'Unseen' News and Views
Nairobi, 21 August 2024 (IOM)* – The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is appealing for USD 18.5 million to provide crucial health-care services to migrants, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and host communities in East, Horn, and Southern Africa at risk of mpox.
Windows shattered by nearby airstrikes. Children crying out from conflict’s psychological blowback. The sense of a hangman’s noose growing ever tighter.
These are some of the stories shared by World Food Programme Gaza employees. Like for hundreds of thousands of fellow Palestinians on the Strip, there is no escaping the 10-month-old war.
A UN team inspects an unexploded 1,000-pound bomb lying on a main road in Khan Younis. Credit: OCHA/Themba Linden
His words fit into a messaging template now in its eleventh month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.
15 Aug 2024 – Now the numbers killed in the indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza exceeded 40,000 registered deaths (72% of them women and children). But the number of deaths could be many folds more (at least ten thousand under the rubble, many thousands died for lack of food or medical care etc).
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Gaza under intense, relentless Israeli bombardment Aug 2024. Photo: Mazin Qumsiyeh
But globally the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. How do they do it and how do we stop it.
Climate change is fuelling flooding and other forms of extreme weather, causing fresh displacement and making life even harder for people already uprooted from their homes.
Residents in Baghlan-e-Jadid district assess the damage caused by recent flooding in Afghanistan’s northeastern Baghlan province. © UNHCR/Mujeeburrahman Habiby
In recent weeks, torrential rains in Afghanistan, Brazil and East Africa have inundated towns and villages, destroyed homes and livelihoods, and brought increasing hardship for the most vulnerable populations.
(UN News)* — A surge in conflict combined with torrential rains and floods is deepening the crisis in Myanmar, leading to a surge in displacement, UN humanitarians have said.
(UN News)* — On , UN authorities in Sudan confirmed that truckloads of food and supplies have been approved to cross the border from Chad through the Adre crossing.
Khartoum’s war-destroyed Omdurman market, once a vital economic and social hub. Photo: WFP/Jonathan Dumont
The opening of the vital aid route on Friday was welcomed by officials, as it serves as a vital humanitarian route for delivering urgent aid to millions, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
UN Secretary-General António Guterres is closely following negotiations in Doha focused on trying to end the war in Gaza, where the situation continues to remain catastrophic after more than 10 months of unrelenting war.
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Among those killed was Sergio Vieira de Mello of Brazil, the UN envoy in Iraq and High Commissioner for Human Rights, who had a long and distinguished UN career stretching over 30 years.
As the UN commemorated World Humanitarian Day on August 19, it continues to be confronted with rising death tolls among both its humanitarian workers and peacekeepers worldwide.
UNITED NATIONS, New York, 18 August 2024 (UNFPA)* – There were more than 1,500 attacks on health facilities last year. More than 280 humanitarians and at least 750 health workers and patients were killed.
These numbers were racked up not on battlefields, but in hospitals, in homes, in vehicles delivering vital medical care, in spaces designed to be safe.
More health workers and patients were killed or injured in 2023 than any previous year – a grim record the world is on track to beat in 2024.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 