Our editors’ weekly take on humanitarian news, trends, and developments from around the globe.
On our radar
‘Normalised horror’: Deadly airstrike on Gaza school shelter
At least 33 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a crowded school being used to house forcibly displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on 6 June. Around 6,000 people were sheltering in the facility, run by UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestine refugees. The strike took place around 2am, and at least 12 of those killed were women and children, according to medical officials in Gaza. The Israeli military said the strike targeted Palestinian militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian armed faction, but has yet to provide conclusive evidence to back up the claim. Sam Rose, an UNRWA official, told the Guardian that attacks on facilities sheltering forcibly displaced people have become so commonplace that they no longer precipitate the same shock and outrage. “We have normalised horror,” he said. At least 180 UNRWA buildings have been hit during Israel’s eight-month military campaign in Gaza, killing more than 450 people. Israel has intensified its bombardment of central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of people forcibly displaced by Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah have sought shelter. The already limited amount of aid entering Gaza has collapsed since the ground invasion of Rafah began on 6 May, worsening a food situation that was already dire due to months of near-total siege and Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian operations. The International Labour Organization, meanwhile, released new data on the economic impacts: Gaza’s unemployment rate has reached a staggering 79.1%, and GDP has contracted by 83.5%. For more on how bombardment of central Gaza is affecting people, watch our latest dispatch from journalist and rights monitor Maha Hussaini:
The F-word
Two children – a seven-month-old and a 13-year-old – died of malnutrition recently in the south of Gaza. More than 3,000 others suffering acute malnutrition are at risk because Israel’s Rafah offensive is threatening to disrupt their treatment, according to UNICEF. Overall, at least 30 children have died of malnutrition in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. Experts, meanwhile, are still asking whether famine is taking place. The latest analysis offers an equivocal answer – and another window into the divisive world of declaring a famine. “Amid uncertainty, it is possible famine is ongoing in northern Gaza,” the US-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) said in an analysis published on 4 June. The report suggests a divide between the FEWS NET analysts and members of the Famine Review Committee, the independent expert panel that makes the final call on whether the strict threshold of famine has been reached. FEWS NET had asked the committee to confirm a classification of “famine”. But the committee cited data “uncertainty” in part due to minimal humanitarian access: “The FRC is unable to make a determination as to whether or not famine thresholds have been passed,” the five committee members wrote. The FEWS NET analysts say data uncertainty is expected in any conflict: “It is possible, if not likely” that famine is ongoing, they wrote.
RSF accused of another atrocity in Sudan
The Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group has killed more than 100 people – many of them women and children – in the village of Wad al-Noura in central Sudan, according to a local resistance committee. Photos shared on social media showed dozens of bodies wrapped in shrouds and laid out for burial in the village, which is in Gezira state, south of Khartoum. The resistance committee said the Sudanese army “shamefully” failed to protect Wad al-Noura’s civilians, who may have been defending the village against the RSF. The paramilitary force advanced into Gezira – a critical breadbasket state – in December as part of an eastward offensive against the army, and has been accused of attacking scores of villages. The group has also carried out alleged ethnic cleansing and genocide crimes against Masalit civilians in Darfur, and is currently imposing a brutal siege on the Darfuri city of El Fasher.
Report indicates Ethiopian forces committed genocide in Tigray
There is “credible” evidence that Ethiopian forces committed genocide during the two-year war in northern Tigray, a new report has concluded. Ethiopia’s National Defence Force and its backers – the Eritrean Defence Forces, and the Amhara Special Forces – are accused of committing “at least four acts” constituting genocide against Tigrayans, including: killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent childbirth. The report by the New Lines Institute, a US-based foreign policy think-tank, called for Ethiopia to be referred to the UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice. Meanwhile, an evaluation of the aid response to the conflict – in which as many as 600,000 people may have died – labelled it a “system failure”. A member of the evaluation team was more forthright. In an opinion piece for The New Humanitarian, he called out the government’s obstruction of aid, the lack of unity among UN agencies, and urged UN reforms.
Africans feeling the pinch
Public concern in Africa over unemployment and the state of the economy has surged in recent years, according to the latest Afrobarometer survey. About two thirds of citizens polled in 39 countries assessed economic conditions as “fairly bad” or “very bad”, with more than half describing their personal living conditions as poor (exceptions were Seychelles and Cote d’Ivoire, where people were slightly more upbeat). Overall, 8 in 10 respondents said they or a family member had gone without a cash income at least once during the previous year, and virtually everyone panned their government’s inflation policies. Across Africa’s major economies, price increases have eaten into standards of living. In Nigeria, inflation is running at 34% -- a near-record rate – and it triggered a nationwide strike this week. In Kenya, people are protesting harsh new taxes, while in South Africa, the recent election setback suffered by the ruling ANC has much to do with its economic mismanagement.
Wanted: Non-Brit for world’s toughest job
The UN’s top humanitarian official is making no bones about the messy world of crises he’ll be leaving to his successor. In a grim speech reflecting on successive emergencies in Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Haiti, Gaza, and Sudan, OCHA chief Martin Griffiths admitted he would move on at the end of this month “with a sense of work unfulfilled because the world is a worse place now than when I joined up in 2021”. But who will replace Griffiths, in a role held only by UK officials since 2007? International Development Minister Andrew Mitchell, rumoured to be a frontrunner, told The New Humanitarian: “I am not! I am standing for Parliament.” Tariq Ahmad, another Conservative foreign office minister, is also said to be in the running. With the Labour Party expected to soon enter power, another name doing the rounds is the head of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, a former Labour foreign secretary. As we flagged in this 2021 editorial, the appointment of yet another UK national is hugely problematic. Griffiths himself suggested as much in this 2022 interview. With only 17% of UN aid programmes around the globe currently funded, whoever it is will have their work cut out.
Weekend read
Opinion | Why India’s Muslims face domestic colonialism in Modi’s third term
‘Modi has already shown what he and his BJP are capable of.’
India’s minorities live in fear of greater disenfranchisement and discrimination by Modi and his Hindu nationalist BJP party.
And finally…
What food aid cuts mean for Syrians
Funding shortfalls have been forcing the World Food Programme to cut food rations across the globe, and Syria – where the UN now says some 16.7 million people, the highest number at any point during the country’s long war – need some sort of aid, is no exception. In December, the UN agency announced it was soon ending its “general food assistance” programme in Syria, affecting some 3.2 million people. Syrian photojournalist Moawia Atrash visited camps for displaced people in rebel-northwest Syria and found that six months after the new cuts many people are no longer receiving the food baskets they had come to rely on. With no source of income in a part of the country that was already food insecure, people told him they are desperate, and even more worried about the future. Watch his video report below:
