Taiz, YEMEN, 6 December 2023 (UNFPA)* –“One day, when I was returning from fetching water, I collapsed on the road. I was bleeding so badly that I knew I was going to lose my baby.”
Umm Mahra was 31 years old and five months pregnant when she was forced to seek refuge with her family in a remote displacement camp in Taiz, in Yemen’s southwestern highlands.
Conflict had erupted across the country and a crippling drought took hold, exacerbating the situation for millions of people already fleeing for their lives.
(Beirut) – Two Israeli strikes in Lebanon on October 13, 2023, that killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and injured six other journalists was an apparently deliberate attack on civilians and thus a war crime, Human Rights Watch said today [7December2023].
This residential building in Gaza collapsed after it was targeted in an Israeli airstrike. Photo: Yousef Hammash/NRC
5 December 2023 — “The pulverising of Gaza now ranks amongst the worst assaults on any civilian population in our time and age. Each day we see more dead children and new depths of suffering for the innocent people enduring this hell.
LONDON, Dec 4 2023 (IPS)* – The Netherlands is the latest country to lurch to the right amid the global cost of living crisis. Its November election saw maverick far-right populist Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) come first. A hardline Islamophobe who’s called for the Quran to be banned could be the next prime minister.
(UN News)*— Deadly torrential rains and floods have affected more than two million people in several areas of Somalia, with over 100 killed and 750,000 displaced from their homes, the authorities and humanitarian partners said on Thursday [30 November 2023] in the capital, Mogadishu.
The crisis began with the start of the deyr rainy season in October and comes six months after the country emerged from a historic drought that brought it to the brink of widespread famine.
The local government, with operational support from IOM in Indonesia, established two emergency tents at Batee Beach, Pidie Regency, to provide a temporary accommodation for Rohingya refugees disembarked in Aceh. Photo: IOM / Karina Larasati.
Geneva / Bangkok (IOM)*, 28 November 2023 –The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is alarmed by reports of the interception and pushback of vessels carrying Rohingya refugees in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea between Bangladesh and Indonesia.
(UN News)* — Amid hopes of a deal to extend the pause in fighting in Gaza between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday [], the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) reported that humanitarian assistance had reached its shelters in northern Gaza for first time since war erupted last month.
“As we drove through Gaza City it was like a ghost town; all the streets were deserted,” said Thomas White, Director of UNRWA Affairs in Gaza. “The impact of heavy airstrikes and shelling was so visible. Roads are riddled with craters, complicating aid deliveries.”
(UN News)* — As the pause in fighting in Gaza appeared to enter a fifth day on Tuesday [], UN humanitarians warned that aid deliveries needed to multiply immediately to save the lives of the injured and stem the risk of a deadly disease outbreak that has left doctors “terrified”.
Priorities include transporting fuel to the north of the war-torn enclave, so that it can be used to power hospitals, provide clean water and maintain other vital civilian infrastructure.
Such services have been massively impacted by weeks of Israeli bombardment in response to Hamas’s 7 October massacres in southern Israel that left some 1,200 dead and around 240 taken hostage.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Nov 22 2023 (IPS)* – In recent decades, failure to sustain economic progress has been blamed on a supposed middle-income country (MIC) trap. Such blaming obscures as much as it supposedly explains.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
The ‘middle-income trap’ fable began as a World Bank story about why upper MICs in Latin America failed to become high-income countries (HICs) after pursuing policies required or prescribed by the Bretton Woods institutions.
Bretton Woods’ Frankenstein The 1944 Bretton Woods rules-based international monetary system ended in August 1971 when President Richard Nixon unilaterally repudiated US obligations. This happened after the US Treasury had borrowed heavily from the rest of the world from the 1960s.
The US government’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ of ‘spending well beyond its means’ has continued despite the resulting international monetary ‘non-system’.
Aden, 23 November 2023 (IOM)* – Navigating their journey against the backdrop of Yemen’s ninth year of conflict, migrants face unprecedented challenges. In this fragile environment, over 93,000 individualsarrived in Yemen between January and October 2023.
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Samara tenderly holds her newborn, a symbol of hope amid the multitude of challenges she has faced throughout her migration journey. Photo: IOM/Rami Ibrahim 2023
Among them, optimistic souls like Samara seek opportunities in the Gulf, unaware of the perils that lie ahead. Compounded by limited access to essential services, their vulnerability to abuses, including gender-based violence and exploitation, is exacerbated.
As a young girl growing up in Ethiopia, Samara*’s life took a harrowing turn when her parents got divorced. Samara and her sister were placed under the care of their father and abusive stepmother after her mother moved to another village.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 