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The UN’s top human rights official has personally intervened to try to stop spiralling violence in Sudan that’s having a terrifying impact on millions of civilians, who humanitarians say are “staring famine in the face”.
Trucks carrying desperately needed aid into Gaza have started moving ashore on the temporary floating dock built by the United States military, but this is not enough to meet the needs of civilians, UN humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, said on Friday.
UN chief António Guterres reiterated his warning on Thursday against a full-scale assault on Rafah, just as aid teams issued increasingly urgent appeals for safe passage throughout Gaza, to replenish dangerously low stocks of lifesaving supplies.
As the world celebrates the International Day of Living Together in Peace, marked annually on 16 May, we are taking you back to the 1950s, when the UN deployed its first ever peacekeeping force to the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula to help bring an end to the Suez Canal crisis.
A renowned Palestinian orthopaedic surgeon’s death in Israeli detention has been labelled “horrifying’ by a UN human rights expert, prompting calls for an independent international investigation.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) began public hearings on Thursday stemming from South Africa’s recent request for emergency provisional measures to immediately halt Israeli operations under way in Rafah, in southern Gaza, where more than one million Palestinians were sheltering during the seven-month-long war in the besieged enclave.
Iraq is a nation brimming with potential but still haunted by legacies of past turmoil, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for the country, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said in a briefing to the Security Council on Thursday.
The UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Ukraine condemned air strikes in Kherson city on Thursday, which injured dozens of civilians, including two children, and damaged homes and an education facility.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres repeated his longstanding call for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages held in the enclave, and unimpeded access for aid delivery, in remarks to the Summit of the League of Arab States in Bahrain on Thursday.
The international community must give greater attention and resources to war-ravaged Sudan, where millions are “trapped in an inferno of brutal violence”, the top UN aid official in the country said on Wednesday.
Amid some of the fiercest reported fighting in Gaza yet, UN humanitarians on Wednesday repeated warnings that famine is still an imminent threat because of aid restrictions and a lack of safe access.
Two women involved in the day-to-day operations in Haiti of the UN’s humanitarian air service, known as UNHAS, say they have to manage “unknowns” and “dangers and stress” in order to keep aircraft flying.
A fresh arson attempt was made late Monday on the headquarters of the UN agency for Palestine refugees UNRWA in occupied Jerusalem, the second attempt in five days, the agency’s chief said.
Escalating Russian attacks in northeast Ukraine have killed civilians, sparked further displacement and caused massive destruction to railways and other infrastructure, a senior official with the UN humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, told the Security Council on Tuesday.
The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced at the UN Security Council on Tuesday that the investigative stage of the legal proceedings into alleged war crimes in Libya is expected to conclude by the end of 2025, transitioning into the judicial stage.
The outgoing head of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) urged leaders to end their stalemate and bring the country back on the path to peace and stability, in an exclusive interview with UN News.
UN Secretary-General António Guteres is appalled by the escalation of Israeli military activity in and around Rafah in southern Gaza, his spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday.
Large parts of the city of Rafah are now a “ghost town”, with UN humanitarians reporting on Tuesday that some 450,000 Gazans have been forcibly displaced from the southernmost city by Israeli evacuation orders in the last week.
A staff member of the UN Department of Safety and Security (DSS) died and another was injured when their UN vehicle was struck as they travelled to the European Hospital in Rafah, Gaza, on Monday.
The suffering of civilians in Yemen, a country enduring nearly a decade of conflict, remains severe and is worsened by a growing cholera outbreak, the UN’s top humanitarian official cautioned on Monday.
Nearly 2,000 children in Ukraine have lost their lives amidst ongoing and escalating war, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Monday, citing UN-verified data.
Nearly 360,000 people have fled Rafah in the last week amid continuing Israeli bombardment that has crippled humanitarian aid deliveries and is believed to have killed another UN aid worker, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on Monday.
Reports have been coming in that a hospital in Sudan’s North Darfur has been damaged in a heavy uptick of hostilities, leaving two youngsters dead and fanning renewed famine fears, UN aid teams have said.
The Secretary-General and the UN human rights chief said again on Sunday that a large-scale Israeli offensive in Rafah must be prevented at all costs, warning of catastrophic consequences in the densely populated southern area in Gaza.
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With no let-up in the Israeli military operation in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah into Friday, UN humanitarians issued renewed calls for a ceasefire as “the only hope” to avert further bloodshed and restore desperately needed aid deliveries.
Two arson attacks and growing protests forced UN Palestine refugee agency UNRWA to temporarily close its office in East Jerusalem this week, but its vital work will continue as war rages in Gaza and violence rises in the West Bank, Senior Communications Manager Jonathan Fowler told UN News on Friday.
With the situation in Rafah “on a knife’s edge”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres appealed again on Friday for Israeli and Hamas leaders “to demonstrate political courage and spare no effort” in reaching an agreement to end the war in Gaza and free all hostages.
