The world is at a historic watershed moment, Nepal’s Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli told world leaders at the UN General Assembly on Thursday, with the contrasts between rich and poor, harmony and hatred, and economic development and environmental destruction more evident than ever.
At the UN on Thursday, world leaders urged a concerted diplomatic drive to end the war in Gaza and to avert further escalation in the region. Strong demands for genuine UN reform persisted, with several African leaders calling for permanent representation on the Security Council. In two high-level meetings, senior UN officials warned that some of the world’s most effective antibiotics are losing their effectiveness against “superbugs”, while others urged nations to “stop gambling with humanity’s future” by getting rid of nuclear weapons.
The Foreign Minister of Lebanon on Thursday said that the crisis in his country demanded urgent international action as Israeli attacks threatened to set off “a domino effect”, turning the entire Middle East region into “a black hole” of endless conflict.
The President of the Transitional Sovereign Council of Sudan told the UN General Assembly on Thursday that while his country was committed to peace, rebels funded by parties elsewhere in the region were waging “devastating aggression” against his country.
The call for a more inclusive and representative Security Council resonated loud and clear at the UN General Assembly on Thursday, as African leaders demanded global powers address the longstanding inequity in the Council’s composition.
From Gaza to Ukraine and beyond, the vast majority of humanitarian needs are driven by conflict – a catastrophe made by human hands – that is turning the geopolitical dial away from the rule of law and towards brute force and aggression, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom told the UN General Assembly on Thursday.
The UN agency that supports Palestine refugees, UNRWA, is the only “outpost of hope” left in the hellscape that is Gaza, the UN Secretary-General told a high-level ministerial meeting on Thursday in New York.
Haiti is becoming more resilient, but can only fully recover with international solidarity, Edgard Leblanc Fils said on Thursday, voicing support for a UN-led peacekeeping mission to combat gang violence that has “paralyzed” the nation and left its people desperate and nearly without hope.
A new $1.5 billion investment, announced on Thursday, will boost education and skills development for millions of the world’s children and youth most in need.
World leaders, senior government officials and civil society representatives joined forces at UN Headquarters on Thursday to reaffirm commitment to nuclear disarmament as a global priority.
The Chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council of Yemen called on Thursday for increased international pressure to dry up sources of funding for Houthi militias and to curb “the flow of Iranian weapons” into his country, which was constantly working to de-escalate tension.
Mahmoud Abbas, President of the State of Palestine, addressed world leaders at the UN General Assembly on Thursday, stressing that the Palestinian people will not leave their homeland – the land of their ancestors.