She’s Been to Gaza. She Met With the Iranians. Now She Has a Warning.

I refuse to believe that the core human essence is bad. Our motivation is not to live in Rappall, never. How could it be? I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro, and today I'm interviewing Mediana Shpojadec, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC works all around the globe and often in secret, remaining neutral to operate in the world's most dangerous environments. But with wars, getting more complex due to new technology, and world leaders increasingly ignoring the rules of war, Shpojadec felt compelled to sit down with me to issue a warning about where we all could be headed. We have to understand the significance and importance of the rules of war, and why they need to be respected. But first a quick message, if you're not a subscriber, we have some news for you, you can now explore the times for free without paywalls during your first month in the New York Times app. Just download the app, and we hope you enjoy it. Okay, onto the interview. Thank you so much for coming in today. I really appreciate it. I know has been very hectic. We are meeting just at the end of the UN General Assembly. I want to start, if you could just briefly tell me, what is the ICRC, and what does it do? We are a global organization founded 163 years ago, in Geneva. Today working in roughly 90 different places across the world, mainly in conflict, because this is what we were created for, to bring help and protection in situations of armed conflict. But then also promote respect for the rules of war, because with the creation of the ICRC came the founding of the Geneva Convention. And then that led to the four Geneva Convention adopted after the Second World War in 1949. And still today, this agreement has been ratified by all states, because all states agreed that there are red lines in war. There are simply certain things that should never be allowed to happen. You know, I covered wars for a big part of my career as a journalist. And the world feels more dangerous and more volatile than I can ever remember. How do you see things? I see it the same way, because the statistics prove it. We now count twice as many conflicts as 15 years ago. We are at 130 international and non-international armed conflicts, that we classify in our system. That's the highest number since the Second World War. So I think it's time we stop admiring the problem and start acting against this. In my own newspaper, there was a recent headline asking if World War Three had already begun. And I want to speak more deeply about why those fears about a global conflict are taking root. But first, you rarely give interviews. The ICRC is quite a secretive organization, because it has to be, because of the sensitivity of what you do. Why are you sitting down now? Because I want more and more people to understand that we live in a decade or four. And because we live in a decade or four, we have to understand the significance and the importance of the rules of war and why they need to be respected. These treaties were created precisely for times like the ones we live in. I need to reach out to people. They need to understand the importance of this. Why do you think they don't? We hear more and more leaders say that the rules of war don't apply anymore, because of the pursuit for total victory. But that is not possible. In history, there has never been total victory. There has only been death and destruction over and above what was necessary. Because at the end of the day, whether there is peace always remains a political decision, not a military one. Is there such a thing as a necessary war? As far as I'm concerned, no. But philosophers and politicians have argued for thousands of years that war is necessary. But the point is, war has always been considered as something in the pursuit of a political objective. It's a means to an end. Today, you get the feeling that the wars become the means to an end itself. And they continue, because people want to stay in power, because they have created an environment where the war becomes the condition under which they can continue ruling, and that's very dangerous. You ask me whether we are approaching a Third World War. Honestly, history will judge that. History books will tell us whether today we already were in the beginning or maybe already in the middle of such a situation. We didn't know as the ICSE that we were in the Second World War when that was happening. The awareness of this being one of the most brutal wars in human history, that awareness wasn't there at that time. You are one of the few people in the world who regularly travels to both sides of armed conflicts. Can you tell me where you've been since you took over as the head of the ICSE in 2022? I've been to Gaza more than once during military operations. My organization facilitated the release and the return of the hostages from Gaza and the Palestinian detainees back to Gaza. I was in Ukraine, I was in Myanmar, I was recently in Iran, in Iraq. I traveled to the Middle East often, but I also traveled to Africa, I was in Sudan, I was in Mali. I have to go and see for myself what it looks like. I need to understand what civilians endure in conflict because I'm speaking to the holders of power. I wouldn't be credible if I didn't know what it is, what it means to be subject to this level of violence. I want to start with Gaza. Your organization is one of the few organizations that has been allowed inside and continues to work in Gaza. International journalists, most other international organizations haven't been given access by the Israeli government. Can you describe what you have seen? I never go to any place of conflict without people telling me that they want to stop, without people telling me that they don't understand what is happening. I see children without parents, I see children without arms and legs. I mean, how senseless does the world feel to you when you're confronting these things? And when you then go to the power holders and