ICRC enhanced the passive security of two pumping stations at locations where water board staff felt exposed to cross-fire and snipers from the ongoing nearby fighting between government forces and the so-called Islamic State group. In other contexts, support with passive security measures has included ensuring that facilities close to a front line had bunkers where staff could take shelter, boarding up windows or fitting them with anti-blast film, and equipping bunkers with survival materials, for example at Donetsk Filtration Station in Ukraine.⁷⁵

Harm to essential services personnel operating amid hostilities can also be prevented through advocacy and confidential bilateral dialogue. In coordination with and based on specific risks identified by essential service providers, ICRC delegations communicate both orally and in writing with authorities, especially parties to armed conflict, on issues including safe access for service providers and parties’ respective responsibilities under IHL. Specific representations have, for example, proposed the creation of a protected zone to allow repairs of damaged water pipelines or requested approval for sufficient fuel transports to generators powering water pumps in contested areas. While the ICRC’s neutral, impartial and independent positioning, combined with its specific IHL mandate and long-standing field presence, continue to give it a distinct and often uniquely accepted role in conducting such confidential protection dialogue, other actors – humanitarian and human rights NGOs, as well as UN agencies – increasingly engage in similar efforts, confidentially or publicly, through documentation, advocacy, and dialogue with conflict parties.

Non-Movement actors also contribute to de-confliction mechanisms facilitating safer access for both deliveries of diminishing supplies and essential services personnel maintaining or repairing infrastructure sites in contested areas. For example, in the years before the 2022 escalation of the international armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine monitored the adherence to so-called “windows of silence” in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions with its patrols.⁷⁶ Such localized temporary ceasefires were initiated by requests to both sides from the utility companies to provide security guarantees for civilian workers to approach and remain at specific infrastructure sites for urgent maintenance or repair work. UNICEF has often played a central role in negotiating access for and financing supplies such as fuel or water treatment chemicals as well as spare parts required by local water and sanitation corporations to sustain or restore water provision, including in Syria⁷⁷ and Yemen.⁷⁸

While these operational examples are instructive, there is no one-size-fits-all intervention menu for humanitarian organizations, authorities or any other actor seeking to protect and facilitate safer access for essential services personnel, and some measures that work in one context may be counterproductive in another. The spread of harmful information about humanitarian actors may generate misperceptions, erode trust in the Movement emblems and eventually undermine the acceptance needed to function as a neutral intermediary. Where parties to conflict are suspected of intentionally targeting essential services infrastructure, heightened visibility may expose personnel to more risk rather than mitigating it. Additional passive security measures at water or power installations may make them more attractive to the warring parties, as they may provide convenient shelter for troops and their equipment. Effective interventions must, therefore, be tailored to the dynamics of urban hostilities, the types of risks involved, the needs and capacities of the service providers, and the perception and acceptance of humanitarian organizations. Thus, just as States and military forces need to expand their understanding, planning and practice to better ensure the specific protection needs of essential services personnel as mentioned above, further research, documentation and sharing of knowledge and best practices remains more generally a crucial aspect of ensuring an environment conducive to better respect for IHL and to universalizing protective standards for civilians and civilian objects during armed conflict. It is to such potential future efforts that we turn now.

Future avenues for strengthening protection

The emerging acknowledgment, in policy and political discourse, of the importance of protecting essential services personnel (not just infrastructure), combined with the existing good practices that, while not always explicitly focused on essential services personnel, still help mitigate the risks they face, are reasons for hope. These two tracks are mutually reinforcing – progress on one can and should drive progress on the other – but much more needs to be done on both fronts. A change of mindset by all actors involved in or responsible for ensuring the uninterrupted delivery of basic services to the civilian population – including parties to armed conflict and other military actors, civilian authorities, donors, and humanitarian organizations – is urgently needed, across several areas: improving the understanding of and reporting on the risks faced by essential services personnel, led by their own experience; working on preparedness; considering the feasibility and protective impact of enhanced visible identification; and making the protection of essential services personnel a political and humanitarian priority, to be reflected in military policies and practices.

First, at a normative level, humanitarian actors and States can contribute to building environments conducive to IHL compliance and to universalizing protective standards for civilians and civilian objects during armed conflict that, ultimately, strengthen the protection of essential services personnel.⁷⁹ However, it is only if policy-makers and the wider public comprehend the vulnerabilities engrained in interdependent networks and the potentially far-reaching consequences of system failure that they can fully appreciate the need to protect the personnel that operate, maintain and repair essential services networks. Efforts to raise awareness of how much of a modern urban population’s basic functioning relies on resilient water, sanitation and power systems and personnel have been undertaken by a range of actors, including UNICEF and the ICRC.⁸⁰ Still, while the evidence of the harm to these systems in war appears overwhelmingly clear and compelling, academic research has also shown that there remains a lack of documentation of conflict impacts (at least on water resources and their management), and therefore of data and knowledge; that empirical studies have been based on a small number of cases; that there is a lack of conceptual engagement in existing research with the notion of armed conflict; and that academic research should also take into account research or knowledge generated outside of academia, for instance by NGOs.⁸¹ This suggests, in line with our argument, that the issue continues to merit not only greater attention but also greater interdisciplinary thinking, greater collaboration between academic and non-academic researchers, and greater understanding and implementation. Better data and evidence collection (and relatedly, the inclusion of research institutions in these issues) is also one of the calls of the Global Alliance to Spare Water in Armed Conflict mentioned above.⁸²

As such, data on threats faced by essential services personnel and the impact on access to essential services should be collected and compiled – for instance, in the UN Secretary-General’s reports on the protection of civilians in armed conflict⁸³ or through other UN or civil society organizations’ monitoring and reporting systems. Overall, more efforts are needed to assess the risks faced by essential services personnel and to identify their protection and operational needs, with those individuals who are most directly affected being at the centre of these efforts. Such consultations should be carried out by humanitarian actors, military planners, political authorities at the local, national and international levels, and relevant research institutions, and should cover all phases of conflict. As stated above, the findings of these consultations must be shared across contexts. The insights gathered from essential service personnel’s experience, lessons learned, and best practices should inform future policy guidance, response strategies and additional protective measures, ideally feeding into continued explicit recognition of service delivery personnel in advocacy, commentary or future instruments, and understood as being required for robust, good-faith compliance with IHL’s provisions protecting civilians.

