News in Brief 21 June 2024 |

This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

Gaza is more than two million stories of loss: UN agencies

Gaza is “a world of devastation” and still in the grip of war after nearly nine months of conflict, UN humanitarians just back from the enclave reported on Friday.

They described widespread destruction and stories of pregnant mothers forced to request preterm C-sections out of desperation and fear.

Aid teams also said that the Israeli military’s announcement of a pause in operations in the south of the Gaza Strip had not had any noticeable impact:

Here’s Dr. Thanos Gargavanis, trauma surgeon and emergency officer from the UN World Health Organization (WHO):

“This humanitarian pause was not reflected on the ground. There was not a single day where we would be able to say that today, we are going to take advantage of this humanitarian pause and go forward and bring from Kerem Shalom the supplies that are waiting for us. So, many things are said publicly, but in reality, on the ground or granular level, nothing gets real.”

Dr Gargavanis said that the impact of the closure of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, along with the increase in fighting and ongoing forcible displacement, meant that what is achieved in Gaza “is only a fraction of what we should be doing”. 

Echoing those concerns, the WHO’s Dr Rik Peeperkorn said that there were “enormous” problems accessing Gaza’s last functioning hospitals today, where pregnant women are asking for an early Caesarean “to make sure that they deliver and deliver safely”.

Across Gaza, veteran humanitarian worker Maryse Guimond from UN Women described seeing people “crammed” into makeshift shelters and lacking even the most basic essentials. 

At one school-turned-shelter run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), there are only 25 toilets for the 14,000 people seeking safety inside the compound and the 59,000 others camping outside, she said.

UNHCR rushes support to Rohingya refugees hit by deadly landslides in Bangladesh 

Deadly monsoon landslides in southern Bangladesh have destroyed over 1,200 shelters and displaced around 2,000 ethnic Rohingya from neighbouring Myanmar who need urgent assistance, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has said.

In an alert on Friday, UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch said that the agency and partners are stepping up support to assist some 8,000 mainly Rohingya refugees affected by the disaster earlier in the week.

“Teams have been mobilized to find shelter for those displaced as work continues to rehabilitate or fix damaged accommodation. In addition to shelter, affected refugees also urgently require food and household items as well as access to health care and psychosocial support.”
Cox’s Bazaar is a network of some 33 camps in Bangladesh that mainly house hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who fled persecution in Myanmar in 2017.

The camps are extremely “vulnerable to the effects of climate change and prone to natural disasters, UNHCR’s Mr. Baloch said, adding Cox’s Bazaar has seen more than 770 landslides and floods since 2017 – and more damage is expected with further rain forecast.

To help the humanitarian effort, the UN agency has issued an urgent appeal to donors as relief efforts in the camps have been “severely hampered by acute underfunding”. 

UNHCR needs $275 million for its aid effort in Bangladesh this year. The appeal is just 25 per cent funded.

Internal displacement set to surge as paths of climate change and conflict meet

The link between climate change, conflict and displacement took centre stage on Friday at the Human Rights Council, as it heard that every year a new record is set in the number of internally displaced persons globally.

At the end of 2023, 68.3 million people were uprooted by conflict and violence – that’s almost half as many again as five years ago – said Special Rapporteur on internally displaced persons, Paula Betancur.

The independent rights expert, who is not a member of the UN, also cited a lack of accountability for human rights abuses as a key driver of displacement, while calling for Member States to acknowledge the “individual stories of loss, resilience and hope” behind the record numbers of displaced.

Ms. Betancur noted that in addition to Gaza where more than eight in 10 people were displaced, Sudan had nearly 10 million uprooted from their homes. 

Haiti had seen its displacement numbers double from last year to a record 600,000 today, while in Myanmar civil strife there, has meant that the vast majority of the three million displaced “are still without proper shelter, without access to food and water”.

A staggering 7.7 million were also internally displaced at the end of 2023 because of floods, storms, earthquakes, wildfires and other disasters, the Special Rapporteur said. She added that this figure does not include displacement caused by “slow onset disasters” including sea level rise and environmental degradation.

Daniel Johnson, UN News.