UN News Today 25 September 2024 |

Sudan crisis: Top ministers meet in New York to demand urgent action

With war raging in Sudan and no end in sight to the catastrophic hunger crisis it has created, UN agencies and foreign ministers gathered for High-Level Week at the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, to issue a renewed call for urgent action to protect the country’s people.

The development comes almost 18 months since rival militaries started fighting each other in Sudan, forcing more than 10 million people from their homes – half of them children.

In a statement calling for “decisive international action”, the UN’s Acting Emergency Relief Coordinator, Joyce Msuya, said that people in Sudan “have endured 17 months of hell, and the suffering continues to grow”. She warned that thousands of civilians have been killed, entire communities displaced and deprived of food, families scattered, children traumatized (with) women raped and abused.

The emergency is now the world’s largest hunger crisis, according to UN humanitarians, who have warned that nearly 26 million people are already acutely hungry across Sudan.

“Without urgent assistance, hundreds of thousands could die,” the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.

Lebanon escalation: UN boosts support at border with Syria

The serious escalation in hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel has forced “tens of thousands” of people to flee their homes in Lebanon, including Syrian refugees, leaving border routes to Syria choked with vehicles trying to get through, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Wednesday.

The agency reported that “hundreds of vehicles” were queuing at the Syrian border and that many people were “also arriving on foot, carrying what they can”.

The exodus included “large crowds, women, young children and babies” – all “waiting in line after spending the night outdoors”.

Some had injuries from the latest widespread Israeli bombing of Lebanon, UNHCR said, noting that Monday’s strikes alone killed at least 558 people – including children and women – and injured 1,835.

Those attacks followed a weekend of rocket strikes on Israeli communities that came in response to last week’s extraordinary series of explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah – the latest deadly development linked to the ongoing war in Gaza.

Latest UN data points to at least 90,530 newly displaced people in Lebanon in addition to the nearly 112,000 uprooted since October 2023.

In Ukraine, children among victims of latest attacks in Zaporizhzhia

To Ukraine, where children are among the victims of the latest attacks on the city of Zaporizhzhia, as well as Kharkiv city and war-torn Donetsk and Kherson regions, UN humanitarians have reported.

It’s been two and a half years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour.

In a new alert, the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, said that “intense fighting” continues to affect civilians and vital energy infrastructure across Ukraine.

The UN agency said that recent attacks had left about 20 towns and villages in northeastern Poltava region without electricity, while “more than 530 towns and villages across Ukraine” are now “either fully or partially” without power, owing to the ongoing hostilities and related technical issues.

Daniel Johnson, UN News.

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