Israeli settlers seen on camera assaulting a Palestinian village. Police arrest only Palestinians WATCH: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qQP-3ClA6ro ERUSALEM (AP) — Over a dozen Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian village in the southern Israeli-occupied West Bank on Friday, beating residents with sticks and rocks, in an incident captured with rare clarity by security cameras. The video obtained by AP and testimonies from Palestinian witnesses appeared to conflict with the account of the attack provided by Israeli police and military, who arrested over 20 Palestinians afterwards. The violence in the village of Jinba follows a settler attack earlier this week in a nearby village in which Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” was left bloodied and bruised before being detained by Israeli soldiers for about 20 hours. The videos provide uncommonly stark images of the type of settler assault Palestinians in the West Bank say now occurs frequently. They say radical Jewish settlers rarely, if ever, face repercussions for attacking Palestinian communities, while Palestinians are often rounded up in droves and detained by Israeli forces. Settlers descend on Jinba AP obtained footage from two security cameras belonging to the Al-Amur family, whose home came under attack. Footage from one camera shows a jeep, an ATV and a white pick-up truck speed up to the edge of the village. A number of settlers pile out of them and run out of the frame, and the screams of Palestinian women can be heard. The settlers then return into view, and at least 15 of them ascend a slope, getting closer to the camera. Many are masked, at least three are carrying bats or sticks, and one is armed with an assault rifle. One can be seen throwing a rock, then bending to collect more. The matriarch of the Al-Amur family, Oula Awad, said she saw the settlers approaching her house between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM, as she was doing laundry outside with her daughter. Her son, Qusai, 17, and husband, Aziz, 63, were washing up to prepare for Ramadan prayers when the settlers pulled up in vehicles and emerged. “The settler runs toward me and told me, ‘Don’t wave. Do not move forward. We will hit you,’” she said. In security footage taken from a different camera at the house, she and her daughter, 16-year-old Handa, are seen screaming and waving clothes in the air, calling for help. At one point, Awad makes a motion waving her arms. It is not clear if she throws something at a settler rushing toward her. The settlers are then seen converging on Qusai. One settler begins hitting him with a stick as he tries to run away. Another settler smashes his head with a rock, sending him to the ground. Four settlers then kick and beat him before running away. This grab taken from video shows a masked settler with a stick, left, beating Palestinian Qusay Al-Amur in his house in the West Bank village of Jinba, Friday, March 28, 2025. (UGC via AP) WATCH : https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qQP-3ClA6ro Awad said the settlers locked her and her daughter in a side room as they beat her younger son, Ahmad, and her husband Aziz. “They entered the room and hit the windows,” said Awad. They tried to burn the furniture. “My husband was standing on the stairs, and they started beating him.” A video taken by Qusai and shared with the AP showed Ahmad on the ground with a head laceration. Aziz lies nearby, his face bloodied. Palestinian Qusai Al-Amur sits in a hospital bed next to his relatives following an attack by Israeli settlers on his West Bank village of Jinba, Friday, March 28, 2025. (Basel Adra via AP) Five Palestinians remain in hospitals. Aziz had a chest injury and underwent surgery for skull fractures; Ahmed, 16, is in intensive care. Qusai suffered a broken arm, bruises and cuts. Another villager, Maher Mohammed, had cuts and bruises, as did his son Osama, who was also undergoing kidney examinations. Nidal Younis, the head of the Masafer Yatta village council, witnessed part of the attack and was detained by police for two hours afterward. He said soldiers who arrived on scene following the attack prevented Palestinians from nearby villages from helping and threw stun grenades at homes, a claim to which the military did not respond. Police and military provide a conflicting account Following the incident, Israeli police said they detained 22 Palestinians from the village on suspicion of stone throwing and brought them in for further investigation. They said Palestinians had attacked two settler shepherds nearby, minorly injuring them. “The security forces view the series of attacks in the area seriously, and will take strong action to bring those involved to justice,” the police said. They did not respond when asked by the AP why no Israeli civilians were arrested. The military gave a somewhat different account, saying an Israeli civilian had been attacked and injured by militants near an Israeli settlement. Then, it said “a violent confrontation developed between a number of Israeli civilians and Palestinians,” injuring another Israeli civilian. Masafer Yatta was designated by the Israeli military as a live-fire training zone in the 1980s, and the military has ordered the expulsion of the residents, mostly Arab Bedouin. Around 1,000 residents have largely remained in place, but soldiers regularly come in to demolish homes, tents, water tanks and olive orchards. Palestinians and rights groups say Israeli forces usually turn a blind eye or intervene on behalf of the settlers. The war in Gaza has sparked a surge of violence in the West Bank, with the Israeli military carrying out widescale military operations that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and displaced tens of thousands. There has been a rise in settler violence as well as Palestinian attacks on Israelis. Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

United Kingdom All Party Parliamentary Group   The UK’s Failure to Recognize Genocide   Report By Genocide Watch   © UNHCR/Ala Kheir  Displaced people arrive in South Sudan from Sudan through the Joda border crossing.   For years, the lawyers in the UK’s Foreign Office have refused to recognize mass killing as genocide until a court determines that genocide has occurred. There are several fatal legal errors in this approach.    Waiting for a court to declare genocide means violation of the duty to prevent genocide.   a) Nothing in the Genocide Convention requires that a court determine that genocide has been committed before government policy makers may use the term “genocide.”  b) Courts to try perpetrators of genocide are seldom created until a genocide is over.  c) Waiting for a court to determine that genocide has been committed means that use of the term nearly always comes too late to prevent it.  d) The Convention is named the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.  e) The International Court of Justice in Bosnia v Serbia  held that Serbia violated the Genocide Convention because it did not prevent the Srebrenica genocide. The ICJ also held that the duty to prevent is a peremptory norm that applies erga omnes (obliges all states.)    Genocide is a term defined by the binding law of an international treaty. Weaker terms are not.   a) Use of the term genocide as opposed to terms like crimes against humanity, “ethnic cleansing”, or atrocities has a significant effect on whether forceful action will be taken to prevent the crimes. See: Stanton, "Ethnic Cleansing" is a Euphemism Used for Genocide Denial .   b) When a weaker term is used, it is a sign that there will be no forceful action to stop the mass killing. When the killings are called “genocide”, forceful military action to stop it is much more likely. See: Stanton, Weak Words Are Not Enough.  See also: Blum, Stanton, Sagi & Richter, “Ethnic cleansing” bleaches the atrocities of genocide .    By declaring “genocide” to be a sacred term only to be invoked by courts, the UK is surrendering its foreign policy to courts, and to the lawyers in the UK Foreign Office.   a) UK Foreign Office lawyers’ refusal to use the word genocide until the genocide is declared by a court means that the UK will nearly always violate its duty to prevent genocide.  b) Courts have no special expertise in the law of genocide. Judges are not high priests endowed with the sacred duty to determine the commission of genocide.  c) Foreign Office lawyers should be advising, rather than dictating, UK foreign policy.    Genocide is a term that should be applicable in determination of foreign policy. a) If the term cannot be spoken, its power to define events and to determine policy is lost.   b) Genocide is a term that should be available to political policy makers, not just to Foreign Office lawyers.  c) By ceding a monopoly on the term “genocide” to Foreign Office lawyers, the UK Foreign Minister is handing them control over UK foreign policy.    By refusing to use the term “genocide” because courts haven’t declared it, the UK Foreign Minister has become a genocide denier.   a) Denial of genocide is the final stage of every genocide. It begins when genocide starts and may last for over a hundred years.  b) Genocide denial is the most predictive early warning of further and future genocide.    Refusal to call the crimes in Sudan “genocide,” tells genocidists they may kill with impunity.   Genocidists employ all the tactics of denial to counter accusations of their guilt. See: Stanton, Twelve Ways to Deny a Genocide .  Minimize the number of deaths.  Question the motivations of the truth tellers.  Claim the deaths were inadvertent.  Emphasize the strangeness of the victims.  Rationalize the deaths as the result of tribal conflict.  Blame “out of control” forces for committing the killings.  Avoid upsetting the “peace process.”  Avoid jeopardizing economic interests.  Claim the victims are receiving relief and good treatment.  Claim the events don’t fit the legal definition of genocide.  Blame the victims.  Say that peace and reconciliation outweigh blaming people for genocide.    The UK’s approach fails to PREVENT the crime of genocide as required by the Genocide Convention.   a) It allows UK leaders to avoid their responsibility to align UK policy with international law.  b) It provides the public with an excuse for non-action to protect lives of fellow human beings.  c) It washes the hands of UK leaders from their duty to prevent genocide.    The Sudan context: civil war and genocide     Since April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been engaged in a fierce battle for control of Sudan. This brutal power struggle has killed over 60,000 people  and has displaced millions .   Both parties and their allied forces are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They have deliberately and indiscriminately  attacked civilians and civilian and humanitarian infrastructure.    The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have committed genocide against the ethnic Masalit people and other non-Arab groups in West Darfur, carrying out 15,000  (since increased to 28,000) ethnic killings in El Geneina in 2023. Tens of thousands  more civilians have been massacred by the RSF during this war. Women and girls, as young as one year old , have repeatedly been targeted for rape and sexual slavery by the RSF, often ethnically motivated . The RSF has destroyed 145 health facilities , depriving 65%  of the Darfuri population of basic health care, and continues to use famine as a weapon of war by blocking humanitarian assistance  from reaching IDP camps, such as the starvation-stricken Zamzam camp.     As was recognized by the US on the January 7th, 2025 , the RSF therefore violates the following articles of the Genocide Convention: Article II (a) : Killing members of the group, (b) : Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (c) : Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, (d) : Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.     Over 30 million people  in Sudan need humanitarian aid. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have aggravated the famine by barring all international and UN aid workers from Darfur in October 2024. SAF-allied militias have massacred villages of civilians, exemplified by the recent attack in Gezira state that left at least 26 dead at the hands of the Sudan Shield Forces.     Conflicts between the Arab dominated Sudanese government and non-Arab ethnic groups have resulted in numerous genocides targeting non-Arab people in Sudan. Genocide became Sudanese state policy when the Arab supremacist Arab Gathering seized power in Khartoum in 1983.     Since then, determined to dominate all of Sudan, the Sudanese army and Arab militias have massacred hundreds of thousands of non-Arab people in the Nuba Mountains, Darfur, the Blue Nile, and in South Sudan before South Sudan became independent. Over  three million  non-Arabs have been displaced.    In 2003-2005, government-backed Janjaweed militias carried out systematic killings of non-Arabs and a scorched earth policy in Darfur. They were supported by bombing by the Sudanese Air Force. They forcibly displaced  Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities and murdered, looted, and mass raped non-Arab populations in Darfur. Janjaweed militias killed at least 300,000 non-Arab people and forcibly displaced 2.5 million.     A joint UN-AU peacekeeping force, UNAMID ,  was established in 2007 with a mandate to protect civilians. However, UNAMID became an observer mission, rather than a peacekeeping force. It failed to protect the hundreds of thousands of people in Sudanese IDP camps from rapes and murders. The Janjaweed militias became an official government force, renamed the "Rapid Support Forces" (RSF) led by General Hemedti.   Granted jurisdiction by the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court   (ICC)   issued arrest warrants for Omar al-Bashir and other leaders of the Darfur genocide for crimes against humanity and war crimes in 2009, and in 2010  for charges of genocide. Bashir appointed these same accused criminals as governors over areas where they committed their crimes.   Anti-government protests  began in late 2018 and a  military coup ousted  Omar al-Bashir in 2019.UNAMID withdrew in December 2020. Although a civilian-led democracy was promised following the military coup, another military coup followed in 2021 which removed civilians from government. Generals Burhan and Hemedti shared power over Khartoum. The RSF took control over western Sudan, including Darfur.     In December 2022, the civilian opposition, General Burhan, and Hemedti signed a "new framework"  which on paper would transition the government to civilian leadership and integrate the RSF into the Sudanese Armed Forces. But Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti) rejected proposals to integrate his Rapid Support Forces into Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). Failure to incorporate the RSF into the military and lack of cooperation  between the SAF and the RSF resulted in civil war.    Fighting broke out   between Hemedti’s RSF and Gen. Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces on April 15, 2023. Since then, over 1000 civilians  have been killed and more than 4,000 have been wounded in Khartoum and Omdurman, tens ofthousands have fled , with over 75,000  internally displaced. Over 100,000 people have fled from Sudan. The RSF took control of most of Khartoum. In March 2025, the SAF retook central Khartoum and Khartoum’s airport.    