they tell you that there's nothing that they can do, you just don't understand, how is it that I see these children, without parents, without limbs, and people who have power and influence still tell me there's nothing we can do. I don't understand it. I often don't understand what I see in connection to what I hear. Millions of Palestinians who live in Gaza are now forced to live on only around 30% of the territory, over 80% of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. And in a 2025 interview with the BBC during the active conflict, you called Gaza worse than hell on earth than you described, the people stripped of their human dignity. Have the rules of war been followed there? What I said about Gaza is still valid today. What happened to Gaza and in Gaza, two Palestinians in Israeli supersedes every legal moral and human standards. You know, there's so many people complicit in what happened there and continues to happen. The worst now is the fact that people are deprived of human dignity. The perception created that if there is enough food, that's good enough. For some people it's good enough to just barely survive and for other people it's only good enough if they can return to normalcy and bring their children back to a normal school. It's applying to standards and this will backfire. We cannot assume that for certain people, certain things are sufficient for a situation when it doesn't apply to everybody else. You can see that by how we measure humanitarian needs in Europe, in comparison to South Sudan or Somalia. Intuitively and because we can't prevent it, we continue applying to standards and that some human lives are more valuable than others. And I always feared that if you allow double standards, it can happen to you. You never know when you find yourself, all of a sudden, on the other side of the lie. And it happened in this Second World War to the Jewish people, but it happened to a lot more people than we nowadays keep in mind. I want to stay with Gaza for one more moment before we broaden out. Did the ICRC have access to the hostages while they were in captivity because there were horrific stories of their conditions and captivity, and obviously that is one of your main roles is to make sure that, you know, detainees, prisoners are treated well. Visiting hostages is much more complicated than bringing them back. And in my opinion, they should have come back unconditionally as of day one. But that's not the reality in which we operate. And so we have to work with the tools that we have. You know, there's nothing more complicated, more complex, and to a certain extent also more brutal than hostage-taking. We know that also because our own colleagues find themselves more often than they should in such situations. And we know how important it is to negotiate them out as quickly as possible. So the objective always has to be to bring the hostages back. And the longer it takes, the more complicated it becomes. I personally think that, you know, pressure should have come earlier on the negotiations. We could have saved more lives, many more lives. And this was the subject of our conversations. I traveled twice to Qatar to meet with the leadership of Hamas to sit with his man, Hanir at the time. I sat with Prime Minister Netanyahu myself. These were tough discussions, and trust me, we are very frank in these meetings, and this is why these meetings have to always remain confidential. You know, I'm also thinking of Israel and how it has not allowed you access to the detainees inside of Israel. I mean, how have they explained that to you and how do you then have to respond? It's true that prior to October 7th, DICS here has had access for decades to detainees, held by Israel, and we, you know, organized tens of thousands if no more family visits. And that's important. This to present in situations of war is extremely challenging and complicated to achieve. And at a certain point in the conflict parties decided for security reasons they don't want to give us access. It's the most common argument. There may be others, but that's the most common one. But it doesn't matter what the reason is, it's a sovereign decision by the state to prevent us. However, according to the Geneva conventions with all these states have ratified, they have a legal obligation to give us access, and in my opinion, also a moral obligation. Because we need to inform the families about the whereabouts of or the fate of their relatives. You know, you capture soldier, this person is detained, but a soldier is not per se a criminal. And no matter how you classify these situations, torture is never allowed, never for any party to the Geneva conventions. Now this is clear and this is what we discuss with those who don't give us access. But you know, detention has a different reason for me to be able to go irrespective of my legal mandate. detention is the place where you lose your identity. Detention is, when there's no possibility to notify the families and to receive information about them, detention becomes the place of utmost deprivation of yourself. And we've seen more often than not that people detained under horrible conditions over extended periods of time, forget who they are. And when I visited recently a detention facility in Iraq, the detainees told me our biggest challenge is information. You know, they are very content if the food situation improves, if they have more access to sanitary facilities, all these things are important to them. But what is most important for everyone always is to have information about what month it is, what day it is, where the families are, where the children are, whether the children are safe. You're talking to human beings. This is a bit of a basic question, why does it matter how you treat your enemy? Of course it matters, because you dehumanizing yourself if you torture. If you tell your soldiers go and kill women and children, go rape them, looting is allowed, it's our strategy in warfare, these people dehumanize themselves, they will never be able to