In 2026, the humanitarian community aims to continue providing targeted assistance, prioritised based on the criticality of needs due to limited resources. To ensure a tightly focused humanitarian response, the humanitarian community has prioritised life-saving and life-sustaining interventions for IDPs, returnees and host communities/residents who have the most acute humanitarian needs, reaching extreme and severe levels; have multiple needs and face specific barriers to meeting those needs; live in critical shelter; engage in emergency-level negative coping mechanisms; face acute protection risks; and are unable to meet their basic needs or access essential emergency services, causing lifethreatening conditions.
The humanitarian response will be delivered and coordinated through 11 operational sectors, including enabling services, Coordination, thematic and system support and the Cash Working Gorup (CWG). The response activities have been designed to support people in need including, IDPs in camps and acutely vulnerable out-of-camp IDPs returnees and vulnerable host communities, to live in safety and dignity, access essential services or meet their basic needs, contributing to one of the HNRP’s three strategic objectives.
Planning for cash-based interventions has been recommended where cash is the preferred response modality of the affected population, where it is feasible to provide cash, and where such assistance has proved effective in the past.
Efforts will be made to ensure that the response is adequately coordinated, and multi-sectoral approaches adopted as much as possible to ensure optimal use of resources. Greater coordination will also be required to promote complementarity and coherence between the humanitarian emergency response and durable solutions, recovery, and development interventions, to ensure the longer-term well-being of these populations and the sustainability of their returns. The humanitarian community also looks to support and complement the government’s efforts to support IDPs, find solutions and improve the living conditions of those still unable to return.
Humanitarian Response Priorities
Strategic Objective I: Provide life-saving and lifesustaining humanitarian assistance to the most vulnerable people, with an emphasis on those in areas with a high severity of needs.
Humanitarian partners will continue to save and sustain lives by seeking to respond to all needs affecting the physical and mental wellbeing of people in need with the highest severity of needs (100 percent of those with extreme needs - severity 4 and some portion of those with severe needs (severity 3). This includes responding to continued IHL and IHRL violations, protection concerns, acute food insecurity, and the needs of IDPs, returnees and vulnerable host communities/residents. Lifesaving and sustained humanitarian assistance will include emergency food assistance, education, health, emergency SNFIs and WASH. Simultaneously, efforts will be made to stop the deterioration in the nutrition status of young children and pregnant and lactating women (PLW), with critical levels of wasting, and stunting. Mental trauma in the aftermath of hostilities persists and is widespread amongst the Syria population. Efforts in 2026 will focus on comprehensive approaches to prevent long-term, intergenerational damage across all population groups. Other life-saving health services, such as trauma, postoperative rehabilitation and long-term, post-surgical care, maternal and child health, will have to broaden as part of wider systematic investments in a highly disrupted health system.
Coordinated planning and delivery: Implementation will encompass coordinated delivery of live-saving and live-sustaining assistance by the sectors. Response activities including delivery of emergency food assistance critical and time-sensitive emergency agriculture inputs, repair/provision of new emergency tents, distribution of emergency shelter materials, implementation of temporary transitional shelters, rehabilitation of collective centres, distribution of core and seasonal NFI support including also hygiene kits, and implementation of site-level infrastructural improvement activities aim to ensure multi-sectoral services are available and provided regularly, including access to emergency WASH and education assistance. The CCCM sector will share the IDP sites integrated monitoring matrix (ISIMM) with respective sectors operating in IDP camps and sites to highlight gaps and to complement with key sector specific indicators such as access to safe water, adequate NFIs and lifesaving/ sustaining shelter support. The lead and contributing sectors will need to work closely with the SNFI, WASH, and Logistic sectors to ensure infrastructure and shelters are upgraded, especially in preparation for winter, during emergency response, including outbreaks, and, during and after rainy seasons.
The nutrition and health sectors will jointly work together to ensure delivery of a minimum package of nutrition services to every child in need alongside primary and secondary health care services (prevention, early detection, and treatment of all forms of malnutrition). The Health and Nutrition sectors will undertake joint capacity strengthening initiatives to ensure that sufficient health care/ nutrition workers and laboratory capacity can deliver essential nutrition services on a scale. The PHC and integrated community health worker package that includes essential nutrition services will be promoted at scale, alongside advocating for unrestricted funding to support this by both sectors. Both sectors will coordinate the procurement of supplies needed for efficient management of SAM with medical complications and anaemia prevention and treatment.
FSAL and Nutrition sectors will coordinate efforts to ensure the provision of food assistance packages that meet the nutritional requirements of vulnerable young children, PLW and Persons with Specific Needs (PWSN) in areas with highest nutrition and food insecurity (Severity ranking 3, and 4 ). The Education sector will coordinate closely with the Protection Sector, and specifically, the Child Protection, and Mine Action AoRs to ensure schools are safe and accessible for students in high-risk locations. Further, referrals and case management services will be strengthened through piloting of an Interagency referrals mechanism and training teachers and caregivers on PSS in education settings. The Education Sector will also coordinate closely with the WASH sector for joint prioritisation and enhancing access to safe water and WASH facilities in schools and with the health sector to mitigate the risk of disease and support the dissemination of lifesaving messages.