The massive influx of new refugees from Sudan threatens  to overwhelm neighboring countries .  Countries including the US, Canada, and France have evacuated their diplomats.  Uncertainty exists regarding the location of Bashir.  Hospitals are running out of supplies , and many health facilities have been directly hit  by shells and gunfire. They lack electricity  and medicines. The director of the UN's World Food Program (WFP)  fears the conflict could result in a humanitarian crisis for all of Eastern Africa.    The RSF recommenced its attacks on the people of Darfur, especially the Masalit. In Darfur, the Rapid Support Forces have murdered over 30,000 Masalit, raped thousands of women, and driven tens of thousands of Masalit into Chad. Masalit towns have been destroyed, their wells poisoned, their streets strewn with corpses. The RSF has now surrounded El Fasher, a city of 2.5 million, capital of Darfur. Conquest of El Fasher by the RSF would create a humanitarian disaster and increased genocide.     Genocide Watch considers Sudan to be at Stage 8: Persecution and Stage 9: Extermination.     Genocide Watch recommends:   The UN Security Council should declare the war in Sudan is a threat to international peace and security.  The UNSC should authorize a UN Peacekeeping Force (PKO) under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter.  The UNSC should call on African Union and other countries to provide thousands of troops for the PKO.  The UNSC should make the PKO an ordinary expense of the UN, obligating all UN members to pay for it.  The UNSC resolution should refer the situation in all  of Sudan to the International Criminal Court.  The PKO mandate should be to end the civil war by diplomacy or force and to protect civilians.  The mandate should include the arrest of both Gen. Burhan and Hemedti if they are charged by the ICC.   See also: Why has the west turned its back on Sudan?     The UK’s past failings to prevent genocide in Sudan.      The UK has a history of failing to hold Sudan’s leadership to account for genocide and crimes against humanity. During the height of the first Darfur genocide in 2003-2006, the then UK ambassador William Patey effusively pledged the UK’s friendship  to an audience of Sudanese politicians and businessmen in Khartoum, despite Bashir’s genocidal campaign against black Africans being well under way across Darfur.     In the 2010s, the appeasement of Sudan’s genocidaires took the form of the UK government’s support for businesses closely connected to the Bashir regime.     Today, the UK continues to prioritize commercial interests over its duty to prevent genocide in Sudan, namely by refusing to sanction the UAE for funding and arming the RSF. The UAE’s complicity in this genocide is well documented by UN experts, who reported in January 2024  that weapons and ammunitions shipments were being sent to the RSF by the UAE via Chad. By maintaining economic ties with the UAE and refusing to follow the US’s lead in sanctioning RSF companies that operate there, the UK benefits from the genocide in Sudan.     The UK is failing to meet its obligations under the Genocide Convention.       The UK has stated that it will wait for the ICC to make a determination  of genocide in Sudan. However, the 1948 Genocide Convention states that governments, not courts, should regularly assess the risk of genocide and use “allmeans reasonably available”  to prevent it. Governments of Canada, the US, France, Germany, New Zealand, and the Netherlands have all made previous determinations of genocide without an ICC conclusion.     On the 28th of October 2024, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy stated that only an appropriate court may deem a situation to constitute genocide, even when “millions of people have lost their lives” . Such an approach violates the Genocide Convention by failing to prevent genocide as required by Article One of the Convention and the opinion of the International Court of Justice in Bosnia v Serbia . It is contrary to the UK’s legal requirement that only a parliamentary vote can declare war – a decision as critical as a genocide determination.    This refusal by the UK to declare that genocide is occurring is de facto genocide denial . As long as the UK refuses to declare that the mass murders in Sudan constitute a genocide, the UK’s words of condemnation are nothing but empty and cowardly excuses for an absence of forceful actions to stop and prevent the genocide. Hindering prevention, the UK is enabling further genocide to take place in Sudan.     Recommendations urging the UK to change its passive stance:     The UK must officially recognize and declare the atrocities committed by the RSF and allied militias against the Masalit people to be genocide.     The UAE is actively facilitating and benefiting from the ongoing conflict in Sudan. The UK is fully aware that the UAE is supplying arms to the genocidal RSF. The UK must cease shielding the UAE from criticism and fulfill its responsibilities under the Genocide Convention. Imposing sanctions on the UAE is a necessary first step, but it is by no means sufficient.     As the UN Security Council penholder on Sudan, the UK has a clear responsibility to take concrete, decisive action in the UN to end the suffering and genocide in Sudan. The UK must urgently call for the deployment of a UN/AU intervention force to protect civilians and restore stability.    The UK must support the establishment of a civilian administration in Sudan as neither the SAF nor the RSF are fit to govern Sudan. The SAF’s track record as part of the Bashir regime clearly demonstrates its opposition to a democratic and pluralist political system.

The strikes hit a military hospital, as well as residential and office buildings in Kharkiv [file image]/ RTÉ Russian forces have captured a village just seven kilometres from the border of Ukraine's central Dnipropetrovsk region in their latest battlefield advance, Moscow has said. The Kremlin's troops have not crossed the boundary of the region since their offensive began three years ago, but they have been grinding towards it for months in the hope of a breakthrough. Seizing land in the Dnipropetrovsk region would be seen as a major propaganda victory for Russia, though military analysts have said such a crossing would have little strategic value. Russian army units "liberated the village of Zaporizhzhia" in the eastern Donetsk region, the Russian defence ministry said in a statement. The Donetsk region borders Dnipropetrovsk to the east. The village of Zaporizhzhia, which shares the same name as the southern Ukrainian region, had a population of around 200 people before the conflict. US President Donald Trump has been pushing for a speedy end to the fighting since taking office, but his administration has failed to reach a breakthrough despite multiple rounds of negotiation with both sides. Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected a joint US-Ukrainian plan for a 30-day truce, and this week suggested that President Volodymyr Zelensky be removed from office as part of any peace process. Ukraine accuses Russia of 'war crime' with Kharkiv strike Ukraine accused Russia of committing a "war crime" during a massive attack on the city of Kharkiv, which included strikes on a military hospital that wounded personnel undergoing treatment. "The hospital building and nearby residential buildings were damaged by a Shahed drone," the Ukrainian army said in a statement. "According to preliminary reports, there are casualties among the military personnel who were undergoing treatment at the medical centre," it added. Ukraine does not typically reveal data on military casualties and did not say how many soldiers were wounded. It accused Russia of having carried out a "war crime" and "violating the norms of international humanitarian law". The Ukrainian emergency services said the "massive attack" on the northeastern city also destroyed residential and office buildings. Governor Oleg Synegubov said two people were killed: a 67-year-old man and a 70-year-old woman. Another 25 people were wounded, including children, he added. Accreditation:   AFP/Reuters © RTÉ 2025.

Humanitarian aid has not entered Gaza for nearly a month due to Israel's blockade. Residents of Gaza tell Middle East Eye they can't bear the hunger Children hold out empty pots as they queue for charity meals handed out from a kitchen during Ramadan, in Gaza City on 22 March 2025 (AFP) Huda Helles enjoyed a brief respite during the first days of the latest two-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. She lived with her family of eight in a makeshift tent in Al-Wihda Street, central Gaza City, after their house in Al-Shujaiya was bombed by an Israeli air strike in 2023. She and her family had a plan for the various dishes they wanted to cook during Ramadan. That plan was turned upside down on 2 March, when Israel closed the borders, halting the entry of all humanitarian aid, food, and goods into Gaza. The renewed blockade has brought the enclave to the brink of famine once again. “We used to cook a variety of dishes every day, but now, for over 20 days, all we’ve had is rice,” Huda said. “Now it’s starting to give me severe stomach cramps.” On Wednesday, the UN aid coordination office,  OCHA , said in its latest update that Israel’s ban on entry of aid has continued for nearly a month and that no aid entered the enclave throughout this period. All requests by humanitarian agencies to coordinate access with Israeli authorities have been denied. Moreover, Israeli attacks killed eight humanitarian workers since its unilateral decision to resume hostilities on Gaza on 18 March, bringing the total number of aid workers killed by the Israeli army in Gaza to 399, OCHA said. Helles recalled when the blockade was imposed. The shops were empty within hours, and what was left was too expensive, she said. Even the charity distributions, which once offered a variety of meals, have dwindled, now providing only small servings of rice at the time of Iftar. An elderly man moves with a walker past rubble along a broken road as people displaced by conflict from Beit Lahia arrive in Gaza City on 22 March 2025 (AFP) After days of eating little more than rice, Huda couldn’t sleep at night, suffering from severe stomach pain and colic. She was diagnosed with a stomach infection two weeks ago.  “Doctors advised me to eat healthy food and avoid canned goods,” she said. “But there’s nothing else to eat except the low-quality charity distribution. I am surviving on eating only bread and cheese, when possible.”  Helles’s mother, Manal, 52, was also supposed to eat healthy food. She suffered a heart attack and high blood pressure at the beginning of this month. Huda thinks that the main reason for her mother’s deteriorating health is living in the harsh conditions in the tents, including the dire lack of food and clean water for drinking.  “During Ramadan, my mother used to prepare a beautiful spread of chicken, meat, and vegetables, carefully preparing each dish for the family,” Huda recalled. “Now, she looks at us helplessly, asking us to hang on, hoping that the starvation will not last much longer.” ‘We lived on canned hummus’ Before the ceasefire, Huda and her family had been displaced to Khan Younis, in the southern part of Gaza. “We were not able to find a piece of bread. For two months, we lived only on canned hummus.”  'We no longer have the energy to flee from one place to another, fetch water, or even recover from wounds due to the lack of food and medical care'- Ahmed Ramda During the ceasefire, Huda and her family feared the return of war and the famine that would inevitably follow. And that is what has happened. “It’s unfair to live in starvation again,” she said. Ahmed Ramda, 38, also struggles to find something to eat or feed his four children during Israel’s current complete blockade on the entry of humanitarian aid, including food. He thinks that the blockade’s impact is even worse than last year. “We no longer have the energy to flee from one place to another, fetch water, or even recover from wounds due to the lack of food and medical care,” he said.  “They want us to be homeless, reliant on limited humanitarian aid, but all we want is for the borders to open so we can work, make a living, and live in peace.” He was once a driver, but his car was bombed by Israeli air strikes in November 2023 while he and his family were evacuating. His house was also destroyed, his father killed, and many other family members were wounded.  Now, Ramda and his family live in a tent on Omar Al-Mukhtar Street in central Gaza. “My children cry every day, refusing to eat the lentils or rice from the charity distributions. They ask me for chicken, meat, and fruits,” Ahmed said. “Their mother even lied to them, telling them she put minced meat in the food, but it melted while cooking.” “I wish to be dead before the moment I see my children starve to death.” In January 2024, Ramda and his wife, Sana, welcomed their baby girl, Misk, into the world in their displacement tent in Deir al-Balah, in the middle of the Gaza Strip. However, due to the lack of proper nutrition, Sana had a difficult time breastfeeding Misk.  Tragically, Misk died of malnutrition in August 2024. “Sana struggled to breastfeed Misk due to the lack of healthy food and because we couldn’t afford what was available in the markets,” Ramda explained through tears. Meanwhile, his 10-year-old daughter, Jori, has been battling dehydration. “I lost one daughter, and I’m terrified of losing another before the borders open and we get food,” he said. “I appeal to the world to end our suffering - not for us, the adults, but for the sake of our children, who are deprived of their most basic rights. "If the borders open, I hope to flee Gaza, seeking a new life in Norway or Belgium, where I can find a job and live in peace with my family." 'We want the war to end' Mazen Marouf, 48, a farmer, struggles to survive with his 11-member family. During the ceasefire, he and his six sons had planted tomatoes and onions on their farmland in Beit Lahia, hoping to feed themselves and make a living from their crops. But when Israel broke the ceasefire on 18 March, their plans were shattered. “Israeli artillery and aerial shelling began suddenly in the morning. We could only take our tent,” Marouf said. “We didn’t know where to go.” Marouf and his family could hardly find an empty place to set up their tent in Al-Yarmouk neighbourhood due to the crowded movement of displaced people. They are still struggling to find something to eat, as they have no money and were unable to bring any food with them when they evacuated. The north of the Gaza Strip, especially Beit Hanoun, was once considered the food basket of Gaza, but has been decimated by the war. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations ( FAO ), at least 67.6 percent of cropland in northern Gaza has been destroyed by Israel. “We only eat when charity distributions come or when others share their canned food,” Marouf explained. “My family and I are sick and suffering from malnutrition.” “We don’t want to rely on humanitarian aid. We want the war to stop now and to live in peace and dignity. Copyright © 2014 - 2025 .  Middle East Eye. All rights reserved. Only England and Wales jurisdiction apply in all legal matters.