The UN General Assembly convened again in New York on Friday for an emergency special session on the Gaza crisis and overwhelmingly passed a resolution which upgrades Palestine’s rights at the world body as an Observer State, without offering full membership. It urged the Security Council to give “favourable consideration” to Palestine’s request.
Some 80,000 people have left Rafah since Monday amid continuing Israeli bombardment in and around Gaza’s southernmost city overnight and into Thursday, UN humanitarians reported.
The head of the UN Palestine refugee agency (UNRWA) has temporarily closed its headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem after an arson attack on Thursday following weeks of protests.
Youth from Samoa, Tonga, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Niue, Cook Islands, as well as the Republic of Korea, Japan and China, co-organized the workshop. Gathering in Samoa, participants used strategic foresight tools to think about issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and sustainable development.
The young peacebuilders were able to establish cross-regional networks and engage in intergenerational policy discussions, while connecting global efforts like the Paris Agreement to regional frameworks, including the Pacific Islands Forum’s Boe Declaration (2018) and the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent.
Participants were encouraged to use foresight to consider various alternative versions of the future and describe elements they believed should be changed or retained in the current system.
Alesana Malo, a PhD student at the University of the South Pacific, said that thinking about the future was not new: “We do it every day when we think about our career, education, or even the next meal, and have been doing it for generations. Strategic foresight is simply a way of system thinking to perceive events of the future: Potential events that can happen, events that are more likely to happen, and finally preferred events.”
Aloma Black, a youth environmentalist and conservationist from Samoa, highlighted that she “learned through the workshop that we share the same vision for our preferred future, but our pathways to get there differs because our contexts differ”.
During the training, the young peacebuilders also engaged in discussions with Government officials from the Samoan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, the Ministry of Women, Community and Social Development and the Speaker of the Tongan Parliament, as well as UN staff. They highlighted that it was challenging to articulate the complexities of climate change because of the lack of relevant vocabulary in local languages. Participants also emphasized the relevance of traditional knowledge and proposed the establishment of a central repository for Pacific knowledge, to record and encourage the sharing of Pacific research, cultural values, and traditional knowledge.
Innovative technology was identified as a key factor, facilitating new approaches to foster accelerated green transitions and sustainable development. The youth examined the possibility of expanding the implementation of “smart grids” — an electrical grid that uses digital communications technology to detect and react to local changes in usage — to enhance energy resilience in Pacific communities.
Peter Due, Director of the Asia and the Pacific Division in DPPA, said the workshop contributed to “building peer-to-peer networks and empowering youth leadership and engagement in both regions on pressing issues globally but also regionally”.
Despite already feeling the impact of sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and other evidence of climate change, many remained hopeful that Pacific Islanders would be thriving in their home countries in the future, and one participant, Aloma Black, shared a particularly vivid description of her preferred future: She would like to hear the Manumea — a Samoan bird currently listed as endangered — sing again.
United Nations Resident Coordinator Themba Kaula highlighted that “Young people are not just beneficiaries of development agendas. They are active agents of change, catalysts for progress, and architects of peace and justice”.
With that in mind, participants emphasized the need for more dedicated spaces for meaningful youth participation. Among the points made by participants were that Pacific governments should include youth in government decision-making processes, such as Parliamentarian mentorship programs and paid internships; create Youth Councils; and support young negotiators as part of government delegations to international, regional, and national fora such as the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP).
Nicc Moeano, a PhD student from Samoa at the University of Waikato, stressed that “one of the main things that I learned is that there are no limits for youth to be involved — they can participate in parliaments, they can participate in decision-making processes”. Adding to this, Aloma Black expressed hope that youth at the workshop would “take what they had learned and share it with other youth in their networks” and be “empowered to continue engaging in this work not only at the advocacy level but on the ground with rural youth as well”.
After the workshop the young peacebuilders produced a “Call to Action” containing that will be brought to relevant regional and global stakeholders at events such as COP29, Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting CHOGM, the 4th International Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Conference, the Summit of the Future, and other major events. Malo said the youth will “put forward our actionable ideas to Parliamentarians and leaders in the Pacific as well as the whole world, for them to hear our voice and to do something about the impacts of climate change on us — the younger generation and future generations to come”.
Israeli military manoeuvres and shelling continued in and around eastern Rafah in southern Gaza on Wednesday morning as UN humanitarians stressed that “no fuel or aid” is getting into the enclave.
Mr. President,
Distinguished Members of the Security Council,
Mr. President,
Mr. President,
Thank you, Mr. President.
Amid ongoing uncertainty about a ceasefire in Gaza, UN humanitarians have issued new data confirming the war’s deeply damaging impact on women and girls sheltering in Rafah.
Displacement after displacement. That describes the reality facing thousands of Palestinian families in Gaza who took Rashid Street from Rafah to the centre of the Gaza Strip after receiving evacuation orders from Israeli authorities on Monday to move to Al Mawasi, a coastal area of the besieged enclave.
