UN warns aid workers face deadly new threats as armed drones reshape global conflicts

Each year on World Humanitarian Day, humanity pauses to reckon with the cost of compassion delivered into conflict — and in 2025, that cost reached 350 lives, the second-highest toll ever recorded for aid workers. What is new and newly terrifying is the weapon rewriting the calculus of danger: armed drones, cheap enough to proliferate and precise enough to reach markets, clinics, and convoys that older weapons could not. The United Nations, marking the day with both grief and urgency, is calling on states to enforce the laws that already exist — because the technology of killing is moving fast