March 27, 2025 Sudanese army finds shipping container filled with human remains in Khartoum WATCH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA-O_mk-cDA "These are the remains of human beings … who were imprisoned or locked up in this container" Sudanese army forces discovered a shipping container in Khartoum filled with dozens of skeletal remains, believed to be victims killed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Copyright © 2025 TRT Global.

Rebecca Henschke BBC Eye Investigations The BBC has been sent several images of damaged buildings in Naung Lin Village, Shan state, where Myanmar's junta fighters reportedly dropped bombs on Friday evening. Source: BBC Myanmar's military junta has continued to bomb parts of the war-torn country following the major earthquake there, which has killed more than 1,600 people. The UN has described the attacks as "completely outrageous and unacceptable". Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews told the BBC that it was "nothing short of incredible" that the military was continuing to "drop bombs when you are trying to rescue people" after the earthquake. He called on the military regime, which seized power in a coup nearly four years ago to stop all military operations. "Anyone who has influence on the military needs to step up the pressure and make it very clear that this is not acceptable," he said. "I'm calling upon the junta to just stop, stop any of its military operations," he added. BBC Burmese confirmed that seven people had been killed in an air strike in Naungcho in northern Shan state. This strike took place around 15:30 local time, less than three hours after the quake had struck. Pro-democracy rebel groups that are fighting to remove the military from power have reported aerial bombings in Chang-U township in the north-western Sagaing region, the epicentre of the quake. There are also reports of airstrikes in regions near the Thai border. The National Unity Government (NUG), which represents the ousted civilian administration, said in a statement that its armed forces would begin a two-week pause in "offensive military operations, except for defensive actions" in areas affected by the earthquake, from Sunday. The 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck Sagaing was also felt in neighbouring countries. It was followed by reports of destruction coming from nearby Mandalay - Myanmar's second largest city - as well as the capital, Nay Pyi Taw, which is more than 150 miles (241km) away. The junta says 1,644 people are known to have died and many more are believed to be trapped under rubble. Live coverage of this story What caused the Myanmar earthquake? Major earthquake adds to war-torn Myanmar's troubles The quake comes after four years of civil war in Myanmar that followed a military coup in 2021. The coup triggered huge protests, with thousands taking to the streets daily, demanding the restoration of civilian rule. What initially began as a civil disobedience campaign soon evolved into a widespread insurgency involving pro-democracy and ethnic rebel groups - which eventually sparked an all-out civil war. Four years on, violent fighting has continued between the military on the one hand, and ethnic armies and armed resistance groups on the other. The junta, which has suffered continual and humiliating defeats and lost vast swathes of territory, is increasingly relying on air attacks to crush resistance to its rule. Large parts of the Sagaing region, the epicentre of the earthquake, are now under the control of pro-democracy resistance groups. A BBC investigation revealed that nearly four years after seizing power in a coup, the military now controls less than a quarter of the country . The investigation revealed that ethnic armies and a patchwork of resistance groups now control 42% of the country's land mass, while much of the remaining area remains contested. It's in aerial combat that the military regime has the upper hand. Resistance groups lack the capacity to fight back in the air. The military has a history of carrying out indiscriminate aerial bombardments that have destroyed schools, monasteries, churches, and hospitals. In one of the deadliest airstrikes, more than 170 people were killed , including many women and children. The UN body investigating human rights violations in the country has warned that the military junta is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against its own people. The military's aerial warfare is being sustained by continued support from Russia and China. Despite UN calls for an arms embargo in response to the coup, both China and Russia have sold the junta sophisticated attack jets and provided training on how to use it. Russia and China have also now sent aid and rescue teams into Myanmar. But UK-based Burmese rights activist Julie Khine said: "It's hard to trust the sympathy now, when they're also the same countries supplying the military junta with deadly weapons used to kill our innocent civilians." Myanmar's military chief Min Aung Hlaing visited a hospital where survivors are being treated in Nay Pyi Taw on Friday. Source: Getty Images/BBC There is also widespread concern that the military will use aid as a weapon in the civil war. Myanmar's military has a longstanding practice of denying aid to areas where resistance groups are active. The UN's Tom Andrews told the BBC that during past relief efforts, the military blocked aid and arrested aid workers. "What we know from past humanitarian disasters, natural disasters, is that the junta does not reveal the truth. It also has a habit of blocking humanitarian aid from getting to where it is most needed," he said. "They weaponise this aid. They send it to those areas that they have control of and they deny it to areas that they do not. "So you have areas in which the most acute needs exist and you have literally aid trying to get in, trucks blocking the way, people being arrested and that has been the pattern of their response to natural disasters in the past. "I'm afraid I'm fully expecting that that will be the case with this disaster." Copyright 2025 BBC. All rights reserved.

Revealed: How the UK continued selling arms after Yemen massacreBy Dania Akkad with Anna Stavrianakis We spent three years trying to find out what happened in Whitehall after the Great Hall attack in Yemen. We discovered how decisions fly with political winds, not facts on the ground - just as in Gaza It all began with a simple question. How did British officials react after Saudi Arabia killed 155 people and wounded hundreds more at a funeral in Yemen in 2016? At the time, Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthis was at its height, and would not have been possible without British weaponry. Hundreds of mourners had gathered on Saturday 8 October 2016 at the Great Hall in Sanaa to pay their respects to the father of Jalal al-Ruweishan, interior minister of the rebel government. One witness said : "A plane fired a missile and minutes later another plane pounded the building. The attack was what is known as a “double tap”, where a first strike is followed by a second that kills additional civilians and emergency workers who have rushed to help the dead and injured. There were also witnesses who said there was  a third strike that afternoon. Reports at the time spoke of the hall strewn with body parts and charred remains. Survivors had had limbs torn off. “The place has been turned into a lake of blood,” one rescuer told reporters. The Great Hall attack, the biggest single loss of life during the war, was widely condemned internationally , by among others, the UN. Saudi Arabia eventually said it had carried out the air strike based on incorrect information. The massacre prompted the US administration under President Barack Obama to review its engagement in the conflict.  Two months later, Washington blocked a major weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, with officials pointing specifically to the funeral attack.But what about the UK? What happened when British civil servants and politicians returned to their desks in London the following Monday?  Did they reflect on whether this was the moment when British weapons should no longer be licensed for sale to Saudi Arabia? After all, in February 2016, eight months before the attack, Edward Bell, the senior UK official overseeing arms export controls, told then-business secretary, Sajid Javid, that it would be “prudent and cautious” for the UK to halt weapons exports to Saudi Arabia. “My gut tells me we should suspend,” Bell wrote in an email.  But in November 2016, only weeks after the Great Hall attack, Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary at the time, had urged Javid to continue selling arms, a Freedom of Information request would later show . Then British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson greets then Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir in London on 16 October 2016, just over a week after the Great Hall attack (Justin Tallis/AFP) What had unfolded in Whitehall that October?  This is the story of what happened over three years as we brought our joint experience as an investigative journalist and an academic researching arms exports to try to answer this question. Along the way, Israel’s offensive on Gaza - and the continued licensing of UK arms exports to Israel month after month as the Palestinian death toll rose - made finding an answer feel all the more urgent.  If we could shine light on what had happened with British arms exports during Yemen, could that help prevent it from happening again? A long game It was a Tuesday in March 2022 when this search began.  Somewhere, I figured, there had to be a paper trail, perhaps messages between civil servants, meeting notes or other documents hinting at what had unfolded in Whitehall back in autumn 2016. It wasn’t going to be the easiest or quickest mystery to solve. But it also wouldn't be dangerous like the work of the Yemeni human rights organisation Mwatana which has documented violations of international humanitarian law on the ground, including the Great Hall attack . From desks in London, we could get at the decisions that had taken lives in Yemen - and it mattered. It was important for the British public to know exactly what was being done in their name, and above all, for Yemenis who had been targeted by weapons made in the UK. I knew Anna Stavrianakis had done this successfully before: as a professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, she has extensively researched and taught about the international arms trade and arms transfer controls, and engaged with policymakers and NGOs about UK arms exports. And most importantly, as far as I saw it, Anna knew her way around Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, which can be made by anyone in the UK to public authorities for information they hold. After a 20-month fight with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), an FOI request Anna had made in 2017 turned up a set of emails that showed how Boris Johnson recommended the UK continue to sell bomb parts to Saudi Arabia - only days after an air strike on a Sanaa potato chip factory killed 14 people in August 2016. An employee checks the damage from a Saudi-led coalition attack that killed over a dozen of his colleagues at the Al-Aqel factory in Sanaa in August 2016 (Mohammed Huwais/AFP) I emailed Anna asking if there was a way to find out what had happened that October during government decision-making on arms exports, and why there seemed to be a hole in the official record. “How interesting,” Anna wrote back less than a half hour later. “I'd be very happy to talk with you. Give me a bit of time to look through my FOI files etc - would Thursday work, say 10am?”  A week and a Signal call later, we were filing FOIs.  Paper promises: UK arms exports The UK government frequently says it has one of the most robust arms export licensing regimes in the world, and that is true - on paper .  The policy is clear: the government will not allow arms exports when there is a clear risk they might be used in serious violation of international humanitarian law.  But a good policy on paper is not the same as a good policy in practice. Experts like Anna say the terms “clear” and “might” have been abused beyond any common sense meaning to allow ongoing exports.  Weapons are produced by privately-owned companies - BAE Systems is the UK’s largest arms company - but they must be licensed by the government for export. The licensing process is extremely opaque and often generates baffling outcomes.  For instance, during the Arab Spring of 2011, the government allowed the export of sniper rifles to North African and Middle Eastern states under the label of “crowd control goods”. And while complex details of arms exports licensing policy may not capture the public imagination, MPs are not much better informed than those they represent. Between 1999 and 2024, UK arms exports were scrutinised by a “super-committee” called the Committees on Arms Export Controls (CAEC), to which four select committees - Business and Trade, Defence, Foreign Affairs and International Development - would each send members.  But CAEC was often beset by problems, including not having enough members present, the absence of a dedicated membership and chair, and being unable to convince relevant ministers to attend and give evidence.  In 2016, the committees held an inquiry into the use of UK-made arms during the war in Yemen. But it disintegrated into farce when members were split between those who wanted to recommend a suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and those who did not. A draft of the report was leaked , and three of the separate committees ended up publishing their individual reports (only Defence chose not to). Eventually, committee members themselves said that the running of the body was not conducive to the scrutiny of the government’s licensing and control of arms exports.  In January 2023, the chairs of the four select committees lobbied for the discussion of arms exports to get its own committee. Excerpt of January 2023 letter which chairs of the select committees sent to then leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt (Parliament) But Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt, then leader of the House of Commons and a former committee member herself, told them : “I appreciate the importance of effective parliamentary scrutiny of arms exports, however, I am currently not convinced that the change you have requested is needed.” So no select committee. Instead, things went in the opposite direction: the under-performing CAEC was disbanded in January 2024, leaving arms control scrutiny to the Business and Trade Committee.  The result? After a strong start in which the committee challenged the government about its performance on scrutiny, Labour’s success in the general election of July 2024 muted the committee’s performance.  Details about arms export policy only emerge when MPs, campaigners, journalists and researchers overcome government delay and obstruction and seek them out, or when legal challenges force the government to reveal its hand. Indeed, most of the public details about UK government decisions relating to arms sales to Saudi Arabia during the Yemen war only came from government submissions to the High Court in 2017, when the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) brought a legal challenge. But even then, many of the government's submissions were not released publicly. Instead, they were only shared during closed evidence hearings that only CAAT’s specially appointed lawyers were allowed to attend on the grounds of national security. Even CAAT wasn’t sure what was public and what was private: indeed, it had to check with its lawyer when Anna and I asked if the group had any other records relating to the Great Hall attack that they had not put on their website .  There was also the problem of figuring out what other people had already requested through their own FOIs. Some government departments and authorities post these online - but not all.  