Humanitarian means concerned with saving lives and easing suffering. A humanitarian crisis, humanitarian aid, humanitarian grounds.
Aid agencies work to four principles: humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence, and the neutrality is what lets them reach people on every side of a war. A humanitarian crisis is a defined threshold rather than a figure of speech.
1adjectivehumanitarianConcerned with saving lives and easing suffering.
“Trucks carrying humanitarian aid, such as food and medicine, finally reached the flooded region.”
humanitarian is a quality of purpose.
Humanity plus -arian, probably modelled on words like unitarian.
Latin
hūmānitās
Old French
humanité
Middle English
humanyte
English
humanity
English, today
humanitarian
From humanity + -arian, possibly modelled after Unitarian (“Christian who does not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity; pertaining to Unitarianism”) (see noun sense 2 and verb sense 2). humanity Middle English humanyte, humanite, humanitye, from Old French humanité, from Latin hūmānitās. by surface analysis, human or humane + -ity. Partly displaced mankind, from Old English mancynn literally “human race”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA