Alert Summer 2025: Displaced

A letter from Dr. Rasha Khoury

Dear friends,

These are difficult times. At Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), we are used to working under challenging circumstances. But the shockwaves of the sudden and decimating cuts to US foreign aid, coupled with dire and worsening crises in Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, Haiti, and elsewhere, have resulted in historic global humanitarian needs and dwindling resources to meet them.

MSF is independent and doesn’t accept funding from the US government, so our work is not directly affected. But our work doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and we can’t fill the gaps alone. Around the world, MSF teams are witnessing the reduction or cancellation of services provided by US-funded groups, from vaccination campaigns to sexual and reproductive health services to water and sanitation work.

Few are more vulnerable than those who have been forced to flee their homes, and as the effects of the aid cuts continue to reverberate across the globe, we know that in many countries where we work, they will hit displaced people the hardest. As we marked World Refugee Day on June 20, we are spotlighting our work with refugees, migrants, and other people on the move.

You’ll hear from MSF USA’s CEO Avril Benoît on the state of the global humanitarian ecosystem, the role MSF must play in this changed landscape, and the challenges our movement faces. Aid cuts are not the only US policy making it more difficult for people to access the health care they need. Ever-more restrictive immigration rules also put migrants and refugees at greater risk.

We’ll update you on the situation in Gaza, where Israeli forces, airstrikes, and evacuation orders are fueling massive displacement and eroding conditions necessary for life. Gaza’s health system, under relentless attack, has been pushed beyond the breaking point.

After nearly 20 months of bombardment and three months of total blockade, Israeli authorities allowed a trickle of aid into Gaza in May, but it's nowhere near enough to meet the massive, manufactured, and growing humanitarian crisis in the Strip. In this desperate hour, we reiterate our rejection of this instrumentalization of humanitarian aid. Health workers and health facilities must never be targets, and aid must
never be used as a weapon of war.

In this issue, you’ll also find an interview with Serge Bakor Lambey, MSF water and sanitation supervisor in Adré, Chad, where hundreds of thousands of people have landed after fleeing war in neighboring Sudan. In addition to being a water and sanitation expert, Serge is also a poet who has been chronicling both his own experiences working for MSF and those of the people he has met in the camp. For Serge, poetry is an important emotional outlet during difficult times—and a crucial way to articulate solidarity with the displaced people he and his team are helping.

In difficult times it’s especially important to remember that this solidarity underpins all of MSF’s work. Every day, in more than 70 countries around the world, our tens of thousands of colleagues reach out in solidarity to fellow human beings caught in crisis— no matter who they are, where they’re from, or what they believe. They do it one bandage at a time, one suture at a time, one vaccine at a time. And they do it because of your solidarity in supporting our humanitarian movement.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Dr. Rasha Khoury
President, MSF USA Board of Directors