There is no single exhaustive collection of FOIs in the UK, although groups such as Unredacted , a research unit at the University of Westminster, are attempting to coordinate efforts and plug the gap. The unit’s Yemen War Project , which hosts the largest collection of publicly available material related to UK involvement in the war in Yemen since 2015, will launch with the publication of this story. All of the FOIs we mention in this story can now be viewed in the project’s archive.  Now, back to our hunt. Anna had trawled through the documents she had already received in response to her requests. I looked through What Do They Know , a website where many people voluntarily post their FOI requests and answers in an attempt to keep the information public. But nothing was turning up to fill in the gaps. And our requests were being kicked down the road by government departments, one stock email at a time.  Making the call on Saudi Arabia  What exactly were we looking for?  It was obvious to almost everyone that the coalition, led by Saudi Arabia, had violated international humanitarian law (IHL) in Yemen. Civilian spaces from schools to hospitals to market places and beyond had been hit long before the funeral hall was double-tapped. The FCDO is responsible for those parts of the arms licensing process that relate to IHL.  But how had the ministry’s officials and lawyers measured Saudi Arabia’s capacity and commitment to following international law?  And what had the politicians they advised done with that advice? Yemeni Prime Minister Abdel Aziz bin Habtoor visits the Great Hall in Sanaa destroyed by reported Saudi-led coalition air strikes in 2016 (Mohammed Huwais/AFP) To get down to specifics: had British ministers and their advisers decided that the October 2016 attack was the final straw as to whether there was a clear risk that British weapons supplied to Saudi Arabia might be used to violate IHL? If they did then the UK government, by its own criteria, should have stopped licensing arms exports to Saudi Arabia. We suspected that among the government documents coming back to us would be a metaphorical smoking gun, tucked somewhere between all the redactions.  It would reveal, we theorised, how officials believed the clear risk threshold had been met - but that the government had sat on the advice so that they would not have to restrict arms exports.  In essence, we were trying to go back and publicly mark the government’s homework in the belief that, if we could expose what we suspected had happened, then it just might stop it happening again. But then Israel’s war on Gaza would completely upend our logic. Requests, redactions and delay Even before the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023 that precipitated Israel’s war on Gaza - which, once again raised major questions about UK arms exports policy - the responses we got to our FOIs made us realise this mystery would not be solved quickly or cleanly. It’s at this point that this story gets a bit more complicated - but I promise you it is going somewhere (although you may want to go make a coffee). Here’s the overview: between March 2022 and April 2024, Anna and I separately filed 15 different FOI requests with the FCDO and the Department for International Trade (DIT), as it was called then. We wanted correspondence between key government officials about UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia after the Great Hall attack. Anna had already successfully, if painfully, used FOIs to find information about the advice officials gave politicians in the three months before the air strike. It took her 20 months and an appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office to force the information out of the Foreign Office.   So we followed her tried-and-tested approach, initially requesting information from both the foreign and trade departments about the quarterly reporting period of October to December 2016, as well as trying other angles. Some of our requests were rejected on the basis that they were “too broad” or “too expensive”: in other words, that it would cost more than 24 hours of staff time, valued at £600 (about $780) to retrieve what we wanted. Fair enough. We weren’t out to bankrupt or overwork the British government. We just wanted information.  But Anna’s previous effort had not initially been rejected for being too broad or too expensive - the FCO had refused to release information on the grounds that it would prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs or potentially damage the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, we refiled those requests, specifying narrower time frames in the hope of being successful. The third time that one of my narrower Foreign Office requests was rejected, the ministry’s FOI unit explained that the material I wanted was “located across a significant volume of physical folders and loose papers which would also contain information that is not relevant to your request”. Excerpt from Foreign Office response to one of my FOI requests, received in September 2022 (Dania Akkad/MEE) They acknowledged that I had been shortening my time frames, which in theory would have meant less work for them, but still said they had “no way of easily identifying the information” because of this apparent loose paper situation. “We are unable to offer any viable suggestions on how your request could be narrowed in a way that would enable us to comply with it,” they concluded. So I filed for an internal review after this third request: the FOI equivalent of ordering a well-done steak at a restaurant and then calling over the manager to complain that it’s under-cooked. In January 2023, I was told that the FCDO manager, in this case, agreed with the staff: what I had asked for was too expensive to process. That was the Foreign Office - but the team over at the trade department responded slightly differently. After rejecting my first request over cost, the DIT then said in August 2022 that my second request had triggered what is called a “public interest test”, which is a common response, especially on anything foreign policy or security-related. What was more in the public’s interest - disclosing the information I wanted or withholding it? Whatever it was, they’d need more time to consider. Another month passed and the department extended their deadline again. I requested an internal review. The next month, the department rejected the FOI request citing three exemptions. If released, the information I wanted might:   harm the UK’s international relations reveal how government policy is developed prejudice an individual, a company, or the government’s interests But six months later, the same department’s internal review flagged that they had made a mistake. This wasn’t about exemptions: actually, as with the Foreign Office, I had asked for too much and it was too expensive. I was welcome to try again, the DIT said  - and unlike the Foreign Office, they made some suggestions. But, by the way, they might still reject that request based on some of the same exemptions they had initially cited. “Other exemptions may apply,” they added. I tried again.  Now, the government has a web-based licensing export system called Spire. Among other suggestions, they wondered: would the specific information I needed be on that? Or was it of a more general nature, like correspondence outside of Spire? So between January and June 2023, I filed another three FOI requests with the DIT based on their guidance. My first two requests were for any correspondence outside of Spire and then specifically for correspondence held in electronic format outside of Spire. For both, the department said it had nothing. The third request, though, was for documents on Spire – and they actually found something that fell under my request. But again they refused to release it because they said this might:  prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs and commercial interests  reveal personal information or information shared in confidence And then, as all seemed lost, a separate FOI query Anna had made to the trade ministry looked like it would deliver the much-needed breakthrough. Four months to say it will take three days When it comes to licensing arms exports, the UK government considers a list of eight criteria .Criterion 2, as it is known, specifically looks at how much the buyer - here Saudi Arabia - respects international humanitarian law.So Anna asked for information about occasions when trade or foreign office officials had raised Criterion 2 concerns about arms exports to Riyadh.Her request yielded a handful of dates - good start, we thought. But none of the dates matched with the Great Hall attack or the days immediately following. The trade department reminded her that it was the FCDO providing advice on Criteria 2:  “ You might like to contact them ,” they told Anna. But the department refused to release any information about the nature of the concerns, or an email chain between then-trade secretary Liam Fox and then-trade minister Mark Garnier from December 2016 that DIT had told Anna they held. So Anna requested an internal review of this denial of release of information and then went to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the final arbiter of all FOI disputes. Both times, the denial of information was upheld. Next: back to the Foreign Office (it’s now February 2023).  After two earlier rejections based on cost, Anna’s third request drew the suggestion that we “consider requesting information held in electronic format on the FCDO’s centrally managed IT system”. So Anna did. The FCDO eventually released some basic information about the number of assessments that it had made of Saudi Arabia. It included that officials had conducted Criterion 2 assessments on several dates including, crucially, 12 October - only four days after the Great Hall attack.  But, the department said, it did not hold any records indicating that the FCDO had raised concerns about Criterion 2 with other departments. Excerpt of Foreign Office response to one of Anna's FOI requests (Anna Stavrianakis) Nor had it done so via the interdepartmental Export Control Joint Unit, a cross-departmental body that oversees UK export controls and licensing for military and dual-use items.  Ministers had been consulted only once, on 19 October 2016. Anna then went more specific. In June 2023 she requested documents and information about the Great Hall strike which had been referred to in media reports and court documents but not released publicly in full.  These included a letter from Boris Johnson to Liam Fox dated 8 November 2016; an IHL update received by Johnson, which he mentioned recently receiving in that letter; and other material, including UK requests to Saudi Arabia for changes to targeting after the Great Hall strikeThere was also a decision paper from 2019, advising the government about international humanitarian law issues, including an overall assessment of Saudi Arabia’s actions in relation to Criterion 2. For four months the FCDO failed to reply, despite Anna chasing them up. It then sent her a holding message. So she went to the ICO, who told the FCDO to hurry up.  At the end of October 2023, the Foreign Office finally told Anna the request was too expensive : it had taken them four-and-a-half months to decide that responding would take more than three-and-a-half working days.  Anna requested an internal review. In January 2024, the FCDO released a redacted version of the 2019 " decision paper " that had already been discussed in court, citing national security exemptions. But it still didn’t answer the other questions we had. At the same time, in October 2023, Anna had complained again to the ICO. It took the ICO until April 2024 to allocate a case worker. The FCDO failed to respond to their investigation within three months and then delayed access to the withheld material.  Further delays and missed deadlines ensued “due to the intricacies of this particular case,” according to the ICO.  One factor in this was the apparent requirement for ICO officials to physically go to the FCDO to view the withheld material, raising the question of what format it is held in. Having missed their own 12-month deadline for complex cases, the ICO issued a decision notice the day before this story was published. They upheld the FCDO's decision but required them to advise how to refine it; and required the FCDO to release the same version of the 2019 Decision Paper as has already been made public by CAAT. David Cameron and the Gaza coverup We felt like we were reaching the end of the road.  But there remained one final option: we could ask for any information about ourselves that had been generated by the departments when they looked at our requests over the past few years. Known as “subject access requests”, these have sometimes offered a behind-the-curtain view on government decision-making when more traditional means have failed. Example: in 2019, documents released under such a request showed how the Ministry of Justice scrambled to halt further coverage of a report, leaked to then-Buzzfeed journalist Emily Dugan, that included testimonies from judges and prosecutors about the rising number of people facing criminal charges without a lawyer. “Avoid talking to Emily Dugan on the phone in any more detail than is absolutely necessary,” the MoJ’s press office told its staff in internal documents. And last year, Bahraini activist Sayed Alwadaei learned through a subject access request that the Foreign Office had attempted to block the Home Office from granting him citizenship, even though he met all of the legal requirements, as it could impact UK-Bahrain relations. So we filed requests to investigate how our own investigation had been received. And again, we waited.  By now it was late 2023. Israel’s war on Gaza was unfolding and we were feeling an eerie sense of repetition. Civilian infrastructure was being hit and and civilians in Gaza were being killed in Israeli air strikes that might be using UK-made arms. Palestinians search for survivors of the Israeli bombing in Rafah, Gaza on 22 November 2023 (AP) MPs wanted to know: what was the Foreign Office’s assessment?  In January 2024, newly appointed Foreign Secretary David Cameron was pressed before the Foreign Affairs Committee about whether he had been advised that Israel had breached international humanitarian law. Cameron, who noted repeatedly that he wasn’t a lawyer, eventually said : “The short answer to that is no.” But 10 days later, the Business and Trade department was forced to file court documents after Palestinian rights group Al-Haq mounted a legal challenge against UK arms exports to Israel. The documents revealed that as early as 10 November 2023, one month after the war began, Foreign Office officials had indeed been raising concerns about Israel’s compliance. In the weeks that followed, Conservative MP Alicia Kearnes, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and a former Foreign Office official herself, was recorded telling Tory donors at a drinks reception that the government had indeed received advice from its own lawyers that Israel had breached IHL in Gaza but had failed to make it public. Making that assessment public would trigger a suspension of arms exports. When asked about the recording, she didn’t deny what she’d said. “I remain convinced the government has completed its updated assessment on whether Israel is demonstrating a commitment to international humanitarian law, and that it has concluded that Israel is not demonstrating this commitment,” Kearns told The Guardian.  Each time the curtain was briefly peeled back, Andrew Mitchell, the senior Foreign Office minister in the House of Commons, would face a flurry of questions from MPs to clarify what lawyers had found and when their findings would be made public (Cameron, as a lord, could not sit in the lower chamber). Week after week, ministers obfuscated. On 26 March 2024, by when at least 32,414 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza and Israel had been accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, then-shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy,  asked Mitchell if he could give “a simple yes or no answer” to one question: had the Foreign Office been advised that British weapons might be used to commit or facilitate war crimes? Mitchell replied that the UK had “a robust arms export licensing regime” and that Israel's adherence to international humanitarian law was regularly reviewed and the government “act in accordance with that”. He said that the Foreign Office would not publish any legal advice.   