return to a normal life. I listen to so many interviews of former soldiers, because I need to understand them as well. All of them always say that what haunts them is this child that was left in the street, because they weren't allowed to turn around and collect it, that they saw bleeding to death. It remains with you, you debase yourself. This is my soldiers normally when they return also, I have all these problems. We are good people, we want to live with people we love, we want to have children that thrive, we want to be able to build a house, and know that our, you know, grandchildren would be better off than us. This is a very normal human motivation to continue living. Our motivation is not to live in Roppel never, how could it be? I want to just take a pause here because I want to learn a little bit more about you. You are Swiss Croatian, you studied philosophy, you worked primarily in international development and peacemaking for most of your career, including for the Swiss Foreign Service, the United Nations. I'm curious why you wanted to take on a job about war. I mean, do you have memories of the war in Croatia? My first memory of war was what my great-grandmother, her brothers, my father, everybody told me at the time about the Second World War and how they endured it. You know, my father was born in the middle and my father said, yeah, when he was five years old, yeah, to work in the field for 12 hours in the sun for a glass of milk at the time. He said, this whole child thought was marked by the memory of being hungry. And my mother, she was equally, you know, traumatized to the point where she said, every time a child died of a disease in her neighborhood, she thought that the parents were lucky and happy probably because there was one less child to feed. And so they felt relieved. Can you imagine thinking as a little girl that somebody is happy about losing a child because you don't have enough food for everyone? This is, these are the stories that marked me probably more profoundly than anything else. And then came the Yugoslavia war, you know, my direct exposure to the impact of conflict. I cannot imagine how anybody could say, we need this war because you always forget that there are people in this war that suffer. And if you keep the people in mind, you will always favor a political solution. I'm not naive, you know, I'm surrounded by, you know, by, by harsh interlocutors in a harsh environment. But still I think if you keep the people in mind, if you, if you had all times remembered that it could happen to you, it could happen to your children, you will think twice before you start the war. You are the first woman to be president of the ICRC. I mean, do you think gender matters and how you're dealing with conflict? You know, I often say this when I came into office, everybody was out. asking about how is it being the first woman president of the ICSC after 160 years of male dominance. And it's not only at the top, I mean, it's across the institution, because it's an organization that was created in war for wars. And then I went to Mali to know the Mali and they sat with the women. And for the first time in ICSC President could sit with the women in a tent, because social norms prevented my predecessors from doing the same. And I felt so shaken throughout the night when I realized what is happening to women in conflict and how brutal it is, because you have an overlap of many things affecting women. And just depriving them of even the minimum protection that any human being should have at all times. And that night I realized it is a difference when it's a woman. Because if there would never be a woman at the head of these organizations, we wouldn't be as conscious of what it means for 50% of the world's population. You've seen many horrible things as part of your job. You deal, as you said, in a very harsh environment, probably the harshest. How do you protect yourself from the relentlessness, awfulness? I mean, I've seen you get, if I may say, a little emotional, thinking about it, I don't go. In Germany, I was built close to water, can you say that? I'm very emotional. I try to be hard, but it doesn't work. And maybe it's good that I'm emotional. Maybe it's good that I get angry when I see bad things or unjust things, because it keeps me going. It keeps that feeling alive that you have to do something. You can't just admire the problem you. There's something that you have to be able to do. And I've always had that feeling. I remember when I was a child, I wanted to say for all the sea turtles, because I watched this documentary about how they're being tortured, when they're being caught and how they are being killed, getting to the meat, and how much suffering that entails. I said to my parents, I want to become a veterinarian. I need to save the turtles. And I think I would have. I probably would have started a global movement for the sea turtles, but then so many other things have happened in between and I now do it. I try it at least to save human lives. You know, as I was thinking about the ICRC and the difficulty in this era of staying neutral, this idea of neutrality and this idea of coming in and having to speak to both sides and not taking sides, it really made me wonder about the challenges of that in this environment. There have been many accusations that the ICRC hides behind its neutrality to mask inaction. The Holocaust is a moment where the ICRC failed catastrophically to prevent or at least to even acknowledge the extermination of the Jews. I know your background is in philosophy and I know you feel all this very deeply. And I'm wondering, what does it mean to be neutral in the face of extreme suffering? I mean, is there an inherent tension in that? When I started my studies, I had my thoughts and I could also get impatient with the stubborn insistence on neutrality and confidentiality, I very, very quickly changed my mind when I became pressed in myself. Having accepted this unique opportunity, I had to learn quickly and then also had to acknowledge