(UN News)* — In Gaza, at least 100,000 displaced people have poured into Rafah in recent days, UN humanitarians said on Friday [], worsening already dire conditions in the southernmost part of the enclave.
“A traumatized and exhausted population” is being “crammed into a smaller and smaller sliver of land,” UN emergency relief chief Martin Griffiths warned on social platform X on Friday.
But serious obstacles persist to bringing more aid to those in need amid relentless Israeli bombardment and intense fighting on the ground.
In a region scarred by years of wars and displacement, climate change and water scarcity have become yet another threat for fragile contexts in Middle East and North Africa.
Dried reeds in the marshes of southern Iraq. Photo: Fareed Baram/NRC
In this region, populations’ ability to cope with the impacts of climate change is limited, thereby aggravating their overall vulnerability.
(UN News)* —Aid missions to supply Gaza have become increasingly difficult amid reports of continued heavy bombing of the Strip overnight by the Israeli military and intense clashes “in most areas” with Hamas fighters, UN humanitarians warned on Wednesday [].
Locations in the north and south of the enclave were hit as Israeli ground forces also reportedly pushed into central areas, along with the firing of rockets by Palestinian armed groups into Israel, prompting concerns from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, about the safety of civilians uprooted time and again.
“I’ve been farming this land all of my life and seen so many people from this area leave over the years because of the heat, dry weather and water shortages,” says Adyl Khujanov, who runs a farm in the village of Kyzylkesek, in western Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan region.
Overwhelmed medics in Gaza on Tuesday [] continued to try to save victims of missile strikes including attacks near refugee camps in the centre of the devastated enclave that have reportedly killed well over 100 people, the UN health agency said.
UN News/Ziad Taleb | Nuseirat school in central Gaza which is run by the UN agency for Palestinians UNRWA and is now a shelter for thousands of displaced people.
World Health Organization (WHO) Emergency Medical Teams coordinator Sean Casey said that “100-plus patients” had been brought into Al-Aqsa Hospital on Monday in the space of 30 minutes, following reported blasts, including near Al-Maghazi refugee camp.
All of them needed urgent treatment for serious wounds, the WHO official told UN News, while “about 100” more lifeless bodies were brought into the hospital at around the same time.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) warns that any attempts by Israel to deport and permanently displace Palestinians within and from Gaza would constitute a serious breach of international law and an atrocity crime.
.
Palestinian displaced families in southern Gaza living in tents. Almost 1.7 million Palestinians displaced since the war started. Photo: NRC/Yousef Hammash
26 December 2023 — This concern follows Israel’s forcible transfer of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians within Gaza. Palestinians fear further displacement could lead to a refugee crisis like the catastrophic events of 1948, known in Arabic as the ‘Nakba’.
(Stockholm) — Revenues from sales of arms and military services by the 100 largest companies in the industry totalled $597 billion in 2022, 3.5 per cent less than 2021 in real terms, even as demand rose sharply, according to new data released today [4 December 2023] by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), available at www.sipri.org.
.
Photo: Wikimedia
The decrease was chiefly the result of falling arms revenues among major companies in the United States. Revenues increased substantially in Asia and Oceania and the Middle East.
The industrial agriculture paradigm, which sees the world as a machine, and not as a self-organized living system, has created devastation on the planet, while contributing significantly to the issue of climate change.
.
.
Navdanya International’s latest graphic report, ‘Regeneration is Life‘, presented at Cop 28 in Dubai, analyzes the actual causes at the root of climate change and highlights the true regenerative solutions against the false solutions proposed by polluters.
(UN News)* —This year’s surprising spike in dengue infections globally represents a potentially high public health threat, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday [22 December 2023].
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec 20 2023 (IPS)* –The World Bank insists commercial finance is necessary for achieving economic recovery and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but does little to ensure profit-hungry commercial finance serves the public interest.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
By failing to address pressing challenges within their purview, the second-ever Bretton Woods institutions’ (BWIs) annual meetings on the African continent, in Marrakech in October 2023, set the developing world even further back.
The International Monetary and Financial Committee, which oversees the International Monetary Fund (IMF), could not agree, by consensus, on the usual end-of-meeting ministerial communique for ‘geopolitical’ reasons. The Development Committee, which governs the World Bank Group, fared little better.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 