Despite the court filings, leaks, and parliamentary questions, MPs and the public remained none the wiser about the Foreign Office’s assessments and whether the government was still licensing arms exports to Israel without restriction. These questions became all the more critical after three British aid workers were killed in an Israeli drone attack on a World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza on 1 April 2024. Arms campaigners speculated that the military technology could have included UK-made engines. A car used by the World Central Kitchen in central Gaza the day after an Israeli strike killed seven of the organisation's aid workers (AFP) This was, in fact, the second time during the war that British aid workers had been attacked by Israel, potentially with UK-made weapons. Around 6am on 18 January 2024, an F-16 jet dropped a 1,000-pound bomb on a compound in al-Mawasi that was housing British doctors, among others, working for UK-based Medical Aid for Palestine and the US-based International Rescue Committee, headed by former UK foreign secretary, David Miliband.  Several staff and a bodyguard were injured and the compound severely damaged.  But a month earlier, the Israeli military had told the British defence attache in Tel Aviv that the site had been designated as a protected, humanitarian area. And four months later, the World Central Kitchen convoy was hit.  Would this fatal attack on its own citizens in Gaza, potentially with UK-made weapons, change the government’s position on arms export licensing? It was only on 9 April 2024, in answer to a journalist’s question during a press conference in Washington, that Cameron, flanked by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, made it clear : there had been no change to the UK’s arms export policy towards Israel. This seemed to fly in the face of logic and all of the publicly available information. It was hard to imagine that the updated legal advice had become any more confident about Israeli compliance with international humanitarian law.  Five months later, on 2 September 2024, the newly elected Labour government announced it was suspending around 30 licences for arms exports to Israel after a review found that there was indeed a clear risk that UK-made weapons might be used in violation of international humanitarian law. That was news that got the headlines. But it was a lower-profile story published the following day in The Guardian that really caught our attention. Someone who helped draft Foreign Office advice said that politicians had been told seven months earlier that Israel was breaching international humanitarian law in Gaza. Cameron had sat on the advice.  The unnamed source pointed to a memorandum released the day before by the Labour government, explaining why it had suspended the arms exports and said the memo was “similar to what was being sent to the government from at least February onwards”.  “The tragedy has to be considered,” the source said. “How many lives might have been saved if the arms export licences had been stopped then and not in September, and what the potential ripple effect might have been on how other countries would have reacted in ceasing trade.” The story lit up arms control and aid organisation WhatsApp groups.  But this key detail - that the advice from inside the Foreign Office had been roughly similar for seven months while more than 13,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza - faded from public attention as soon as it fell off the Guardian homepage.  What the government said about us In the midst of all this, our subject access requests had started to come back in February 2024. Anna’s file from the Trade Department was mostly a snapshot of her work with parliamentary committees and campaign groups.  The Foreign Office was a bit more wary :  “...we need to look at this closely in the context of previous FOIs from Anna [REDACTED] [REDACTED] Anna successfully appealed an FOI response in 2019.”  They also described that in giving evidence to the Committees on Arms Export Controls, she had “dominated” the sessions and been “very critical of the Govt”.  Note that the FOI process is supposed to be “applicant blind”: officials are not supposed to take the identity of the individual requesting information into consideration, as FOI releases are about putting information into the wider public domain. And both FOI requests and subject access requests are supposed to be motive-blind: they are to be treated without reference to the applicant’s motives. My request revealed a bit more. As, over the months, I whittled down the time frame of my requests, heavily redacted emails showed that the Foreign Office and Trade Department FOI units were in touch with each other.  Excerpt of the Foreign Office's response to my subject access request (Dania Akkad/MEE) “We have received a new [request for information] on arms exports to Saudi Arabia. The request is the same as the one we received in March but a narrower time frame,” someone in the Foreign Office whose name was redacted wrote to another person whose name was redacted in the DIT on 15 July 2022.  “We previously issued a section 12 attached due to the wider scope of the original request,” they wrote, referring to the disproportionate costs exemption. Eight minutes later, someone in the DIT pinged back: “Yes, we received the same cut down request.” And on 18 July 2022, someone in the Foreign Office emailed two contacts in the government legal department noting my latest FOI. “The requester has now written back with a new FOI request covering a narrower time frame,” they wrote. The emails also showed that there had also been some discussion - maybe even tension - within the Foreign Office about how it should respond.  “It's unfortunate that the requester followed our refinement advice in the previous response and we're now saying that no refinement is possible…” one person wrote on an undated day. In November 2022, someone asks in an email: “Are dept absolutely sure we could not ask requester to narrow any future request.” Two months later, someone in the Foreign Office wrote: “I think that we really need to add in some guidance on how to narrow the request. If this were to lead to an ICO complaint they would comment on the lack of assistance provided to the requester.” In response to that email, someone else said they had established that, regardless of the date range, they would apply the exemption that my request was too expensive because what had been requested was located across a large volume of physical folders and loose papers. “There is an end-point to this type of activity and this appears to be it,” they wrote. Another excerpt from my subject access request (Dania Akkad/MEE) It was interesting to us that the kind of documentation we were requesting, such as correspondence between ministers and teams of Foreign Office and Trade Department made in 2016, would, in the age of email and text messaging, be stored in folders as loose papers. But also, the idea that folders and papers were just sitting somewhere left us convinced that, if we just framed our request differently, then we could get something.  The Foreign Office wasn’t going to advise us on how to do this. But we might as well give it one last last shot.  The Great Hall coverup In one final FOI in April 2024, I asked specifically for “read outs, agendas, notes, emails, handouts, reports or any other documentation related to any meetings held within the Foreign Office between 10 October 2016 and 14 October 2016 regarding the Saudi-led coalition bombing of a funeral hall in Sanaa on 8 October 2016”.  This was a final attempt to specify types of documentation associated with meetings we assume must have happened in the aftermath of the air strike. This time, I got something. In August 2024, a 10-page digest of heavily redacted emails sent between officials in the wake of the attack landed in my inbox. I couldn’t quite believe it at first. But then I started reading.  Even with the redacted passages, it was clear from the flurry of emails that, yes, British officials had been concerned on that Monday morning in October 2016, only two days after scores of Yemenis were massacred at a funeral. There is, for example, reference several times to an office meeting that day, described in one email subject line as “Monday’s FS meeting on Yemen”, which suggests that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson attended.  Mentioned in the emails is a set of “asks of the Saudis” that came out of the meeting. These were to be communicated by then Middle East minister Tobias Ellwood during a trip to Riyadh that week. The emails also detail that someone “will be taking the note”. There is also mention of a readout, presumably key points from that meeting. Surely, we thought, this documentation would have fallen under our FOI requests, including one in which I had asked for minutes of any meetings which Johnson and Ellwood had both attended that October. But we’d never seen it. On Wednesday 12 October, Neil Bush, head of the Arabian Peninsula and Iran Department sent an email to top Foreign Office officials involved in the Middle East, and UK ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, the US and the United Arab Emirates among others. Email from heavily redacted response from the Foreign Office to a FOI request made in April 2024 (Dania Akkad/MEE) It noted that the latest assessment of Saudi Arabia’s compliance with international humanitarian law was completed the week before the Great Hall attack. Furthermore, it had been due to be delivered to Johnson’s private office by noon on Monday 10 October. That update, Bush wrote, “concluded the clear risk threshold had not been reached, but the judgment was becoming increasingly finely balanced”. Over the weekend of the air strike, he and others had discussed the funeral hall attack and the “implications for the clear risk test on IHL”. He wrote: “The incident on 8th October at the funeral hall in Sana’a was an important new development that officials recommended needed to be taken into consideration in our assessment on IHL.” Johnson, he said, had agreed and asked for all incidents up to the end of the weekend to be “incorporated into an updated assessment”. That updated assessment was now being redrafted. “We are developing in tandem a handling plan as a prudential measure if the clear risk test is considered to be met,” Bush wrote.  This was crucial.We now knew that, even before the Great Hall attack, the question of whether Saudi Arabia was capable and committed to following international humanitarian law was already in question.  We also now knew that the attack had prompted a new – or updated – assessment. Civil servants had been concerned enough that the clear risk test might be met that they had prepared a handling - or fallback - plan. But what still remained unclear was the outcome of that new assessment and how ministers had interpreted and used that advice. And it was also unclear what exactly had been redacted from all of the emails.  It was a question that became all the more pertinent when a whistleblower came forward in February 2025, saying he had watched the formulation of the UK arms export policy first-hand during the Yemen war and had resigned over it. Writing in the Guardian, Mark Smith said that the UK government had ignored legal advice to stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia during the war in Yemen. Smith was a lead adviser on arms sales policy in the Foreign Office, and tasked with gathering information to inform advisers on whether sales were lawful. He said that there had been a high-level meeting of senior Foreign Office officials, including legal advisers, in which it was “acknowledged that the UK had exceeded the threshold for halting arms sales”. “Yet instead of advising ministers to suspend exports, the focus shifted to finding ways to ‘get back on the right side of the law’,” Smith wrote. Smith didn’t say exactly when this high-level meeting happened and did not respond to my request, through an intermediary, to have a conversation in which he might say more.  He did, however, elaborate in his piece on the culture he observed inside the Foreign Office, saying that “officials are bullied into silence” to make arms trade rules that “create a facade of legitimacy, while allowing the most egregious crimes against humanity to take place”.  Smith said he was instructed to “rebalance” his findings, that his reports were edited, and that he was given verbal instructions that would be immune from prying FOI requests.  Officials who delivered dissenting advice were asked to seek “additional information” and reporting deadlines were extended. He said he saw this across both the Yemen and Gaza wars in relation to arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Israel.  Once out of the world of arms export licensing, Smith was warned not to put his concerns in writing and to delete any and all correspondence.  What we learned after three years Smith’s piece was a revelation for me and Anna, a seeming confirmation of why we had spent three years with so little to show for our efforts.  And it left us with a question: what had been redacted from the little information we had received; and what information and advice had never been put into writing in the first place? I have since asked the Foreign Office whether it was true, as Smith said, that British officials had acknowledged that the UK had exceeded the threshold for halting arms sales. If that was the case, then was it a result of the Great Hall attack? I also asked what the outcome was of the assessment ordered immediately after the Great Hall attack.  In answer, an FCDO spokesperson issued the boilerplate response that we’ve heard many times before: “Each export licence application is rigorously assessed on a case-by-case basis against the Strategic Export Licensing Criteria.  “We will not issue an export licence where to do so would be inconsistent with the Criteria, including when there is a clear risk that the items might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.” So after three years of searching, we’ve come to believe there is no smoking gun when it comes to the international humanitarian law assessments that inform the licensing of UK arms exports. Not because there isn’t dissent within the state, but because any dissent is snuffed out by bureaucratic manoeuvring and political direction.  When there are those very rare smoking guns, such as Mark Smith’s damning testimony about the government ignoring advice during the Yemen war, they risk becoming damp squibs when it becomes clear how hard it is to hold individuals and the machinery of the state accountable.  Ironically, while Smith wanted to defend the ability of officials to “provide impartial advice without fear of political interference”, the government repeatedly uses the “free and frank advice” exemption to withhold information from the public under the Freedom of Information Act.  These are the actions of a government actively suppressing civil servants’ professional obligations and the public’s right to know.  And it’s not specific to this current government: we started our quest under a previous government, and the commitment to arms sales cuts across both Labour and the Conservatives, who governed from 2010 until July last year.  Instead, most of what the public has learned has continued to come from court cases and whistleblowers. How did British officials react after the Saudi-led coalition killed 155 people and wounded at least 525 more who were attending a crowded funeral in Yemen on 8 October 2016?  The delay, denial, and deflection we have experienced lead us to conclude that the government deliberately circumvented the law to carry on selling weapons.   But we still can’t say for sure. Copyright © 2014 - 2025. Middle East Eye. All rights reserved. Only England and Wales jurisdiction apply in all legal matters.

