The anticipated reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under an April 7 deal for a two-week suspension of U.S. air strikes against Iran is already marred by confusion and uncertainty. Experts warn that Iran’s continued control over the Strait will still require coordinated international efforts to restore confidence. The stakes extend well beyond energy markets — to humanitarian crises such as Sudan, where already catastrophic conditions are worsening.
Since the United States and Israeli forces launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28 and Iran began retaliating with attacks across the region, the world’s attention has been fixed largely on oil markets, regional escalation, and geopolitical realignment. Those are vital concerns, to be sure. But a quieter catastrophe has been unfolding in the interim, one measured not in barrels of crude oil, but in metric tons of food stuck in shipping containers in Dubai, and in pharmaceutical shipments rerouted around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, and in the slow strangulation of a weakened global humanitarian system at the exact moment when aid is needed most in conflict and disaster zones around the globe.
The Strait of Hormuz accounts for more than 20 percent of the global maritime oil trade, but it also is a critical thoroughfare for humanitarian logistics and supplies. That includes fertilizers, food aid, and medical supplies required for life-saving care and fundamental food security, supplies that fell sharply in early March with the waterway’s effective closure.
So decision-making surrounding military action in the Middle East, including recent efforts to draw down conflict, cannot afford to consider questions of legality and “lethality” without simultaneous and serious attention to the knock-on effects, given the implications of humanitarian catastrophe and hunger for broader security outcomes.
When a Humanitarian Logistics Hub Becomes a Liability
The global aid system has long been under strain, driving an already brewing crisis that was compounded by deep cuts in international humanitarian aid spending of about 30 percent between 2024 and 2025 alone. The precipitous spending drop has hit some of the world’s most devastated conflict zones, including Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Middle East and the Persian Gulf, so severely impacted by the Iran war, served a central role in the teetering aid system. Over two decades, an International Humanitarian City in Dubai became the linchpin of global humanitarian logistics, coordinating crisis response while keeping costs low. Today, as conflict spreads and millions of people face hunger — with food insecurity especially high in areas of East, West, and southern Africa — the humanitarian assistance community fears Dubai could become its Achilles heel. With container terminals disrupted, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration reported that shipping firms were demanding a $3,000 emergency surcharge per container to move through the Dubai hub to recoup rising costs and uncertainty.
The fertilizer shock is particularly alarming for food security timelines. Nearly one-third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization predicts no more than a three-month window for action before risks escalate significantly, affecting global planting decisions for 2026 and beyond. Meanwhile, the Houthi movement in Yemen threatened attacks on additional shipping lanes such as the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden as potential leverage against the United States and Israel. While follow-through attacks have been limited so far, rising threats and uncertainty essentially shut down every viable route.
The oil price spike compounds everything. For humanitarian organizations, price increases translate directly into higher operating costs at every step, including transporting medicines by road and running diesel generators in health clinics. The International Rescue Committee reports that operational costs are up by as much as 30 percent in some areas, further limiting aid delivery. All of this compounds earlier budget hits. Income for the U.N.’s World Food Program dropped by more than half over just three years, to about $6.4 billion in 2025 from more than $14 billion in 2022. The system was already running on fumes when bombs began to fall on Tehran.
The Crisis for Sudan
Sudan was already neglected — despite being the world’s worst humanitarian crisis — before the world’s attention turned to Iran in February. U.N. agencies estimate that about 33.7 million people — two-thirds of Sudan’s population — will need humanitarian assistance this year, with more than 20 million requiring health assistance and 21 million facing acute food insecurity. The World Food Programme has confirmed famine conditions in western Al Fasher, the capital city of North Darfur State and southern Kadugli, the capital city of South Kordofan State, two key military flashpoints in the country. And 20 additional areas across Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan are at risk of famine.
The Iran war has made this worse in both direct and structural ways. Sudan imports more than 50 percent of its fertilizer from the Persian Gulf region, meaning that the Strait closure has not only disrupted the delivery of existing humanitarian aid, but also is undermining the very agricultural foundation that Sudanese families depend on to feed themselves. Humanitarian shipments intended for Sudan have been rerouted as far as the Cape of Good Hope — a 6,000-mile, three-week extension in travel time.