Strategic Objective II: Protecting Safety and Rights: Protect the safety, dignity, and rights of crisis-affected people, in line with international law and standards.
Using the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s (IASC) Policy on Protection in Humanitarian Action (2016) as a frame of reference, humanitarian partners will respond to a variety of protection needs and risks. Most of these pose direct threats to physical and mental well-being and many- such as GBV, violence against children, women and men and negative coping mechanisms - have been further aggravated by deteriorating economic conditions, and inadequate access to essential basic services. Addressing negative copying mechanisms with negative impact on children such as child labour and early marriage is a critical priority. This will require close coordination with Education, FSAL and other basic service interventions in order to address the complex, underlying causes for these harmful coping mechanisms. Humanitarian mine action interventions, particularly survey and clearance, will be scaled up. One in three communities in Syria are estimated to be at risk of EO, posing high risks in areas of return, and providing a significant barrier, or threatening the safety of those who have already returned to their places of origin following displacement. Explosive ordnance clearance is a prerequisite for safe return, agricultural recovery, infrastructure rehabilitation, and school reopening. Mine action prioritisation will be aligned with identified return corridors and highreturn localities.
Protection actors will further respond to needs arising from family separation and will also respond to the lack of civil documentation including , housing, land and property issues. The humanitarian community will engage with the Government of Syria and all stakeholders, to implement these protection activities. Housing, land and property security and access to civil documentation are foundational enablers of safe return and sustainable reintegration. A coordinated, cross-sectoral strategy will prioritise legal identity restoration, tenure security, and dispute resolution mechanisms as prerequisites to durable solutions and recovery investment.
Protection risk analysis will continue to inform area-based programming and return facilitation to ensure that solutions pathways do not exacerbate vulnerabilities or generate new protection risks.
Coordinated planning and delivery: Protection partners will work towards promoting adherence to the response-wide collective obligation of Centrality of Protection - including through advocacy with humanitarian leadership, duty bearers and key stakeholders to be guided by the need to ensure protection of the affected population in all decision-making and response, in accordance with IHL, HRL and humanitarian principles. Protection mainstreaming and GBV risk mitigation will be promoted across sectors. The Mine Action AoR and the Education sector will enhance collaboration to promote increased inclusion of risk education messages into education programmes, continue data collection and sharing to monitor the number of children and youth reached with risk education messages through educational programmes, as well as to monitor the number of teachers and other public service providers trained in the delivery of key lifesaving risk education messaging.
Protection Risk Analysis
Building on a practice established in 2018, all sector strategies, as well as UN and humanitarian activities under this HNRP, underwent a mandatory protection risk analysis (PRA). The PRA remains part of a broader strategy to enhance mainstream protection across the humanitarian response. PRA also enables sectors to systematically check for ’do no harm’ considerations at the response planning stage and identify potential protection risks related to the implementation of their activities, along with relevant mitigation measures and resources required for monitoring those risks. The Protection sector, and its AoRs, will continue to provide technical guidance to strengthen response, procedures and practices. Notwithstanding signs of economic stabilization and transition alignment, protection risks remain acute for millions of crisisaffected people. The centrality of protection will continue to guide all phases of humanitarian response and transition engagement.
Strategic Objective III : Restoring life-saving services and livelihoods in support of national recovery priorities: Enable equitable and sustained access to essential services and livelihoods to preserve dignity and promote resilience and self-reliance for crisisaffected people.
Guided by this objective, the response will seek to provide livelihood support to vulnerable people and enable communities to access essential basic services to prevent a further increase in the number of people in need. It will also reduce protracted humanitarian needs by strengthening the selfreliance of affected populations, improving individual and community welfare, and in that way reducing dependence on external assistance.
Coordinated planning and delivery: As improvements to infrastructure and basic services are interlinked and often enabling, the sectors will continue to work jointly in efforts to bring about comprehensive solutions, considering, where relevant, an area-based approach based on an inter-sectoral, multi-stakeholder, geographically targeted approach, and considering the whole population within that location for the provision of a holistic response. The area-based approach will seek to ensure community-led decisionmaking, as well as promote a context-sensitivity and protection lens, eventually fostering locally owned and sustainable structures and interventions. Highreturn districts will require area-based surge planning to stabilize essential services and infrastructure. Geographic prioritisation will ensure that return dynamics are matched with commensurate multisectoral investment to support both returnees and host communities. They will incorporate unified displacement and return population baselines, protection risk monitoring, and service absorption capacity analysis to ensure coherent, evidencebased planning.
To prevent prolonged dependency on humanitarian assistance, returns must be accompanied by sustainable livelihood opportunities and secure tenure arrangements. Addressing HLP disputes and restoring civil documentation will be essential to enable returnees to achieve self-sufficiency and contribute to local recovery.
For livelihood support interventions, sectors will enhance multi-sectoral programmatic integration, especially through linking food security and agriculture, with positive outcomes in livelihoods (i.e. sustainability, income generation and selfreliance) and early recovery (i.e. sustainability and self-reliance).