IN July 1972, the last emperor of Ethiopia celebrated his 80th birthday in extravagant style, culminating in a sumptuous banquet for 2,000 elite guests. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of his subjects were dying of starvation in Tigray and Wollo.
The callous indifference of the emperor’s government towards this catastrophe helped cement the idea among large segments of the population that Haile Selassie was an out-of-touch, self-dealing autocrat, unfit to rule Ethiopia. Barely two years later, he was deposed in a revolution and a military coup.
In today’s Ethiopia, echoes of that shameful time are growing deafening. In late December, footage began to spread on social media of the horrific conditions within a large camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) at Hitsats, in northwest Tigray.
The videos of wraith-like women and starving children went viral. There were images of fragile elderly people moving painfully slowly, weakened by hunger. Others lay quietly in dilapidated shelters.
It’s estimated that since 2022, more than 300 people have died in Hitsats from hunger and a lack of medical care, out of an IDP population of 16,000. An additional 50 deaths have been reported since July 2025, with 1,700 people described as at risk.
The IDPs in Hitsats, a village close to the Eritrean border, are among the more than 800,000 Tigrayans forced from their homes in western Tigray during Ethiopia’s 2020-2022 civil war. It was a conflict that pitted the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – Tigray’s ruling party – against the federal government and its two military allies, the Eritrean army and militia from the neighbouring Amhara region.
Claiming western Tigray as historically Amhara, its militia forced out Tigrayan civilians through a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that included systematic rape, torture and killings. The violence had the tacit support of the Ethiopian and Eritrean militaries.
The victims of that expulsion now languish in more than 90 overcrowded and poorly serviced camps like Hitsats. The 2022 Pretoria peace accord that ended the war was supposed to pave the way for their safe “repatriation”. But western Tigray is now run by Amhara administrators, settlers are arriving from Amhara claiming land and homes, and the paramilitary Tekeze Guard intimidate all returnees.
How did we get here?
Long before the videos from Hitsats emerged, it was clear to anyone who cared to look that the IDPs were in desperate need. The TPLF knew it. The Ethiopian government knew it. The UN and other humanitarian agencies did so as well.
But all of these powerful people and institutions, like Haile Selassie half a century ago, were in denial.
For the aid system, there is some mitigation – although it cannot be absolved of all responsibility. It suffered two consecutive blows over the past three years that have magnified the Hitsats tragedy and the suffering of all vulnerable people in Ethiopia.
The first was the suspension in 2023 of World Food Programme (WFP) assistance – a draconian response to the discovery of large-scale aid diversions run by officials in the federal government and Tigray’s regional administration. The freeze lasted for several months and affected 20 million people countrywide.
The stoppage was demanded by WFP’s main donor, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and was only reversed after WFP was able to develop a biometric system to track food deliveries.
The second setback was the effective closure of USAID by President Donald Trump at the beginning of last year. Ethiopia was one of the world’s largest recipients of US assistance – much of it humanitarian lifesaving aid – but it has since been dramatically scaled back.
Even before USAID’s demise, WFP was in trouble. A serious funding gap that began three years ago forced it to slash the number of people it could feed, and the USAID cuts forced it to close its office in Shire, which shelters one of Ethiopia’s largest IDP populations and is geographically close to Hitsats.
Across Tigray, the humanitarian situation is dire – worsened by last year’s drought. In the Kola Temben region of Tigray, a UN-led fact-finding mission found Global Acute Malnutrition rates of 62% in children under five, and over 70% in pregnant and lactating women.
The displaced face additional problems with access to clean water and health services. Close to 60% living in host communities also suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders, which largely go untreated.
These IDPs once farmed the fertile plains of western Tigray, growing sesame and other cash crops for export, and they lived well. They are now destitute, their lives on hold.
“We are dying daily and burying almost every day”
In May last year, I travelled to Hitsats as a research assistant, interviewing IDP families about their experiences. I met Keshi Mebrahtom (not his real name), who had been displaced from Humera, in western Tigray. He said all the IDPs were struggling to find enough food to eat, adding that the 15 kilos of food rations they were supposed to receive were frequently delayed, while “clothes… cooking oil, and medicine are luxuries”. The last time there was a food delivery was in January.
WFP’s biometric screening is also seen as discriminatory. A key criterion for IDPs to receive food is that they must be camp-based. Yet more than 50% of IDPs live within the host community and among relatives. Although their needs can be just as desperate, they are omitted from the database that entitles them to rations.