There are more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world. What can the future hold for them? Tens of thousands of children have been wounded in Gaza. Even those evacuated for treatment face an impossible path 27/03/2025 Amna, center, sits with her children, Elias, four, left; Taline, five; and Khaled, nine, at their current residence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in March. Photograph: Hannah Yoon/The Guardian When I entered the home in north-east Philadelphia, Elias, a lively four-year-old boy, grabbed the pack of KitKats I had brought with me and began swinging it over his head. He whirled around in circles, hollering something unintelligible. In a familiar scene – I have small children of my own – his mother tried to impose order, but yielded to the greater force of a kid on sugar kept indoors by a cold snap. Elias, his five-year-old sister Taline and nine-year-old brother Khaled were in the US because Elias and Taline needed urgent medical care. They had sustained staggering injuries when an Israeli pilot or drone operator shot a missile at the house they were taking refuge in. The explosion cleaved Elias’s right leg off below the knee. Taline’s injuries were also severe; she arrived in the US with external fixators – pins and steel in her legs – as she battled infection. A program organized and managed by Heal Palestine , a non-profit that helps evacuate wounded children from Gaza, arranged the children’s travel with their mother, Amna. When we met, Taline shied away from me, withdrawing into a large sofa. She peeked out from behind copious bangs while I talked with a volunteer from the organization, which had secured housing for the family for the duration of their stay in the US. Once the children’s treatment is completed, perhaps by the summer, their mother said, the family will have to leave the US for Egypt, a stipulation of the state department. Their father, Amna’s husband, was still trapped in Gaza – he hoped to join the family in Egypt whenever the Rafah border reopens, now a distant possibility with Israel resuming its assault. In Egypt, their rights and access to education will be limited. The Egyptian government has indicated that Palestinians who have taken refuge in the country will have to return to Gaza, an uncertain prospect even before Donald Trump pronounced his intention to cleanse the territory of Palestinians. The question of what the children’s futures would be like – what kind of future was possible – cast a long shadow over our time together. Taline was unable to walk well – her doctors in the US had tried to repair her legs hoping to avoid amputation, which remains a possibility. Elias had been fitted with a prosthesis, enabling him to move around the home. He was boisterous, and when I played back a recording of my conversation with his mother, Amna, his voice – his shouts and laughter – acted as counterpoint to the horrors Amna was describing. Khaled, the nine-year-old, was different. He had been trapped with his father in Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital for three days during Israel’s second siege of the facility in March 2024; Taline and Elias had already been evacuated south to Rafah with Amna by that time. Khaled watched as Israeli troops killed people at the hospital. He watched, too, when his father was beaten, stripped and dragged off to the beach, where he was interrogated for two days. Israeli troops bulldozed the nearby cemetery, and when Khaled was compelled to leave on the third day of the siege, he picked his way, with all the other surviving women and children, through a field of corpses. He was, his mother told me, suffering from emotional issues. Elias and Taline, who both sustained injuries in a missile strike in Gaza. Photograph: Hannah Yoon/The Guardian I had sought the family out – and others like them – to begin to piece together what had happened to the children of Gaza. Before October 2023, kids accounted for roughly half of the 2 million Palestinians there. Official figures put the death toll in Gaza at more than 50,000 people, a number that continues to climb as Israel renews its attacks. But a study in the Lancet estimates that Israeli troops killed more than 64,000 people in just the first nine months of their rampage, the time for which the study’s authors had data. In other words, the official count is probably dramatically understated. Meanwhile, the UN reports that at least 14,500 children have been killed – also probably a dramatic undercount. The real mortality figure is probably unknowable, not least because so many families have been killed at once, leaving no one to account for some babies or toddlers ever having existed. Beyond the mass death, international agencies suggest that at least 110,000 people in Gaza have been injured, including at least 25,000 children . And Unicef estimates that between 3,000 and 4,000 children in Gaza have had one or more limbs amputated. That small tract of earth is now home to more child amputees per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world. Much of what these kids are experiencing is hidden from the world – journalists still cannot enter Gaza, and many of those who called the place home have been killed . Yet, a handful of children have made it out for treatment, in the US and elsewhere. In the United States a life-changing injury doesn’t mean the end of a life worth living. Laws are in place to ensure people with disabilities enjoy equal rights and opportunities. For those with insurance, there is advanced medical infrastructure with follow-up care. But what does an amputation mean in a place with no sidewalks, no streets or wheelchair ramps or prosthetists? What promise can the future hold for children who have sustained brain injuries, or burns that destroy their ability to maneuver or function? What kinds of outcomes will exist for children who have no access to psychologists, physical therapists, legal rights – or homes? The many thousands of injured children are important. Yet together, their bodies tell a story, one that has been embossed for all time on the terrain of the 21st century. They act as the prism through which questions of international law and the protection of the vulnerable will be mediated. But if the loss these children have endured is a judgment, it is also prologue. Because their needs, their capacities and limitations, will define the contours of Palestinian society and memory forever. Amna seemed wary of me initially. But as she spoke the words came more freely. She had survived multiple Israeli wars on Gaza, and had lived through an 18-year siege. Then came the Hamas attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, and Israel’s devastating response. Before then, Amna recalled, life was hard, but home “was my heaven, too”. She was pregnant when the assault on Gaza began, and she delivered Faris by cesarean section on 11 December 2023. Ten days later, an Israeli pilot fired a missile at her apartment building. In past wars, her neighborhood in Jabalia had been spared. “The area where we were was supposed to be safe,” Amna told me. Amna, Khaled and Taline sustained deep cuts in that first assault, and required stitches – in Taline’s case, to close lacerations on her arm and head. A neighbor provided the address of a nurse who lived nearby. The family fled the rubble and made their way to her home. “We got to the house. It was overflowing with displaced people. I can’t tell you how many. There were so many people,” Amna said. The nurse stitched the open wounds on Taline’s arm and head. She explained that the laceration in Taline’s arm was deep and would require internal stitches, something she was unable to do. She also told Amna that the little girl’s arm was broken. The entire time, the bombing continued. Soon after the nurse finished treating Taline, a second explosive struck, killing 11 people at the nurse’s home. “The walls disappeared. You can’t see anything. You swallow the dust. You can’t hear anything,” Amna recalled. “My first shock came when I saw [Faris]. He was in my arms. He was choking. I thought he was dead. But he hadn’t died. Someone took him from me and shook him and he began to scream. My baby who died. He was alive then.” Skin is the body’s largest organ, made of fat and protein. The top layer, the epidermis, is where melanin is formed and where new skin cells are made. Humans wear new skin – the whole is renewed – every month. But not in the case of injury, particularly one caused by fire. Taline may have another surgery scheduled in the spring, an attempt to save her leg. Photograph: Hannah Yoon/The Guardian The Cleveland Clinic offers a guide to burn injuries. First-degree burns are what we experience after touching a hot kettle. The damage caused by the heat is superficial, and the skin recovers quickly. Second-degree burns mean the “top and middle” layers of the skin are damaged. The next degree of severity – third-degree burns – touches the third layer of skin and thin layer of fat just beneath it. A fourth-degree burn goes into the muscle and gristle, the nerves. Muscle is roasted by the fifth degree. Sixth-degree burns scorch bone. In Gaza, the extraordinary incidence of amputations is explained not only by the traumatic force injuries caused by relentless Israeli bombardment, but burns and resulting infections as well. Many amputations should not have been necessary. Dr Feroze Sidhwa, speaking from Gaza, said that he saw many children lose limbs that could have been saved under other circumstances. He cited the destructiveness of the weapons, the high rates of infection given the sanitary conditions at hospitals, the scarcity of necessary medical equipment, and malnutrition as leading contributors to amputation. “It’s very difficult to heal a wound when you have no protein intake for a week, let alone for 15 months,” he said Dr Thaer Ahmad, another doctor who operated in Gaza, explained that treating burns requires a lot of resources that were often unavailable. In ordinary circumstances, he said, a physician may be willing to tolerate an infection that results from a burn, since infections can typically be treated. “But given the pressure that’s being put on the health system and practitioners in Gaza, an amputation is a relatively quick treatment than can be done,” he said. We may never learn how many children had treatable wounds that, in different circumstances, may have resulted in their keeping a limb. Baylasan was 11 when her house was bombed in Khan Younis. We met in a suburb of Washington DC in December 2024, near where she was receiving treatment. “I’m afraid of loud noises,” she said. She told me about the first nights of the war in Gaza, in October 2023. A missile exploded nearby one evening: “I woke up and started screaming. My mother came to comfort me. I was afraid; I was shaking.” The night of her injury, in November of 2023, her mother had made her a cheese sandwich before bed. “At nine or 10 I went to sleep – I didn’t feel anything until 2am. I heard Mama screaming under the rubble. I didn’t know I was under the rubble.” She lost consciousness and awoke four days later in the hospital, unaware that her leg had been amputated. “Every time someone would sit by my leg I would scream thinking they would injure it.” Baylasan lost her leg when her house in Khan Younis was bombed. Photo: Handout Baylasan – vivacious, funny and sarcastic – stood out when we spoke. She was the only child I met who wasn’t accompanied by a guardian. She was alone in Virginia, staying with a Palestinian-American family who volunteered through Heal Palestine to host her. She’d made friends at school, and was learning English. When I asked about her favorite music she lit up. She loved Al Shami, a pop singer from Syria. Baylasan’s mother survived that bombing, and after being evacuated for treatment in Turkey with Baylasan, had traveled to Belgium. Baylasan’s brother had been studying there when the assault on Gaza began. He had succeeded in obtaining a visa for their mother, who traveled there after Baylasan departed for the US. The family hopes to receive asylum in Belgium, a process that could take 18 months . When we met, Baylasan was completing intensive physical therapy at the Prosthetic Care Facility of Virginia. Her father remained in Gaza, where an amputation virtually guarantees a life of social isolation, no access to support services, and limited opportunity for emotional recovery. When I asked Baylasan whether her father had the means to join the family in Belgium, she gave me an exasperated look; it was a stupid question. “ Raho al masary. Inharago. ” The money’s gone. It burned. Gaza was a difficult place before October of 2023. My own memories of life there – I was born in Rafah – are imbued with a feeling of closeness, of being hemmed in. For many people, education was the only path to a better life, which perhaps helps explain why literacy rates in Gaza exceeded 97.8% for adults. The degree of educational attainment was also reflected in the relatively well-developed medical infrastructure in the territory. Doctors Without Borders reports that before the Israeli assault, there were 36 hospitals serving 2.3 million residents in Gaza – one for every 60,500 people. People in the US have more access – one hospital for every 23,500 people – but the development of the healthcare sector surpassed what could be reasonably expected in light of Israel’s longstanding siege on the impoverished territory. Today, most of that infrastructure no longer exists. Gaza’s reconstruction will require more than $50bn over 10 years, according to a UN, EU and World Bank assessment. That’s saying nothing about the lost human capital, the doctors and nurses and the people who educate and train them. The Guardian reports that more than 1,000 healthcare professionals were killed by the Israeli military. Of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, only 16 are partially functioning today, according to a UN report . If critically injured, disabled people in Gaza could lead dignified, productive lives before 2023, that no longer seems possible. Organizations like Heal Palestine and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund have worked assiduously, against long odds in challenging conditions, to meet some of the need. Steve Sosebee, who leads Heal Palestine, described the organization’s work as comprehensive. Its staff operate a field hospital in Gaza. They also manage a mental health program and food kitchens there. The organization has also facilitated the evacuation of and care for 37 severely injured children. It continues to provide mental healthcare even after their physical wounds have healed. “We get them the medical care that they need but otherwise don’t have access to,” Sosebee explained. “We’re also providing a holistic approach to their healing which is mental health therapy, education and community support. Taline and Elias play together in their room at their current residence in Philadelphia. Photograph: Hannah Yoon/The Guardian Many of those who escaped Gaza for medical treatment – including the 11 children I met with in the US and Egypt – did so before Israeli troops overran the Rafah border with Egypt in May of last year. Their petitions for medical evacuation involved a long chain of coordination through the health ministry in Gaza, the Egyptian government, the World Health Organization and the Israeli army. Typically they traveled to the Rafah border with Egypt and from there were loaded into ambulances which then undertook the six-hour drive from the border to Cairo. I met Marah and her mother, Amal, in Long Island. They were staying at a Ronald McDonald House, a facility that houses families with children who require long-term care, near the hospital where Marah was being treated. Marah, who is one of seven children, was 16 when an Israeli bomb struck her aunt’s house in Al-Shaboura, in Rafah, where she was sheltering. Both of her legs had been amputated above the knee, near her pelvis. In New York, Marah had numerous surgeries to prepare her for prosthesis. When we met, she was learning to walk – a process which is markedly more difficult for those with amputations above the knee. Her days are filled with physical therapy and more physical therapy, as she put it to me. The family’s nightmare began early, and like virtually everyone else I spoke with, continued until they left Gaza. In October 