The latest grave assessment from the World Health Organization (WHO) came after UN teams reached Al Ahli Arab hospital and Al Shifa hospital on Wednesday, amid reports of intensifying ground operations by Israeli Defense Forces and continuing airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, in response to Hamas’s 7 October terror attacks on southern Israel. “Patients were…
5:55 PM It’s been a day of intense activity in and around the Security Council at UN Headquarters but it does now look as if ambassadors are going to go into consultations at the top of the hour, to try and bring the United States on board with the resolution which it is hoped will…
Wad Madani is located some 140 kilometres southeast of the war-torn capital Khartoum and sits at the heart of Al Jazirah state, known as Sudan’s breadbasket. Nearly half a million people have fled to the state since war broke out in April between the Sudanese Army and a rival military group known as the Rapid…
Soon after becoming a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1988, she went on a mission to Ethiopia, where years of drought and civil strife had caused terrible famine. After visiting UNICEF emergency operations, she talked about the projects to media in the United States, Canada and Europe over several weeks, giving as many as 15 interviews…
“Access to sufficient amounts of clean water is a matter of life and death…children in Gaza have barely a drop to drink,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “Children and their families are having to use water from unsafe sources that are highly salinated or polluted. Without safe water, many more children will die from deprivation…
Agreement in Brussels on the New Pact on Migration and Asylum reportedly followed three years of intense negotiations, and it should start taking effect in 2024. The deal will attempt to distribute migrants more evenly across the bloc, providing enhanced support and coordination for processing claims away from frontier states such as Italy and Greece,…
Roza Otunbayeva, who also heads the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), also underscored the need for greater engagement with the de facto Taliban authorities who seized power in August 2021. She told the Council that the human rights situation in Afghanistan is characterized by systemic discrimination against women and girls, repression of political dissent…
WFP described the decision taken on safety grounds as a major setback to humanitarian efforts in the country’s breadbasket, where staff had been regularly providing aid to over 800,000 people, including many who had escaped the fighting in Khartoum. The ongoing fighting makes it extremely challenging for humanitarian agencies to safely deliver assistance, especially with…
Though its current evaluation of the global public health risk is “low”, the UN health agency cautioned that with the onset of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the new variant “could increase” the burden of respiratory infections in many countries, noting other diseases such as RSV, influenza and childhood pneumonia that are already on the…
The deaths of over 10,000 civilians have been verified by the UN human rights office (OHCHR) since the invasion began in February 2022, although the actual number of fatalities could be much higher. Over 10 million people have been forced to flee their homes, including more than 6.3 million who have sought refuge outside Ukraine….
