Wars got a lot deadlier for ordinary people last year, with civilian deaths jumping 40% according to new data by the UN Human Rights Office. At least 48,384 people died in conflicts during 2024, most of them civilians who had nothing to do with the fighting. Human rights defenders got hit especially hard – 502 were murdered and another 123 simply vanished. The math is brutal: every 14 hours, someone defending human rights, reporting the news, or organizing workers was killed or disappeared.
The targeting of journalists got particularly brutal in 2024, with 82 media workers killed compared to 74 the previous year. Over 60% of these journalist killings happened in conflict zones – the highest proportion in more than a decade. This shows how dangerous it’s become to report on wars and human rights abuses, with people trying to silence those who document what’s really happening.
The violence against women and children in wars has been devastating over the past two years. Four times more women and children died in armed conflicts between 2023 and 2024 compared to 2021-2022 – the UN counted 21,480 women and 16,690 children killed. Most of those deaths happened in Gaza, which saw 80% of all child deaths and 70% of women’s deaths during this period, showing how brutal modern warfare has become for families caught in the crossfire.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk tried to put the horrific numbers in perspective, reminding people that each death represents a real person with a family and a story.
“Behind every statistic is a story. Behind every data point, a person,” he said.
The data also showed that discrimination is hitting one in five people around the world, with the most vulnerable often facing attacks from multiple directions at once.
There is some hope amid all the bad news. The number of countries with independent human rights watchdog groups has nearly tripled since 2000, jumping from 32 to 89 countries by 2024. These institutions now cover more than half the world’s population and do a better job of tracking abuses and holding governments accountable. But it’s clear that protecting civilians and rights defenders is getting harder.