2023, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the family home in Al Zeitoun in northern Gaza, sending them to seek shelter in Marah’s aunt’s home. Eight days later, another bomb killed her brother, her sister, her brother-in-law; and one of her sister’s young daughters. Marah lost both legs after an Israeli bomb struck her aunt’s house in Rafah. Photo: Handout Another niece, a 15-month-old child named Mona, survived the bombing with serious injuries. The family took Mona with them and fled south to the home of another one of Marah’s aunts in Rafah. At 3am, two months after arriving, the bombers struck again. A missile exploded in the room where Marah was sleeping with Mona. The toddler was killed in that bombing, joining her mother, father and baby sister in death. “I remember waking up briefly in the rubble and calling for my father. I thought he hadn’t heard me and I said the shehada [an Islamic prayer] three times and after that I don’t have any memory of the next two or three weeks,” Marah told me. Marah’s legs were badly lacerated and mangled; she had multiple fractures and a head injury. She was taken to a hospital which, lacking resources, directed her rescuers to another hospital. Overwhelmed staff at the second hospital believed she was dead and moved her to the morgue. “My [surviving] brother – he’s three years older than I am. He came close to say goodbye to me and came close to my face and saw that I was breathing. He told the doctor: ‘She’s breathing.’” Marah was in a coma for eight days, during which her doctors amputated her legs. Marah’s mother, Amal, was also severely wounded in the strike that injured her daughter. She made a point of serving me coffee despite her difficulty walking. “I had 22 operations,” Amal told me. “The flesh had melted off my legs.” Amal spent eight months at the Emirati hospital – a field hospital in Rafah, which was operating through the efforts of the UAE. She decided to leave, despite needing additional care, when she learned that Marah would be able to travel to New York for treatment through Heal Palestine. After extensive back and forth with Israeli and international officials, Marah succeeded in obtaining permission to leave. Heal Palestine coordinated her travel and care by enlisting the services of various hospitals and charities, and raising funds for travel. Marah’s father and brother remained in Gaza. Taline and Elias’s wheelchairs. Photograph: Hannah Yoon/The Guardian Marah and Amal will eventually have to travel to Egypt from New York, where they will await their return to Gaza. I asked Amal about her hopes for her daughter’s future. “There is no future in Gaza for someone like Marah,” she told me, gesturing to her daughter in her wheelchair. “I want her to complete her education.” I traveled to Cairo to meet children who had been injured and were receiving care there. I wanted to see too, what life could be like for Marah, Elias, Khaled and Taline, all of whom are meant to go to Egypt after completing treatment in the US. I met Malik, a little eight-year-old boy who had suffered a severe head injury when his home in Gaza was bombed, in a suburb of Cairo. He had been evacuated to the US where doctors had performed a cranioplasty – a titanium plate covered most of the back of his head. After three months of treatment in Florida, he and his mother returned to Egypt in August of last year. Malik slurred his speech but had learned to walk again by the time we met – he accompanied me to the store to buy chocolate for him and his sisters. Ibtisam, Malik’s mother, described pulling him from the rubble from an airstrike on their home in Nuseirat on 8 January 2024. “I called for my girls; they were screaming and crying. It was dark – you couldn’t see anything. I called for Malik but he didn’t respond,” she said. “I started feeling around in the dark … I found a pile of hot rubble and glass. I started to uncover him there. I pulled him out and was cut by glass. I held him. He was awake but he wasn’t responding to me. I cradled his head with my hand and my hand went inside – into his head.” Prospects for a life in Egypt are better for those with life-altering injuries than they are in Gaza, but public infrastructure there cannot truly support the needs of disabled people. I spoke with a developmental neuroscientist who leads a lab at a large research university in Philadelphia. He requested anonymity because of his lab’s reliance on funding provided by the National Institutes of Health, which is at risk under the Trump administration. “[Brain development] is a process of refining cellular connections postnatally,” he explained. “Kids’ brains are remarkably resilient and can recover from things that adult brains never could … but there is a limit to the ability to repair and rewire around injuries.” Brain-injured patients need years of support from “trained physical therapists and occupational therapists and physicians to really maximize the amount of recovery [they] can get”, he said. That’s in addition to the child psychologists who are tasked with addressing the post-traumatic stress disorders that attend trauma. Dr Hazem Madi, a Palestinian doctor from Gaza who managed to escape to Cairo in February 2024, explained that while private hospitals in the Egyptian capital can meet a high standard of care, many public hospitals cannot. Access to occupational therapists and child psychologists is limited as well. An Amnesty International report elaborates : “Egypt’s public healthcare system has been struggling with a shortage of public hospital beds, offering only 1.4 beds per 1,000 people, which is significantly below the global average of 2.9 beds per 1,000 people.” In that regard, Malik is more fortunate than others. Heal Palestine has facilitated his ongoing mental and physical therapy in Cairo. Beyond medical care, Egyptian authorities do not permit Palestinian refugees from Gaza – roughly 100,000 people – to register their children in public school. Malik and his sisters were attending school remotely – teachers in Gaza had succeeded in organizing virtual learning, albeit haphazardly and unevenly. Nor can the challenge of earning a living be overstated. Malik’s family rely on Heal Palestine for housing – the organization rents an apartment for them in 6 October City near Cairo. But the aid won’t last forever, and Palestinians in Egypt lack residency permits and cannot work . Their status is, like so much about their lives, precarious. Amna, the young mother I met in Philadelphia, searched frantically for her husband and children after the strike at the nurse’s home. “When I saw them I was shocked. Elias’s leg was gone. Taline looked … Her legs were mangled. Shredded. They were going to die. I collapsed. Khaled carried his brother out and he returned and carried his sister out. Can you imagine a nine-year-old in that situation?” Her husband sustained a leg injury too. The family spent a night in the stairwell. The ambulance never came – no one would risk the drive to Jabalia. Tourniquets kept the children alive through the night. Elias in his room in Philadelphia. Photograph: Hannah Yoon/The Guardian “All night – I want you to imagine – all night. My kids are saying I need water. Please give me water. All night. The bombing was going all night. It wouldn’t stop.” The area was bombed again in the morning. Someone suggested they try to evacuate to a nearby school. “Everyone said we have to go. Everyone was fleeing from death. My husband couldn’t stand. How was I going to move my children? I said I’m not going anywhere. I can’t leave Elias and Taline.” A stranger came along and offered to carry Elias and Taline. He helped make crutches from discarded wood for Amna’s husband and encouraged him to try to walk. The school was no more than 200 meters away. Amna started to walk, which was difficult since she had given birth by C-section 10 days earlier. “There were people in front of me,” she said. “They had their kids. They were shelled. Limbs. Things that I still can’t comprehend. Those people wanted to enter the school and they were killed … The soldiers shelled them.” Amna fled into a nearby house and was separated from her husband, who was with Taline and Elias. She remained with Khaled and her infant, Faris. “I didn’t know if Elias and Taline were alive or dead. If my husband was dead.” Elias and Taline found refuge with their father at al-Shifa hospital. They received basic care, keeping them alive. Amna spent two days in hiding until the Israeli troops withdrew. Finally, she left with her baby and son Khaled, who carried a makeshift white flag. They emerged into a new landscape. “We were barefoot. Everything was destroyed. No school. No hospital. The landmarks – it wasn’t Jabalia any more.” Eventually, she made her way to al-Shifa, the last operating hospital in the area. There, she found her husband with Elias and Taline. “They were on the ground. The crowd was unbelievable. People stepping on one another. My children were on the ground. “I gave the doctor my infant. He said to me: ‘Your son needs oxygen’ – there was none. ‘Try to nurse him – hold him." “I understood. My son was going to die. Hours or a day or two – he was going to die. Six hours later he died. Faris died. He was 12 days old.” Amna buried Faris in the Shifa cemetery, the one Khaled would walk through after it had been bulldozed by Israeli forces. Soon after Faris died, an ambulance drove Amna, Taline and Elias south to another hospital in Rafah. Weeks later, she secured permission to leave Gaza with Elias. An Egyptian border guard was moved by Taline’s condition and said he would let her out too. Soon after that, Khaled was allowed to travel south in an ambulance with a cousin who had been injured. Eventually, he was permitted to join his mother in Cairo. The children’s father stayed behind in Jabalia, which was bombed again this month. I met Baylasan in December of 2024. In March, I learned that she had been reunited with her mother and brother in Belgium, where Heal Palestine is providing them with housing. For now, Baylasan is completing her physical therapy treatment virtually. When it’s time she will travel back to Virginia for a new prosthesis. Baylasan’s father remains in Gaza. Marah and her mother were supposed to leave for Egypt in March, but the severity of Marah’s injuries led her doctors to conclude that she needed at least another nine months of therapy and treatment in the US. She’s now studying for a high school equivalency exam. Khaled, left, Taline, and Elias. The three siblings are enrolled in school in Philadelphia. Photograph: Hannah Yoon/The Guardian Elias, Taline and Khaled are enrolled in school in Philadelphia. Taline may have another surgery scheduled in the spring, an attempt to save her leg. In November of 2024 – the same month I first visited Marah – hundreds of Israelis traveled to Amsterdam to watch a football match. They received a lot of attention when they attacked, and were attacked by, locals there. Yet in all the reporting, one provocation stood out to me: the Israeli visitors sang : “Why is school out in Gaza?" And they answered: “There are no children left.” Almost all of the small children I met in the course of writing this story carried haunted looks. I asked them things like “What are your hobbies?” and “What’s your favorite show on television?” and I was met, mostly, by blankness. Beyond their physical injuries, they have experienced unspeakable loss. Their schools, their neighborhoods are gone. Many of their loved ones, siblings and friends are now dead. If childhood is a time of innocence, small hurts and joys, playground anxieties and high drama, then, the Israeli fans, for all their venom, were right. There is no childhood in Gaza. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (dcr)

By Yvette Tan BBC News People crouch on the tarmac in Mandalay airport. Source: BBC After a four-year long civil war, a severe food crisis and an economy on the decline, Myanmar now finds itself devastated by a powerful earthquake. On Friday, the 7.7 magnitude quake hit the city of Sagaing in central Myanmar, and was followed by reports of destruction coming from nearby Mandalay - the country's second largest city - as well as the capital, Nay Pyi Taw, which is more than 150 miles (241km) away. Getting information out of Myanmar is difficult. Mobile lines in the affected areas have been patchy since the quake struck, but tens of thousands of people also live without electricity and there is limited access to the internet. Foreign journalists are also rarely allowed to enter officially due to a lack of press freedom. So, how did Myanmar get here? The country has seen decades of unrest and military rule since its independence from Britain in 1948. In 2011, it appeared to move away from this and free elections were held four years later, which Aung San Suu Kyi  won. Democratic hopes were dashed in 2021, when she and her government were overthrown by a coup led by General Min Aung Hlaing. He detained and charged Ms Suu Kyi and other members of her government, making allegations of widespread fraud in a vote held months earlier, when her National League for Democracy party won more than 80% of the ballot. The coup triggered huge protests, with thousands taking to the streets daily, demanding the restoration of civilian rule. Violence quickly escalated between civilians and the military, with the army responding with brutal force, using tear gas and rubber bullets against crowds. Rights groups believe hundreds of people died and thousands were injured in the crackdown. Live: Follow the latest on the Myanmar earthquake Watch: Moment Bangkok high-rise under construction collapses Eyewitnesses describe horror in quake's aftermath   What we know so far What initially began as a civil disobedience campaign soon evolved into a widespread insurgency involving pro-democracy and ethnic rebel groups - which eventually sparked an all-out civil war. Four years on, violent fighting has continued between the military on the one hand, and ethnic armies and armed resistance groups on the other. The military has suffered huge losses and is no longer in control of large parts of the country. Discontent with General Min Aung Hlaing, too, has risen among the army's ranks as more and more soldiers defect. The fighting has left millions living in constant fear and insecurity - with little access to basic needs, including medical care and food, say rights groups. More than 3.5 million people have been displaced by the fighting, according to the UN, which also said that this number will only grow as the conflict continues. Food insecurity has reached "unprecedented levels", the organisation's world food program says, adding that rapid inflation has made food unaffordable for many. Earlier this week, the UN announced it would cut aid to more than one million people in Myanmar from next month, citing global funding shortfalls. This comes months after more than 200 people died in the wake of Typhoon Yagi , which triggered severe floods and mudslides in Myanmar and left hundreds of thousands of acres of crops destroyed. Myanmar's military chief Min Aung Hlaing (C) arrives to meet earthquake survivors. Source: Getty Images/BBC Friday's earthquake will no doubt add to the suffering of the country's 50 million people. It struck near the city of Sagaing - a rebel stronghold. Just months ago, it was the site of heavy fighting between rebels and the military, with local reports saying that air strikes were launched, causing thousands to flee. The second-largest city, Mandalay, has also been hit by the earthquake, and is home to 1.5 million people. The Mandalay region has seen intense fighting between resistance troops and the army. A very slow limited stream of information coming out of the country suggests that a hospital in the capital Naypyidaw, where the military government sits, has been turned into a "mass casualty site" - the few visuals we can see paint a picture of destruction, showing cracked roads and collapsed buildings. "Hundreds of injured people are arriving... but the emergency building here also collapsed," security officials at the hospital told AFP. The country's junta has now declared a state of emergency in multiple regions and made a rare request for international aid. But it is unclear how they will respond to the earthquake as they fight a war under the leadership of an embattled general. Map showing the earthquake. Source: USGS/BBC Copyright 2025 BBC. All rights reserved.

