The huge central African nation has seen years of violence in the restive but resources-rich east, which have uprooted millions of people – some 2.7 million in North Kivu alone and more than seven million nationally. “What breaks my heart is to see a population exhausted by violence, exhausted by conflict, exhausted by the horrors…
3:15 PM ‘Insidious campaign’ to end UNRWA aid operation in Gaza: Lazzarini UNRWA is the backbone of the aid effort to stop Gaza slipping into famine, Mr. Lazzarini told ambassadors, and beyond that it has championed Palestinian development for decades. “Today an insidious campaign to end UNRWA’s operations is underway, with serious implications for international…
The Commissioner-General of the UN relief agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) briefed the Security Council in New York on Wednesday as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens, telling ambassadors that life-saving deliveries are being blocked by Israel as part of an “insidious campaign” to push it out of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Andrea de Domenico was speaking via videoconference to journalists in New York, briefing them on developments in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. He said although humanitarians welcome recent Israeli commitments to improve aid facilitation in Gaza, “we are dealing with this dance where we do one step forward, two steps backwards; or two steps…
Jamie McGoldrick, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator overseeing crisis relief in Gaza, pushed back at Israeli claims that more than 1,000 trucks had entered Gaza in the last few days but only around 800 had been collected on the Palestinian side. The veteran aid official also maintained that the deconfliction system in which humanitarians shared their…
Israeli authorities have not given a clear reason why, said OCHA Spokesperson Jens Laerke, speaking during the regular briefing by UN humanitarian agencies in Geneva. “They very often deny and that is it, and it ends there. We do not get an explanation,” he said. In a widely reported telephone call last Thursday between United…
Since early March, the World Food Programme (WFP) has reached more than 500,000 people, providing school meals, social protection and emergency activities nationwide. The agency has also served some 500,000 hot meals to over 76,000 internally displaced persons in 57 sites in the greater Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. Aid partners have also delivered nearly four million…
Marking six months of war since the “abhorrent” Hamas-led terror attacks of 7 October, António Guterres told journalists at UN Headquarters in New York that nothing could justify the horror unleashed by Palestinian militants that day. “I once again utterly condemn the use of sexual violence, torture injuring and kidnapping of civilians, the firing of…
“The UN WFP has managed to bring desperately needed food and nutrition supplies into Darfur; the first WFP assistance to reach the war-wracked region in months,” said Leni Kinzli, WFP Communications Officer in Sudan. The convoys crossed into Sudan from Chad in late March carrying enough food and nutrition supplies for 250,000 people facing acute…
Briefing the Council on the current situation on the ground, Ramesh Rajasingham, coordination director with UN humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, and Janti Soeripto of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Save the Children, outlined the latest impact of the devastation that has followed the Hamas-led terror attack on Israel last October, which left more than 1,200 people…