that we wouldn't be able to do what we do without this strict insistence on neutrality, not in the context of prisoners of war in Russia and in Ukraine, but definitely, definitely. We wouldn't have been able to bring back the hostages from Gaza. I mean, you see the pictures, you see our colleagues are unarmed amongst thousands, if not tens of thousands, men in a situation surrounded by a rubble from which there was no escape. We had to negotiate the terms with everyone. Nobody would have trusted us to be able to do this. Highly complex operation. If we hadn't defended our neutrality over 160 years because we are predictable in it, you tweak it once. You become political and that's it. I know it makes so many people angry, but that's the essence of our mission. In that context, I want to also ask you about Iran because you noted that you have also spoken with the Iranians about the negotiations and about the situation there. I understand your role as a neutral party. I understand that you cannot divulge the nature of those discussions. But I am wondering how much you can say about what you've seen there and how this conflict may or may not be resolved. It became very clear to me, and I followed at the time the nuclear talks between 2013 and 2015 between former president Obama and the president Obama. It became clear to me at the time how complex these negotiations were. It's much more complicated today in comparison. The first challenge to establish is the trust. We have in the meantime created a world where war is not a means of last resort. It happens at any moment in a process, which leads to a situation where parties always keep that possibility in mind and always keep a high readiness and preparedness to return to conflict. That in itself is not helpful because these negotiations will take a long time, will require a lot of compromise. But on top of this, we have created a situation that is much, much more complex because of the overlapping of conflicts and challenges. Today's conflicts are not limited to a given situation. They are turning into systems. Explain what you mean exactly. Look, you have countries aligning over continents as states. You have shifts in military cooperation. You have shifts in interests and economic goals. So speaking of Iran, so Iran's relationship with Russia, Russia's relationship with China, the conflict spreading to Saudi Arabia and Yemen with the Houthis. And then you have the non-State-owned groups that are connected with other non-State-owned groups in the Horn of Africa, and you can follow these streams through the Sahel as far as Western African countries. Certain groups, ideological groups or radicalized groups, however you want to name them. They share ideologies. They share common objectives. They align. They realign. They trade their arms. They ensure the availability of technology and cheap weapons across many, many countries and thousands of kilometers. So you never limited one situation. And if now the situation escalates in Yemen, you can be sure that it won't remain contained to that territory for a long time. You already have two very important see-states affected. It means that the number of actors that will need to get involved and exercise political pressure is increasing. So you have a lack of trust. You have asymmetric warfare that allows these conflicts to continue for an extended period of time. And on top of this, and I haven't mentioned this yet, there's a total absence of economic growth. And, you know, a fast loss of development gains that have been essential for the welfare of the people in many countries of the world, take Iraq to begin with. You know, over the last 10 years, the country has been recovering from very large conflicts that have had a heavy impact on society and the economies. These gains are being undone. Countries don't have the fiscal space anymore to cope with the fallout created by continued warfare, and at the same time, there's no prospect of economic growth that would allow us to feel, you know, capable of repaying the debts that are being created today. So the combination of these or the convergence of these trends is extremely dangerous. I still insist we will not be able to get out of it without negotiations, but these negotiations have to happen yesterday. There will last as long as it takes. They will require a lot of consensus and a lot of people involved. This has to be understood, and now what do we need? We need political will. There's not much we can do if this continues to escalate. We need negotiations. We need powerful politicians. I personally, I want politicians to have power to negotiate. President Trump, in his recent speech at the UN General Assembly, was threatening the annihilation of Iran by U.S. forces, speaking of this idea of trust and using war as a method of negotiation. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic? And he's used language like that quite a bit, but, you know, it was notable to me in that particular speech because he made that statement at a body explicitly created to stop wars, which is the United Nations. And I'm just wondering what you think that kind of language says about America's understanding and commitment right now to these very complex in-depth negotiations that you say are needed? You know, I started my career as a diplomat about 25 years ago in New York. And since I've been observing eroding language, you know, certain things set back then would have triggered points of order, you know, people would have left the room. They would have been outraged. I remember when at the time Hugo Chavez spoke at the General Assembly and what reactions this triggered. Yes. More and more President Bush and the smell of sulfur implying that he was the devil. Exactly. This is a gradual erosion and all of a sudden makes you realize, but there are things being said that, you know, in certain situations could even lead to war crimes because you, depending on who you are and what the situation looks like, could entice people to do things that would actually amount