(UN News)* —Women and children account for roughly 70 per cent of people killed in the war in Gaza, with two mothers killed every hour since hostilities erupted more than 100 days ago, according to a UN Women report published on Friday [19 January 2024].
The report examines the gendered impact of the conflict, which has left more than 23,000 Palestinians dead, according to Gazan health authorities, about 16,000 of whom are women or children.
(UN News)* — Babies are being “delivered into hell” in Gaza with many others likely dying as a result of conflict with Israel and increasingly dire conditions in the enclave, UN humanitarians warned on Friday [].
Reiterating urgent international calls for a ceasefire, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that there have been nearly 20,000 births since the start of widespread Israeli bombardment in response to Hamas-led attacks in Israel that left some 1,200 dead and approximately 250 taken hostage.
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 15 2024 (IPS)* – The world’s rich are getting progressively richer while the world’s poor continue to be increasingly poorer.
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Credit: Oxfam
In a new report released January 15, Oxfam says the wealth of the world’s five richest men has doubled since 2020 –even as five billion people were made poorer in a “decade of division.”
(UN News)* —The world enters 2024 with soaring cases of cholera globally, with over 667,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths last year, UN agencies have reported.
Eastern and southern African nations are among the worst affected, accounting for about 75 per cent of the fatalities and a third of the cases, as of 15 January, according to UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
With the regions also suffering from lack of adequate clean water and sanitation, and poor case management, children are particularly vulnerable as the outbreaks spread rapidly.
Principled Diplomacy Critical to Uphold Human Rights Framework
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(New York) – Global leaders have failed to take strong stands to protect human rights during 2023, a year of some of the worst crises and challenges in recent memory, with deadly consequences, Human Rights Watch on 11 January 2024 said in its World Report 2024.
(WMO)*, 12 January 2024 — The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has officially confirmed that 2023 is the warmest year on record, by a huge margin.
Ed Hawkins Warming Stripes | | Ed Hawkins
The annual average global temperature approached 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels – symbolic because the Paris Agreement on climate change aims to limit the long-term temperature increase (averaged over decades rather than an individual year like 2023) to no more than 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 17 2024 (IPS)* – World Bank aid encourages governments to enable illicit financial outflows to offshore tax havens by reducing capital controls, thus draining precious foreign exchange and government resources.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Aiding elite wealth
Aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centres known for banking secrecy and private wealth management.
Capital outflows follow aid inflows apparently captured by ruling politicians, bureaucrats and their cronies. In the 22 most World Bank aid-dependent countries, aid disbursements coincide “with increased deposits in foreign bank accounts in tax havens”.
Palestinians arrested in the northern Gaza Strip describe how Israeli soldiers systematically abused civilians and combatants alike, from severe deprivation to brutal physical violence.
5 Jan 2024 – In early December, images circulated worldwide showing dozens of Palestinian men in the city of Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, who were stripped to their underwear, kneeling or sitting hunched over, then blindfolded and put into the back of Israeli military trucks like cattle. The vast majority of these detainees were civilians with no affiliation to Hamas, Israeli security officials later confirmed, and the men were taken away by the army without notifying their families of the detainees’ whereabouts. Some of them never returned.
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 15 2024 (IPS)* – Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a “rules-based international order”?
Members of the UN Security-Council gather for a meeting on the maintenance of international peace and security in the Red Sea. 10 January 2024. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías
It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.
The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”
The headquarters of the International Criminal Court in The Haque, the Netherlands- Credit: Adam Mørk.UNITED NATIONS, Jan 11 2024 (IPS)* — The continued devastation of Gaza by Israel has triggered widespread charges of war crimes, genocide, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, starvation as a weapon of war and mass killings of civilians – over 22,000 at last count—compared to 1,200 killings by Hamas.
These accusations have prompted growing demands for intervention by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which has remained silent while its Prosecutor Karim Khan is accused of double standards and playing politics.
The New York-based Foreign Press Association (FPA), which was scheduled to host a zoom discussion later this week, said “with more than 20,000 Palestinians dead, areas of Gaza turned to rubble, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan has yet to investigate either Israel or Hamas for the deaths, on and after 7 October– despite his exemplary hair-trigger speed against (Russian President) Vladimir Putin fo war crimes committed in Ukraine”.
| Ed Hawkins
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 