Human Crisis

A number of casualties reported after Israeli jets target area in Rafah, southern Gaza. At least 24 people were killed in Gaza’s Deir el-Balah region when Israeli forces shelled a residence where displaced people were sheltering. UNRWA representatives say it can no longer provide services in north Gaza, citing few staff and a “collapse of social order” amid Israeli attacks on civilians and restrictions on food aid access that has left the population starved.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been a primary provider of crucial humanitarian aid and services to Palestinian refugees for an extended period. Recent accounts of a reduction in aid to UNRWA prompt concerns regarding the welfare of the vulnerable population it assists, as well as the broader implications for regional stability and peace-building efforts.

The World Food Program has announced that it has provided food items and cash assistance to nearly 19 million people in Afghanistan over the past year.

A few hundred metres from the Rafah border fence with Egypt, dozens of Palestinian families set up tents as a "last resort" as they sought refuge from the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip after having to move multiple times from their homes and previous shelters.

Israel has unleashed unlawful lethal force against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, carrying out unlawful killings and displaying “a chilling disregard for Palestinian lives”, Amnesty International says.

Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, who has extremist rhetoric against Palestinians, also suggested Gaza's population migrate from the enclave.

It’s not often that a columnist is obliged to make reference to pizza in the midst of a rogue-nation-made famine. But the times and decency demand it given that, as a defining aspect of its iron-clad siege of Gaza, Israel, by its own admission, has intended all along to bar food and water from reaching the devastated enclave and the children, women and men who, for the moment, populate it.

European court has condemned Lithuania's complicity in CIA torture at a secret prison, while Vilnius said it is prepared to award the Guantanamo detainee over $108,000 in compensation.

A weeklong telecommunications blackout in the Gaza Strip has become a “matter of life and death” and should end immediately, digital civil rights group Access Now says during the longest continuous outage since Israel’s war began.

In the pitch-black hours of early Thursday morning, the Humanity 1 rescue ship approached a sky-blue wooden boat in distress in the central Mediterranean Sea. On board were at least 126 people who were suffering from hypothermia, dehydration and exhaustion from clinging to the boat for hours as it struggled to stay upright amid waves as high as two metres (six feet).