By Samia Nakhoul and Timour Azhari Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa attends an interview with Reuters at the presidential palace, in Damascus, Syria March 10, 2025. REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights DAMASCUS, March 26 (Reuters) - Syria's President Ahmed al-Sharaa has a lot to prove to win over Western powers. If the first few weeks of his rule are anything to go by, he may be heading in the wrong direction. The West is watching Syria's leaders closely to ensure they rein in the Islamist jihadis who killed hundreds of Alawites , create an inclusive government with effective institutions, maintain order in a country fractured by years of civil war and prevent a resurgence of Islamic State or al Qaeda. To hammer home the message, three European envoys made clear in a March 11 meeting with Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani in Damascus that cracking down on the jihadi fighters was their top priority and that international support for the nascent administration could evaporate unless it took decisive action. The meeting has not previously been reported. "The abuses that have taken place in recent days are truly intolerable, and those responsible must be identified and condemned," said French Foreign Ministry spokesman Christophe Lemoine, when asked about the message delivered in Damascus. "There is no blank check for the new authorities." Reuters spoke to the three European envoys as well as four regional officials during a trip to Damascus. They all stressed that the authorities must get a grip on security across the country and prevent any repeat killings. "We asked for accountability. The punishment should go on those who committed the massacres. The security forces need to be cleaned up," said one European envoy, who was among the group of officials who delivered the message. Washington has also called on Syria's leaders to hold the perpetrators of the attacks to account. U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said they were monitoring the interim authority's actions to determine U.S. policy for Syria. The problem for Sharaa, however, is that his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group only comprises around 20,000 fighters, according to two assessments by Western governments. That makes him reliant on the tens of thousands of fighters from other groups — including the very hardline jihadist factions he is being asked to combat – and moving against them could plunge Syria back into war, five diplomats and three analysts said. Thousands of Sunni Muslim foreigners, from countries including China, Albania, Russia and Pakistan, joined Syria's rebels early in the civil war to fight against the rule of Bashar al-Assad and the Iran-backed Shi'ite militias who supported him, giving the conflict a sectarian overtone. One of the reasons Sharaa now depends on a relatively small force of some 20,000 fighters from several disparate groups, including the foreign jihadis, is because he dissolved the national army soon after taking power. While the step was meant to draw a line under five decades of autocratic Assad family rule, diplomats and analysts said it echoed Washington's decision to disband the Iraqi army after the fall of Saddam Hussein - and could lead to similar chaos. Sharaa's move, along with mass dismissals of public sector workers, has deepened divisions in Syria and left hundreds of thousands without income, potentially pushing trained soldiers into insurgent groups or unemployment, worsening Syria's instability, according to five European and Arab officials. Neither Sharaa's office nor the Syrian foreign ministry responded to requests for comment for this story. STUCK IN A PARADOX In addition to the challenge of quelling sectarian violence, Sharaa must also contend with a host of foreign powers from the United States to Russia, Israel, Turkey and Iran - all turning Syria's territory into a geopolitical chessboard. Turkey holds the north, backing opposition forces while suppressing Kurdish ambitions. U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces control the east with its vital oil fields, while Israel capitalised on Assad's fall to bolster its military foothold . It now controls a 400-square-km demilitarised buffer zone, supports the Druze minority and is opposed to the Syrian leadership. In response to the massacres of civilians, Sharaa has established an investigation committee and promised to punish those responsible, even those close to him. But any action against the jihadis who carried out the killings could ignite factional infighting, purges and power struggles - leaving the new government stuck in a paradox, the diplomats and analysts said. "Obviously Sharaa doesn't control the foreign jihadis and does not call all the shots," said Marwan Muasher, vice president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "What is clear is that the massacres were carried out by people who are Salafi jihadists, and are not listening to what he's saying." While diplomats recognise that the inquiry is a step in the right direction, they said its credibility would have been far stronger with U.N. and international observers. Ultimately, they said, the true test of Sharaa's leadership lies not just in the commission's findings but in how he deals with the fighters responsible for the atrocities. The massacres were, however, a stark reminder of the forces at play in post-Assad Syria, signalling a brutal reality that toppling a dictator is the beginning of a larger, more perilous battle to shape the country's future. Abdulaziz Sager, founder of the Saudi-based Gulf Research Center, said the presence of "rogue groups" - the foreign jihadis - operating outside the law would lead to a collapse in security and undermine the state's authority. "Therefore, the new leadership has no choice but to take firm action against such violations," he said. An Arab diplomat said political support from Arab states was also not unlimited, and would need to be matched by concrete steps, including inclusive governance, protection of minorities and real progress on the ground. That means genuine power-sharing with Alawites, Christians, Kurds and other minorities - and only then can the new leadership stabilise Syria and garner U.S. and European support, the Arab diplomat said. Washington and European states have tied the lifting of sanctions, imposed under Assad, to the new authorities proving their commitment to inclusive governance and the protection of minorities. Removing these sanctions is crucial to reviving Syria's shattered economy, Sharaa's most pressing challenge. SAME PLAYBOOK? But despite promises of reform, the five-year constitution Sharaa unveiled this month gave him absolute power as president, prime minister, head of the armed forces and chief of national security, as well as granting him the authority to appoint judges, ministers and a third of parliament - dashing hopes for democratic reforms. The constitution also enshrines Islamic law as "the main source" of legislation. Critics argue that the constitution swaps autocracy for Islamist theocracy, deepening fears over Sharaa's roots as the leader of a hardline Islamist faction once allied with al Qaeda. Kurds, who control northeastern Syria and recently agreed to integrate with the new government, criticised the temporary constitution for "reproducing authoritarianism in a new form". Syria's dilemma, analysts say, mirrors the trials faced by Arab states a decade ago when, in 2011, a wave of uprisings ousted dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen. The "Arab Spring" upheavals promised democratic revival, but takeovers by Islamists, military coups, and violent fragmentation turned these hopes into setbacks. The victories were short-lived, with states such as Yemen and Libya descending into violence and chaos. Syria, having endured a far longer and bloodier conflict, now stands at a similar crossroad. Analysts say if Syria's rulers adopt exclusionary policies that ignore the cultural, religious, ethnic diversity of its citizens, they are bound to fail - just as late Islamist President Mohammed Mursi did in Egypt after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. In Mursi's case, his divisive constitution failed to meet the people's diverse demands and led to his toppling by the army. Such a policy in Syria, the analysts add, would fuel domestic resistance, antagonise neighbours, and prompt foreign intervention. "Some internal and external forces wanted a secular state, while the constitutional declaration reaffirmed the state's religious-Islamic identity, stating that Islamic law (Sharia) would be the primary source of legislation," said Sager. "A possible compromise could have been a model similar to Turkey's - a secular state governed by an Islamic party." Muasher at the Carnegie Endowment said Assad's fall should serve as a warning to those who replaced him in Syria. He said Sharaa must decide whether to adopt the same playbook that made Assad vulnerable and led to the mass Sunni uprising that eventually ousted him - or adopt a different course. "Syria's new rulers must recognise that the brutal authoritarian model of the regime they replaced was ultimately unsustainable, as is any political system based on exclusion and iron-fisted rule," Muasher said. "If they fall back on repression, they will subject Syria to a grim fate." Reporting by Samia Nakhoul and Timour Azhari in Damascus; Additional reporting by John Irish in Paris, Matt Spetalnick and Humerya Pamuk in Washington; Writing by Samia Nakhoul; Editing by David Clarke © 2025 Reuters. All rights reserved

The state news agency reports at least four people have been killed in two separate attacks in the country’s south as Israel says it targeted Hezbollah operatives. Smoke rises from Jabal Rezlane following Israeli strikes in response to cross-border rocket fire, as seen from Marjayoun in southern Lebanon, on March 22, 2025 [Karmalllah Daher/Reuters] Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health has said that at least four people have been killed in two separate Israeli strikes in south Lebanon, as Israel claimed it struck Hezbollah operatives. Thursday’s strikes were the latest in a series of deadly attacks in south Lebanon, despite a November ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah after more than a year of hostilities, including two months of open war. An “Israeli enemy strike on a car in Yohmor al-Shaqeef led to the death of three people”, said a Health Ministry statement reported by the National News Agency (NNA) on Thursday. The NNA said an “enemy drone” targeted a vehicle near the town, in a strike that came at the same time as artillery shelling. Elsewhere, the Israeli military said in a statement that “several Hezbollah terrorists were identified transferring weapons in the area of Yohmor in southern Lebanon”, adding that the army “struck the terrorists”. On Thursday morning, the NNA also reported that “one person was killed and another wounded in the Israeli drone targeting … of a car in the town [of] Maaroub”, also in south Lebanon. Israel has continued to carry out raids in Lebanon since the November 27 ceasefire, striking what it says are Hezbollah military targets that violated the agreement. But most of the victims have been civilians.Earlier this month, the Health Ministry said an Israeli attack killed two people in the Yohmor area, as the Israeli military said it struck two Hezbollah operatives. Ramp up in fighting Last weekend saw the most intense escalation since the truce, with Israeli strikes on south Lebanon killing eight people. Israel said those raids were in response to rocket fire, the first to hit its territory since the ceasefire. No party has claimed responsibility for the rocket fire, which a military source said originated north of the Litani River, between the villages of Kfar Tebnit and Arnoun, near the zone covered by the ceasefire deal. Hezbollah, which has been weakened by the war, denied involvement. Under the ceasefire, Hezbollah agreed to pull its forces north of the Litani River, about 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the Israeli border and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure in the south. Israel was to withdraw its forces across the United Nations-demarcated Blue Line, the de facto border, but still holds five positions in south Lebanon that it deems “strategic”. Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem said on Wednesday: “We will not accept the continued [Israeli] occupation. “There is no room for normalisation or surrender in Lebanon,” he said in a televised address. © 2025 Al Jazeera Media Network

© UNICEF/Jospin Benekire: A woman collects her possessions before leaving a camp for displaced people near Goma in teastern DR Congo. A record 27.7 million people are in the grip of acute hunger in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), amid ongoing conflict linked to massive displacement and rising food prices, global food security experts warned on Thursday . The situation represents one of the world’s worst food crises , according to the UN-partnered  Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) platform. “The humanitarian situation in the DRC is deteriorating at an alarming rate. Families who were already struggling to feed themselves are now facing an even harsher reality,” said Eric Perdison, WFP ’s Regional Director for Southern Africa and ad interim WFP DRC Country Director. On a scale of one to five – where five indicates famine – 3.9 million people in DRC are classified as IPC Phase 4, which indicates “emergency” levels of hunger - and a 23.8 million are enduring Phase 3 “crisis” levels. Check out our explainer on how hunger and famine levels are classified, here . Chaos in the east The situation is worst in the conflict-affected eastern provinces of DRC – North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika – where families have lost access to their livestock and livelihoods. Rebels from the Rwanda-backed M23 armed group have wrested control of the main cities of Goma and Bukavu since the year began, amid continued fighting, economic collapse and continuing efforts by regional mediators to agree ceasefire terms.  Mapping shows that the outbreak of violence in December in eastern DRC led by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels has pushed an additional 2.5 million people into acute food insecurity. Situation worse for those uprooted “Internally displaced people escaping violence remain among the most vulnerable, bearing the brunt of the worsening food crisis,” said the UN World Food Programme (WFP), in a joint statement with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations ( FAO ). They are just two of the UN agencies committed to helping the most vulnerable communities in the war-torn east by providing life-saving food and nutrition assistance and strengthening resilience. These include tens of thousands of people uprooted by M23 rebels from camps in North Kivu - and in particular six sites around Goma – and the territories of Kalehe and Uvira in South Kivu in February 2025, amid intensified conflict. “All IDP sites in North Kivu, particularly in the Goma region, are now completely empty,” the IPC said, adding that of the 3.7 million internally displaced people formerly based in camps in eastern DRC, more than 2.2 million are in “crisis” and 738,000 face “emergency” levels of hunger. In total, the DRC has more than 7.8 million displaced people, most live with host families in eastern regions. “We have resumed operations in parts of North and South Kivu, and we are committed to do more to support those at risk, but we urgently need more resources,” WFP’s Mr. Perdison said. “ Armed clashes continue to disrupt food production and trade routes, while humanitarian access remains limited , as security risks hinder the ability to deliver essential assistance,” WFP added. Inflationary pressures The sharp depreciation of the Congolese franc, shuttered banks and lost incomes have also made it increasingly difficult for families to afford even the basics. At the same time, inflation and disrupted supply chains have contributed to a rise in food prices. The price of basic foods such as maize flour, palm oil and cassava flour have increased by up to 37 per cent compared to pre-crisis levels in December 2024. To date this year, 464,000 people have received WFP food, cash for food, and nutrition treatment in accessible areas of eastern DRC; WFP has managed to reach 237,000 people in Bunia alone. Beyond emergency food assistance in eastern DRC, FAO and WFP have invested in skills-based training in North and South Kivu to help communities improve their long-term food security. “The current situation is dire for the population, as harvests are lost, food prices soar, millions of people face acute food insecurity and are increasingly vulnerable,” said Athman Mravili, FAO Representative ad interim. Urgent appeal To help WFP reach 6.4 million people in DRC with food and nutrition assistance – and invest in long-term solutions – the UN agency needs $399 million to sustain operations amid growing humanitarian needs over the next six months . “WFP and FAO call on the international community to step up funding and humanitarian access to prevent a full-scale catastrophe,” they said.  Copyright © United Nations