Monitoring in Motion for Migrants in the Darien Gap
8 May 2025 —The Darien jungle on the border between Panama and Colombia is a labyrinth of rivers, filled with wild animals and oppressive, humid heat that envelops everything. It is a transit and destination route for migrants and asylum seekers, where fear, despair, and danger are constant.
It is also the main entry point for people heading towards Canada, Mexico and the United States of America. Yet, the greatest danger does not come from nature itself, but from traffickers and criminals who prey on people on the move.
(UN News)* —Israel’s plan to take control of relief assistance in Gaza would put civilian lives in danger and cause mass displacement while using aid as “bait”, UN humanitarians said on Friday .
UNRWA | A displaced girl waits her turn to fetch water for her family in the southern city of Rafah in Gaza.
UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spokesperson James Elder insisted that the Israeli proposal to create a handful of aid hubs exclusively in the south of the Strip would create an “impossible choice between displacement and death”.
The plan “contravenes basic humanitarian principles” and appears designed to “reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic”, he told journalists in Geneva.
(UN News)* — An estimated 3,800 people have died as a result of the devastating earthquakes that struck Myanmar on 28 March. Six weeks on, the situation in Myanmar remains dire, with whole communities still traumatised and vulnerable.
“I hate earthquakes. Earthquakes took my mother and my aunt away,” five-year-old Khin Yadanar told the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), after both her mother and aunt were killed when a brick wall collapsed on them.
Around 6.5 million children were already in need of humanitarian assistance before the earthquake, which compounded existing vulnerabilities resulting from the brutal civil war between multiple armed opposition groups and the military junta which seized power in a February 2021 coup.
(UN News)* —Shattered by her husband’s death during the rising tide of gang violence in Haiti last year, Christiana and her six children fled 223 kilometres from their hometown to the city of Mirebalais, where her six-year-old daughter, Leineda, began treatment for malnutrition.
UNITED NATIONS, May 7 2025 (IPS)* – Since the Western Sahara War in 1975, Sahrawi refugees have resided in a collection of refugee shelters in the Tindouf province of Algeria.
Sahrawi refugees walk near the Awserd Refugee Camp in the Tindouf Province of Algeria. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider
For over 50 years, these communities have struggled to develop self-sufficiency and have been solely dependent on humanitarian aid for survival, marking one of the most protracted refugee crises in the world.
(UN News)* — Thousands of exhausted Sudanese refugees continue to flee fighting in search of safety in neighbouring Chad, aid teams said on Tuesday , as a third day of drone strikes ripped into the city of Port Sudan.
This refrain echoes through centuries of struggle—from the plantations of Saint Domingue to the besieged neighborhoods of Gaza, from the mineral-rich soil of the Congo to the burning plains of Southern Africa.
— Hunger and Sudan’s horrific war pushed Abdelminime Moussa from his homeland. Sitting in the sand at eastern Chad’s Koursigue refugee camp, the Sudanese father describes how his family fled assailants who surrounded their village in North Darfur, just across the border.
Abdelminime Moussa at the desolate Koursigue refugee camp in eastern Chad. Moussa and his family count amount the millions of refugees who escaped conflict-torn Sudan. Photo: WFP/Lena von Zabern
“We had nothing,” Moussa says of their arrival earlier this year at this desolate camp, sprinkled with white tents, thorn trees and not much else. “I manage as best as I can to feed my children.”
(New York) –The United States should not forcibly transfer migrants to Libya, where inhumane detention conditions are well-documented, including torture, ill-treatment, sexual assault, and unlawful killings, Human Rights Watch said today [9 May 2025].
Based on numerous media reports citing US officials, the Trump administration may be poised to imminently deport an unknown number of detained migrants to Libya.
(UN News)* — The UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA, has strongly condemned the forced entry by Israeli security forces into three of its schools in occupied East Jerusalem, describing it as a violation of children’s right to education and safety.
WFP Video | Gaza faces severe shortages of food, water and medicine. (file)
According to the agency, heavily armed personnel entered the schools in Shu’fat refugee camp on Thursday [] while classes were in session, forcing more than 550 Palestinian girls and boys – some as young as six – out of their classrooms.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 