The New Humanitarian asked WFP for comment for this story, and despite a reminder sent last week, received no response.
“The foreign donors ignore us and give us their back. The party, to which we dedicated our lives, has given us its back.”
In late December, I called an elderly man in Hitsats whom I had met on a visit earlier that month. I asked how he was and whether people were coping with the aid cuts. “Everything is bad,” he answered. “We are dying daily and burying almost every day.”
He remembered the 1985 famine and how he had been forced to migrate to neighbouring Sudan, where the TPLF and aid agencies were able to provide relief. But now, he said, “the foreign donors ignore us and give us their back. The party, to which we dedicated our lives, has given us its back.”
His resentment is not misplaced. At a time when the images from Hitsats dominated social media, causing shock and outrage, the TPLF was busy faction-fighting and convening inconsequential public meetings – including one advertised as “the executive capacity building forum”.
The blame game
The federal government, the TPLF, and the Tigray Interim Regional Administration (TIRA) – set up under the ceasefire agreement as a first step towards Tigray’s re-inclusion in the federation – have tried to distance themselves from the crisis by blaming each other. Yet they are all responsible.
In December, TIRA president Tadese Werede visited the Adi-Shementenay area – next door to Hitsats – to inspect a road project. He said nothing about the hungry IDPs whose images were flooding social media, and neither did he divert his entourage to the camp to offer any support.
The insensitivity is breathtaking. The TPLF even collects party membership dues from exhausted and hungry IDPs.
Fetleworq Gebreegzabhier, who runs TPLF’s headquarters in the regional capital, Mekelle, claims IDPs tell her survival of the party – which is under growing political pressure from the federal government – is their primary concern. “Wherever we discussed [it], they said no people can be saved without first the party being saved,” she said at a press conference.
The insensitivity is breathtaking. The TPLF even collects party membership dues from exhausted and hungry IDPs. “They asked me for party membership payment,” an IDP from Hitsats told The New Humanitarian. “I answered them, ‘I have no money, I can’t pay’.”
Getachew Reda was the founding TIRA president until he fell out with the TPLF last year and fled to Addis Ababa. He has set up a new party, the Tigray Democratic Solidarity Party (known as Simret), which accuses the TPLF of wanting “to survive first, before the people”. Yet as a former senior TPLF figure, Getachew oversaw the same system that demands political loyalty as a priority.
The federal government also has a role to play in the crisis. It insists that all humanitarian assistance must be channelled through its delivery mechanisms, and suggests the Tigrayan authorities are to blame for shortages by pocketing food aid.
The TIRA argues that the fault lies at the federal level – before the aid gets to Tigray. It suggests that Addis Ababa is punishing the region, its former enemy. “They [are all] weaponising our suffering, our death,” concluded the elderly man in Hitsats.
Under the pressure of a determined social media campaign, the TIRA has now launched an appeal to help the IDPs in Hitsats, tapping into local philanthropy and the Ethiopian diaspora. The total amount raised has not been made public.
IDPs need to go home
A critical failing of the Pretoria ceasefire agreement was that it skirted the issue of IDP returns to western Tigray.
Under the terms of the accord, responsibility for ensuring safe repatriation lies with the federal government, but it is unclear who will be granted political control of the region, currently under Amhara administration.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has said its status should be resolved by referendum, but there has been little movement. Both Addis Ababa and the TPLF blame each other for the delays, while IDPs fear the violence of the Amhara paramilitary Tekeze Guards.
After the starvation in Hitsats became public, Gebrehiwot Gebreegzabhier, the head of Tigray’s disaster risk management commission, told Tigray TV that the only solution was the safe return of displaced people, “in accordance with the Pretoria peace agreement”.
But with relations nosediving between the federal government and the TPLF, that is looking increasingly unlikely. Instead, both sides are inching closer to armed confrontation, which would be a humanitarian – and regional – calamity.
I fought in the 2020-2022 war as a Tigray Defence Force soldier. Witnessing the horror of Hitsats and the continued suffering facing IDPs denied the chance to go home and rebuild their lives, I feel that I have failed the people of Tigray.
Yet, like so many others in Tigray, I also feel betrayed. The war we fought has improved nobody’s lives, except the political elites in Addis Ababa and Mekelle. And if war comes again, so many more will suffer – forced from their homes, families torn apart, livelihoods and lives once more destroyed.
Edited by Obi Anyadike.
–––––
The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
