(UN News)* — As the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza passes the dark milestone of 40,000, UN rights chief Volker Türk called on Thursday [] for an end to the killing “once and for all” and the release of all hostages while negotiators prepared to meet in Qatar to renew efforts to halt the conflict and avert a wider war.
“Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war,” the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement.
(UN News)* — The risk of polio spreading in Gaza remains high unless there is an urgent and comprehensive response to the serious health threat, UN humanitarians said on Wednesday [].
“At least two rounds of [orally delivered polio vaccine] will be necessary to shut down transmission,”the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) explained in an update.
(UN News)* — The killing, injury and displacement of Palestinians continues in the West Back against the backdrop of the ongoing conflict in Gaza, now in its 10th month, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in an update issued on Wednesday [14 August 2024].
The number of Palestinian children killed by live ammunition fired by Israeli forces has almost tripled since 7 October 2023, compared with the preceding 10 months, rising from 39 to 115.
Eight countries, including Mali, Niger, Senegal, South Sudan and Sudan, are home to children who spend more than half the year in temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius / 95 degrees Fahrenheit
UNICEF/UN0290924/Llaurado
NEW YORK, 14 August 2024 (UNICEF)* –– One in 5 children – or 466 million – live in areas that experience at least double the number of extremely hot days every year compared to just six decades ago, according to a new UNICEF analysis.
(New York) – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2024 electoral campaign frequently used hate speech against Muslims and other minorities, Human Rights Watch on 14 August 2024 said.
(UN News)* — Conflict in Myanmar between the military junta and opposition forces is increasingly brutal, with both sides likely responsible for international crimes including summary executions, top independent rights investigators said on Tuesday [].
In a call to regional bloc ASEAN to help end the violence and support efforts to bring perpetrators to justice, the head of the Human Rights Council-appointed probe into the Myanmar emergency Nicholas Koumjian described an increasingly “desperate” junta whose devastating military tactics were being matched by opposition fighters acting with total impunity.
“Aerial bombings have increased very substantially in this last year,” Mr. Koumjian told journalists in Geneva.
(UN News)* —Sudan’s deepening humanitarian crisis caused by nearly 16 months of war has left countless women and girls subject to sexual violence and rape and tens of thousands of children at risk of death from hunger, UN aid teams said on Tuesday [13 August 2024].
Speaking from Sudan, UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spokesperson James Elder described meeting a senior medical worker at a hospital outside Khartoum who had “direct contact with hundreds, hundreds of women and girls, some as young as eight years old, who have been raped. Many have been held captive for weeks on end.”
(UN News)* —Amid further evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military in Gaza, UN humanitarians delivered a fresh warning on Monday [12 August 2024] over the dire sanitary emergency there and the urgent need for a mass polio vaccination campaign in the embattled enclave.
UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, issued a statement from Deir al-Balah in Gaza’s central area, where untreated sewage run-off formed large pools on the road next to shelters for forcibly displaced people.
“Sewage water is all over the streets,” said UNICEF spokesperson Salim Oweis, who highlighted the destruction of Gaza’s water and sanitation network, and its sewage treatment plants, since war erupted on 7 October, after Hamas-led terror attacks in Israel.
“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”
— Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh
Voters in the U.S.A. live in fantasy and probably always will. No matter how obvious it is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, not a democracy, the ardent pipe dreams of a new face in the White House go to their heads every four years. It can only be explained by a combination of intellectual ignorance, the acceptance of propaganda, and the embrace of illusions.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 