Archive for ‘Middle East’

25/09/2025

Gaza: Voices from Hell on Earth

Human Wrongs Watch

Photo: NRC

These words belong to Eman Muqbel, site management coordinator for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Gaza. She and her family are among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living under bombardment in Gaza City and being forced to flee their homes.

25/09/2025

Colonialism Hijacks Energy Transition

Human Wrongs Watch

By OXFAM International*

70% of minerals for renewables lies in Global South but the majority of profits are captured by the world’s richest

The vital transition from fossil fuels into renewable energy is being captured by super-rich polluters – individuals, companies and countries – reproducing colonial patterns that are entrenching inequalities and fueling human rights violations, says Oxfam’s new report Unjust Transition: Reclaiming the Energy Future from Climate Colonialism, published on 24 September 2025. 
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Image from OXFAM International.

For example, Tesla, the firm owned by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, made $5.63bn from Electric Vehicles (EVs) sales in 2024.

For each EV, the company earned profits of $3,145 – 321 times more than the entire Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) got for supplying the 3Kg of cobalt in each car. 

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25/09/2025

UNICEF Aid Trucks Robbed at Gunpoint in Gaza City

Human Wrongs Watch

(UN News)* — Humanitarian aid in Gaza must be protected, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday [], following the theft of therapeutic food critical for saving thousands of young lives from malnutrition as famine spreads. 

Children who are not getting enough to eat attend a nutrition clinic in Deir al Balah, in Gaza.
© UNICEF/Eyad El Baba | Children who are not getting enough to eat attend a nutrition clinic in Deir al Balah, in Gaza.

“The individuals commandeered the drivers at gun point and diverted the RUTF before releasing the drivers and trucks,” the agency said in a statement.

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24/09/2025

‘Environmental Damage in Gaza Strip Harming Human Health, Threatening Long-Term Food and Water Security’

Human Wrongs Watch

By the UN Environment Programme*

Nairobi, 23 September 2025 Two years of escalating conflict have caused unprecedented levels of environmental damage in the Gaza Strip, damaging its soils, freshwater supplies and coastline, finds a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

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24/09/2025

Health Workers Lose Support Structures and Pregnant Women Die: The Reality of Funding Cuts Hits in Yemen

Human Wrongs Watch

By the UN Population Fund*

HADRAMAUT/HAJJAH/TAI’Z GOVERNORATES, Yemen, 15 September 2025 – “The patient was in her third trimester and arrived with severe bleeding,” said Ms. Akaber, a community midwife from the Ku’aydinah District, in Yemen’s northwestern Hajjah Governorate. “I provided assistance, but the baby was already dead.” 
A midwife from a UNFPA mobile health clinic assesses a pregnant woman at a displacement camp in Marib, Yemen. The mobile clinic is no longer operational due to funding cuts.  ©UNFPA Yemen
A midwife from a UNFPA mobile health clinic assesses a pregnant woman at a displacement camp in Marib, Yemen. The mobile clinic is no longer operational due to funding cuts. ©UNFPA Yemen

The patient was Hanan Wahan, a 25-year-old mother of three who was nine months pregnant. She experienced complications during an attempted home birth, and Ms. Akaber urged her husband to bring her to the district hospital, hoping they could save her life.

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23/09/2025

Beware Independent Central Banks

Human Wrongs Watch

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Sep 23 2025 (IPS)* – US President Trump’s snide barbs against his appointee, US Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Jerome Powell, have revived support for central bank independence – long abused by powerful finance interests against growth and equity.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Independent central banks are supposed to improve the quality, equity, and growth impact of monetary policy.

Instead, they have primarily served powerful financial interests, with contractionary and regressive effects leading to slower, unequal growth.

Independent of whom?
Central banks were established to determine monetary policy to shape financial conditions to achieve national economic objectives.

In recent decades, the new conventional policy wisdom has been that independent central banks should set monetary policy. Thus, they have been influenced by powerful financial interests, typically foreign, in smaller, open developing countries.

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23/09/2025

To Hell with US Empire

Human Wrongs Watch

By Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service*

Zarni tells it like it is.

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11 Sep 2025 – Kirk, Charlie Kirk is DEAD. By that single “BEAUTIFUL” shot, as his Patron Donald Paedo Trump Jr is wont to say (ala BIG and Beautiful Bill).

Obviously, it must have been a Big and Beautiful Bullet. The shot was too neat and professional, needing no follow-up, that in turn, rules out any “woke” or Left or Marxist or Muslims or LGBTQs.

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22/09/2025

New Industry Requirements Could Disrupt Abusive Armed Groups’ Trade in Gold

Human Wrongs Watch

22 September 2025 — Deep in the forest in Venezuela’s Bolivar state, residents live in fear of horrific violence at the hands of armed groups involved in the illicit gold trade.

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A gold miner carries a sack of rocks to a grinding mill at a mine in El Callao, Bolivar state, Venezuela, April 29, 2023. © 2023 Matias Delacroix

During a 2020 investigation, a 17-year-old boy told Human Rights Watch how he witnessed members of a Venezuelan armed group amputating both hands of a miner they accused of stealing gold. Summary executions and forced child labor by armed groups is still happening today.

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22/09/2025

Outsourcing Cruelty: Trump’s Mass Deportation Machine

Human Wrongs Watch

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 19 2025 (IPS)** Thousands of Afghans who fled to the USA when the Taliban took over in August 2021 now face the prospect of deportation to countries they’ve never been to.
 

Credit: Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters via Gallo Images

People who risked everything to escape persecution, often because they helped US forces, now find themselves treated as unwanted cargo under the Trump administration’s anti-migration policy.

Trump’s expanded deportation programme targets an estimated 10 million foreign-born people who live in the USA but lack proper legal documentation.

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18/09/2025

Deadly Attacks and Collapsing Services Push Sudan Closer to Catastrophe

Human Wrongs Watch

By Vibhu Mishr

(UN News)* — The United Nations has sounded the alarm over Sudan’s spiralling crisis, warning that deadly attacks in El Fasher, the collapse of essential services, and mass displacement are pushing millions in Darfur and beyond closer to catastrophe.

Patients receive treatment in a tent outside a hospital in Khartoum, as Sudan’s health system comes under severe strain from attacks, shortages, disease outbreaks, and natural disasters.
© UNICEF/Ahmed Mohamdeen Elfatih | Patients receive treatment in a tent outside a hospital in Khartoum, as Sudan’s health system comes under severe strain from attacks, shortages, disease outbreaks, and natural disasters.

Sudan has been embroiled in a brutal civil war between rival militaries – the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and affiliated militias.

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