DR Congo emergency: UN agencies Heavy artillery increasingly used in populated areas
Latest reports from Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from UN teams on Tuesday indicate a fast-deteriorating situation amid an ongoing assault by M23 rebels on the provincial capital.
Hospitals are overwhelmed, dead bodies lie in the streets and there’s been an increase in sexual violence, rape and looting.
With more, here’s Shelley Thakral, UN World Food Programme (WFP) spokesperson:
“We’ve seen families fleeing the fighting and they’re facing unimaginable challenges. Every step of their journey is fraught with danger. Roads are blocked, ports are closed, and those crossing Lake Kivu risk their lives in makeshift boats. Certain IDP sites have been emptied where fighting has been the most violent. I spoke just moments ago to an activist in Goma and he told me, we’re here, we’re hiding. We don’t know who will come to help us.’”
Spiralling violence across the resource-rich region has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people from camps around Goma in a matter of days.
The UN Security Council has demanded an immediate halt to the M23 offensive and called for the group to withdraw from territories it has seized.
The Council also condemned the presence of “external forces” in eastern DRC – amid reports that Rwandan troops are heavily involved in the offensive.
In Gaza, unexploded weapons threaten all those returning to north
To Gaza, where UN aid teams are leading a massive aid boost to the devastated enclave, to help stave off widespread hunger and meet people’s basic needs.
The World Food Programme, WFP, said that in the space of just six days, it delivered 22,000 metric tons of food into Gaza – double what got through in the whole of November.
And as some 300,000 Gazans return to their former homes in the north while the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel holds, humanitarians anticipate that they will be in desperate need of food and other commodities.
Jonathan Cricx, from the UN Children’s Fund, (UNICEF), has been in Gaza with thousands of families as they head north:
“It was really heartbreaking because we know that those families have been displaced several times in the 15 months of the war, and when I was talking to the children and to the parents, they were saying that they wanted to go back to their houses and if their houses was in rubble, they would prefer to have a tent on those rubble.”
UN agencies remain deeply concerned about the risk of unexploded ordnance across Gaza and particularly in the north.
Between five and 10 per cent of weapons dropped on the Gaza Strip did not explode on impact, so agencies including UNICEF are distributing leaflets to raise awareness about the dangers.
Syrians need far more help to return home, insists UN refugee chief
UN refugee agency chief Filippo Grandi has appealed for more international assistance for the people of Syria after a meeting with the leader of the country’s caretaker authority in Damascus.
Mr. Grandi said that his discussions with high-level officials in the Syrian capital including Ahmed Al-Sharaa which ended on Monday had focused on how best to support Syrians returning home.
Since September, more than half a million refugees have returned to Syria, including 200,000 since the fall of the Assad regime.
Additionally, nearly 600,000 people who were displaced inside Syria have since returned to their homes, according to refugee agency, UNHCR. It noted that 7.4 million Syrians are still uprooted inside the country and there are more than six million Syrian refugees worldwide.
“We must seize this critical window of opportunity to help the country emerge from years of crisis and bloodshed,” Mr. Grandi insisted. He added that while many families are taking the brave step of returning home, they face overwhelming difficulties: destroyed and damaged homes, shattered infrastructure and widespread poverty.
Daniel Johnson, UN News
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Source of original article: United Nations (news.un.org). Photo credit: UN. The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the views or opinion of Global Diaspora News (www.globaldiasporanews.com).
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