Second, the protection of essential services personnel should be high on the domestic agenda in peacetime and periods between active hostilities. Relevant municipal, regional and national authorities should develop emergency preparedness and crisis response plans with and for essential service providers, focusing on staff safety and security during hostilities. This may include devising protocols enabling escorting of vehicles and personnel by impartial humanitarian organizations, improving passive protection measures for staff and infrastructure, or investing in the gradual automation of service infrastructure to reduce risk exposure by allowing remote operation and monitoring. Such joint planning will also help essential services personnel establish and strengthen communication channels with civilian and military authorities – a crucial asset when efficient operational coordination under the strain of ongoing hostilities is required. Humanitarian actors can contribute to all of the above, in the form of technical advice and training, material support, or facilitating contacts and developing emergency coordination mechanisms.

Third, the ICRC/Norwegian Red Cross report Keeping the Lights On and the Taps Running suggests that the feasibility and potential protective impact of developing a new distinctive sign – nationally or internationally recognized – to identify essential services personnel as they carry out their activities should be carefully explored. Such a sign, in current practice somewhat akin to the “press” label used by journalists (who are also generally only protected under IHL by their civilian status) on their protective clothing, could serve to enhance the protection of essential services personnel, particularly when they operate in urban environments during war.

On the one hand, creating a new sign should not be seen as a panacea. The persistent and even increasing threats faced by journalists – but also by medical and humanitarian personnel despite their clear protection under IHL, embodied in a visible emblem – demonstrate that the real challenge lies much more with compliance than with legal gaps. One may wonder whether an additional sign would be more respected than currently existing emblems or signs, or similarly, whether advocating to formally extend legal protection (as called for regarding engineers in the 1994 Water and War Symposium mentioned above), such as through amendments to existing treaties, difficult as they may be to imagine, would be impactful. In addition, in contexts where critical infrastructure has been deliberately targeted rather than protected, a new sign could unintentionally increase risks to essential services personnel, effectively turning them into more visible targets. Another risk would be that of abuse of the sign by parties to the conflict. These arguments have been considered in relation to other proposals to formalize new distinctive signs for specific groups like journalists, and are equally relevant to essential services personnel.⁸⁴

On the other hand, these concerns should be weighed against the practical experience of essential service providers which, in certain contexts, have adopted ad hoc identification measures such as displaying the water or power company logo or name, or an ad hoc sign representing these services, on their clothing and vehicles to make it clear that they were civilian vehicles and personnel carrying out public water or power work.⁸⁵ These providers have often found such visible identification to be protective in practice. This means that making use of increased visibility, such as some recognizable sign, does not have to wait until political will emerges for agreement to amendments to international law – it can and does happen now. Further exploration and careful consideration of the current experiences of service providers, as well as of the potential risks and benefits of a new distinctive sign, on both the practical and normative levels, are thus encouraged.

Finally, at the national level, clear instructions from political leadership to enhance the protection of essential services personnel in order to ensure the continued provision of essential services during conflict are a prerequisite to a corresponding change in military mindset. This can then cascade into military policy and practice, including in the commander’s intent, doctrine, training, operational planning, and the conduct of military operations.⁸⁶

Conclusion: The necessity of applying the letter and spirit of IHL

The protection of essential services in armed conflict is not merely a technical concern or a legal question – it is an ongoing urgent humanitarian necessity requiring greater understanding and attention. IHL offers a clear framework designed to protect civilians and the objects and services indispensable to their survival, and many of its provisions already provide strong and explicit protections for essential services infrastructure and other civilian objects. However, protecting infrastructure alone is not enough. Preserving the very conditions of civilian life in times of war requires us to also protect the systems that sustain this infrastructure, and this necessarily includes protecting the people who keep them running. In this sense, as mentioned above, it can be argued that harming or otherwise preventing the work of essential services personnel might “render useless” an object indispensable to the survival of the civilian population and could already be considered to violate IHL’s explicit protections of such objects. In any event, the letter of the law cannot reflect the complex realities of modern service delivery systems and of the work of the people who keep them running, which leaves open the risk of interpretations that are perhaps rigorous in appearance but which in essence betray the intended humanitarian purpose of IHL and the careful balancing of military necessity and humanitarian imperative on which it is based. In this light, fifty-eight States and the European Union supported the recent joint statement by the co-chairs of the April 2025 State consultations on the protection of civilian infrastructure within the framework of the Global Initiative on IHL, which reaffirmed that the “object and purpose of international humanitarian law is, and has always been, humanitarian. It was created to protect.”⁸⁷ Applying IHL in both letter and spirit, in good faith, is not only a legal imperative but is morally just and operationally necessary. Doing so requires going beyond a narrow textual analysis and embracing the law’s ultimate protective purpose. This means, for example, considering the foreseeable cumulative, systemic and long-term effects of hostilities on service delivery, supporting operational measures facilitating safer access for and reducing harm to those who enable it, and actively engaging in policy and legal debates seeking to strengthen their protection in practice.