The International Rescue Committee warned in March that pharmaceutical supplies worth $130,000 intended to support about 20,000 people in Sudan were stuck in Dubai, as disruptions to shipping routes delayed deliveries. Save the Children told the Council on Foreign Relations’ Think Global Health that almost $600,000 worth of essential medicines intended for 90 primary care facilities in Sudan were stuck in their Dubai shipping hub.
The Sudanese people are paying the cost, including the country’s women, who for years have been at the forefront of efforts to promote democracy and human rights. In the face of recent hunger and health crises, and increases in gender-based violence, they have helped lead the humanitarian response in Sudan’s volunteer, grassroots mutual aid and emergency-response networks, which have provided vital food aid and medical support. But women in Sudan have lamented that the soaring humanitarian need has not been met with commensurate international support, and that it also has diverted foundational investments in their advocacy for the political mobilization and inclusion of women.
The political attention deficit makes this even harder. Sudan has struggled for years to compete for international focus against higher-profile conflicts. Now, with the Middle East consuming diplomatic bandwidth and media oxygen, the risk is that Sudan disappears from view entirely — even as the material conditions driving its crisis are actively worsened by the same war that has dominated the headlines.
Limiting the Iran War’s Fallout for Sudan
Once the world’s largest humanitarian and foreign aid donor, U.S. cutbacks in assistance last year are weakening the whole system. Then, in December, the U.S. government committed $2 billion in humanitarian finance mainly to be channeled through the U.N. system, but conditions placed on the aid immediately raised concerns about how meaningful that pledge will be. Furthermore, a year after gutting — and later shuttering — the U.S. Agency for International Development, which once channeled and coordinated most U.S. aid (though U.S. foreign aid still made up only 1.2 percent of the federal budget before those cuts), the Trump administration is still working to establish a new State Department humanitarian bureau. Decision-making about that initiative remains opaque. Without an established humanitarian bureau in place at the onset of the war, the U.S. was underprepared and poorly positioned to respond to the cascading global humanitarian impacts of the conflict. Urgent investment and capacity-building within the new bureau are needed to prevent further escalation of crises in Sudan and beyond.
Prioritizing the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz is crucial for humanitarian aid, given that it is likely to be a “monthslong” endeavor, with Iran still holding control of the waterway and the global humanitarian system already straining. The U.N. has established some expert working groups focused on the passage of certain commodities and supplies, but specialists warn these activities have failed to consider a holistic view of humanitarian needs beyond particular supplies that have thus far garnered the most attention, such as fertilizer, at the expense of other urgent needs, such as immediate food aid. One step that might help would be establishing a separate humanitarian task force led by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to monitor and advise on the reopening of the Strait for humanitarian supplies, enabling, as two Council on Foreign Relations experts suggested, “direct coordination by famine response experts.”
Countries could also work to establish global humanitarian air bridges similar to those deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic through the World Food Programme with support from the United States, the European Union, and other partners. That could help channel emergency funding toward the costs of transporting critical supplies.
Furthermore, donors must understand the need to dramatically increase flexible humanitarian funding as a critical component of global security efforts, including to reach women and girls who are facing dramatic resource cuts. In addition to the humanitarian considerations of such aid, the foundational well-being of women and girls is linked to improved security outcomes.
And Sudan cannot be allowed to drop from the agenda simply because the news cycle has moved to Tehran. Last year was the first time in the 21st century that two famines — in Gaza and Sudan — occurred in the same year. The number of people in catastrophic food insecurity is rising. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, an initiative of food aid organizations, Sudan’s humanitarian response plan for 2026 needs $2.9 billion and has so far received only 5.5 percent of the necessary funds. That gap existed before the Iran war; it is now functionally unbridgeable without emergency action.
The Iran war did not create Sudan’s crisis. But it is accelerating it, deepening it, and narrowing the window to stop it.
