News

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People meets Friday at the UN Headquarters to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Nakba. Senior UN officials, including General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock and Assistant Secretary-General Khaled Khiari, are expected to address the meeting. The event will also feature testimonies from Palestinian families and a tribute to historian of Palestine and the Nakba, Walid Khalidi. Follow our live updates from the meeting as it happens.

Civilians across Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon continue to face mounting hardship as conflict, displacement and ongoing military operations deepen humanitarian needs and strain already limited aid efforts, according to the latest updates from UN agencies.

Brightly coloured nicotine pouches promoted through social media influencers, music festivals and youth-oriented advertising are driving a rapid rise in nicotine use among young people worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Friday.

At least six million people in Somalia are going days without enough food, UN aid teams warned on Friday, highlighting that nearly two million of this number are young children “at high risk of illness or death”.

Nearly six million people in Somalia – almost a third of the population analysed – are projected to face acute hunger between April and June, with 1.9 million expected to experience emergency levels, UN-backed food security experts warned on Thursday.

Decades of gains in the fight against AIDS are under growing threat as donor funding declines and community-based health services collapse in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries, the head of the joint UN programme on HIV/AIDS warned on Thursday.

An additional $1.8 billion in US humanitarian funding will allow the United Nations and its partners to expand emergency relief operations reaching millions of people worldwide, as rising global needs and funding shortfalls force aid agencies to scale back assistance.

More than 1,600 conflict-related detainees in Yemen will be released under a UN-brokered agreement reached after months of negotiations in Jordan, marking the largest prisoner release deal since the country’s civil war began and offering a rare sign of progress in stalled peace efforts.

The UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine, Bernadette Castel-Hollingsworth, has reacted strongly to Russian military strikes on a civilian area of Kyiv on Thursday. 

Eighty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, artist Sandy Walker believes art still has the power to cut through abstraction and confront people with the human reality of nuclear violence. Inspired by the writings of Hiroshima survivor Tamiki Hara, Walker’s work seeks to transform historical catastrophe into intimate acts of memory, grief and attention. 

A feasibility study is underway to examine whether Gaza’s war debris could be recycled to reclaim coastal land and build artificial islands, as part of reconstruction.

Serious human rights violations continue in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and must not be allowed to fade from international attention, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned on Wednesday.