to war crimes. This is why hate speech and this brutal language is so dangerous. But, you know, I'm not accusing a specific person today because this erosion has been happening for far too long and I've been alert for many years now, or I know what he's standing up and saying, this cannot happen because this in itself is preparing for war. But most importantly, every politician that uses the term, any term that points at there are no rules and there are no red lines, sends this signal to any person in the world that bears a weapon, that holds a weapon. You have to be conscious that as a holder of power, you have a far bigger reach. So far, many more people here, oh, there are no red lines. I have weapons. I can use them. One of the things that struck me about why we're in such a period of global conflict is that it's relatively easy to get into wars, as you've said, but increasingly hard to get out of them. So they drag on and accumulate. So a war that started 15 years ago doesn't get resolved and then new wars are added to that. And so what we're seeing is just conflict upon conflict upon conflict. Are we losing our capacity to resolve conflicts? Definitely. I mean, that's a fact. If you don't negotiate over 10 years, you lose the practice. You cannot. It's like being a heart surgeon, you don't stop operating and then come back and they give you the instruments and you resume. Negotiation is something that you need to master. I spoke once with a senior representative of the ANC in South Africa who told me our adversaries never had to negotiate anything. They did not have to do it. So we had to train them first before we could sit at the negotiation table. Negotiations require so many things and they require, especially, political weight, courage and compromise, but you need to know what your red lines in the negotiation are, how far you prepare to go and how you get the other party to agree. When you look at Ukraine and Russia, Iran and the US, there have only been sporadic attempts to negotiate those conflicts, this is not yet the expression of courage and will to come to an agreement. I mean, sending the vice president, for example, to Iran for a day, that's not a negotiation strategy, I think. When you think about the context of the Iran nuclear deal, hundreds of people, years, you know, when it's serious and you know when it's happening. Undergirding this whole discussion and your call for leaders to pick up the phone is the breakdown of many democracies and the institutions that hold them together. The weakness that we're seeing in upholding liberal democracy means that international organizations are also weak, you know, look at Germany, a country you know well, the far right, the far left, surged in recent elections, citizens are angry, they're looking for solutions, they have a lack of faith in politics to solve their problems in a way that feels beneficial to them and governments seem to be increasingly afraid of their own populations. Are you worried about the complete breakdown of the post-World War II order? Of course I am, because the order made it possible for Europe to stay out of a third world war, to stay out of the levels of the destructions that we have seen, you know, coming from these coils. Europe is in a certain way also the leader of battle, obviously, you know, I feel very bad saying that, but we have to acknowledge that the European or the Western history is not one of peace and security, but coming out of that trouble, there was, there were a few people who had the foresight and the courage to establish an international system that is in no way perfect, but for a long time prevented the worst. And that system is there, including the Geneva Convention, I mean, everything that is written in the Geneva Convention today is still as valid, because if you had to rewrite them, you would come back with the same principles. Trust me, because they're so intuitive and logical. In any society, religion, culture, nobody will tell you, it's correct to torture a child. I mean, how unimaginable would that be for any society to come back to this idea of where we are in the world right now that perhaps we might already be in this third global war without us knowing? What can we do? What should we be doing? You know, let's go back to that time when we believed in peace. Why is it so wrong to start a global movement around the notion of peace and world peace? It's possible. I think when I talk to my children for them pieces. It's not something completely away and absent. This is how they imagine their future. I think we have to listen to them and we have to start retreating from an over-focus on weapons, weapons systems, defense, technologies. We also have to recreate a positive narrative about humanity, about peace, about coming together and working together and living together. Because there is a minimum ground that nobody has left yet, and that is the ratification of the Geneva Commensions. The commitment to a set of rules that prevent the worst, that prevent destruction of humanity. We have to come back to recognizing that humanity is what holds us together and that this is something we need to protect as a priority today, because we're debasing almost everything. Marianas Polarich, thank you so much. I have really found our conversation very sobering. I thank you. That's Marianas Polarich. To watch this interview and many others, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/@symboltheinterviewpodcast. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly. It was edited by John Wu, mixing by Sophia Landman, original music by Dan Powell and Marion Luzano. Photography by Philip Montgomery. The rest of the team is Priya Matthew, Wyatt Orm, Paolo Newdorf, Maya Tepler, Eddie Costas, Leland James, Gabby Contreras, Kathleen O'Brien, and Brooke Mentors. Our executive producer is Alison Benedict. Next week, David talks with Bono and the Edge about YouTube's 50th birthday and the band's forthcoming album. I'm Luzano Varro and this is the interview from The New York Times.