Non-Governmental Organizations

In the nearly 1,000 days since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, thousands of civilians have been killed, the country's energy capacity is on the brink, and drones are terrifying frontline communities, the UN's top aid official in the country said on Friday. Speaking in Geneva, Matthias Schmale warned that winter posed a critical challenge and described the anguish felt by Ukrainians as the war rages on.

According to the international humanitarian organization Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), the number of people forced to flee their homes in Colombia has doubled since the historic peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was signed eight years ago. While more than 130,000 people were forced to flee in Colombia in 2016, NRC estimates that the number of newly displaced people will exceed 260,000 in 2024.

More than 60,000 Somalis, mainly women and children, have fled to Ethiopia’s Somali region in the past few weeks to escape violent clashes and insecurity in the city of Laascaanood (Laas Caanood), in Somalia’s Sool region, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reports. More than half of them arrived earlier this week, UNHCR spokesperson Olga Sarrado Mur said Friday at a news conference in Geneva.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said Tuesday it will be forced to end food assistance to 2.5 million Syrians next month if it does not receive at least $180 million in donations to fund programs through the end of this year. The announcement came as the European Union (EU) gears up to host the seventh Brussels Conference on “Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region” on Wednesday and Thursday.

The international humanitarian organization Save the Children is warning that "time is running out" for the nearly one million residents of Sudan's largest camp for displaced people, many of them children, as food and medical supplies run out. The relief agency said Wednesday that it had just two days' worth of medical supplies left in its mobile health clinics in Zamzam camp in Sudan's western Darfur region.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that, as of Sunday, at least 93,000 people have been displaced due to escalating hostilities in Syria’s Suweida Governorate, both within Suweida and towards the neighboring governorates of Dara and Rural Damascus. Credible reports detail widespread atrocities perpetrated by different actors in the governorate.

The United Nations has warned that the delivery of life-saving aid to millions of people in Afghanistan could be "severely impeded" as donors have only provided 7 percent of the humanitarian funding appeal for 2024. More than half of Afghanistan's population, 23.7 million - including 12.4 million children - are estimated to be in need of humanitarian assistance, but aid agencies will only be able to reach a fraction of them due to a severe lack of funds.

The displacement crisis prompted by ongoing conflict in Sudan continues unabated, with nearly six million people forced out of their homes and women and children making up nearly 90 percent of those uprooted, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) warned on Wednesday. On Thursday, the international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said that six months into the war in Sudan, people's lives are still in danger from bombings, shelling and shootings, while the country's health system is on the edge of collapse.

Food is slowly returning to the Gaza Strip amid "apocalyptic scenes", but UN humanitarian officials said on Tuesday that supplies are still desperately inadequate. They issued fresh calls for wider access and more border crossings to be opened, as well as continued financial support. Since the resumption of general food distributions on October 13, nearly half of Gaza's population has received food parcels.

The United Nations children’s agency (UNICEF) said Friday that in the first six months of this year, approximately 11,600 children are believed to have made the dangerous journey across the Central Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe and nearly 300 have died. Both figures are double those from the same time last year.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) released its annual Emergency Watchlist on Wednesday, spotlighting the 20 countries most likely to face escalating humanitarian needs in the coming year. According to the dire ranking, the top five crises are Sudan, the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Myanmar, Syria and South Sudan, as war and climate change fuel new and ongoing humanitarian emergencies around the world.

With Haiti “in the grip of total chaos”, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says "restoring a degree of public order" to prevent further harm to the population from violence and to ensure access to life-saving humanitarian assistance must be the immediate priority. Speaking to the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday, Volker Türk also said that humanitarian corridors must be established as soon as possible.

Myanmar's Rohingya ethnic minority, victims of a brutal campaign of mass atrocities and persecution by the country's military in 2016 and 2017, is again facing a wave of deadly violence that raises the "specter of ethnic cleansing." This time, however, the perpetrators are said to be the Arakan Army (AA), one of several ethnic groups fighting the nation's ruling junta, as well as Myanmar's security forces, according to survivors and human rights groups.

International donor funding to alleviate hunger in the world's neediest countries plummeted in 2023, despite exacerbating global food insecurity reaching record highs, aid agencies warn. Humanitarian appeals for the 17 countries bearing the brunt of food insecurity suffered a staggering funding gap of 65 percent last year, up 23 percent from 2022, according to an analysis released this week by the humanitarian organization Action Against Hunger.

July saw the highest number of civilian casualties in Ukraine since October 2022, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) said on Friday. Coordinated attacks by Russian forces across Ukraine on July 8, which killed dozens of people in a single day, made last month exceptionally deadly.

Children make up about half of all armed gang members in Haiti, the head of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Monday, calling for their protection to be stepped up. Meanwhile, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) says it is ramping up its operations in Haiti in the face of a hunger crisis caused mainly by violence and displacement. Some 5.5 million Haitians are in need of humanitarian assistance in 2024, a number that is expected to rise.

Nearly a year after the outbreak of war in Sudan, the conflict continues to rage, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes every day and creating one of the largest and most challenging humanitarian emergencies and displacement crises in the world. The number of displaced people has now surpassed 8.8 million, with more than 2 million of them having crossed borders.