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humanitarian crisis
'Devastating Blow to Humanity': Barred From Gaza by Israel, Health Workers Cry Out for Help
As the situation inside Gaza is increasingly described as "indescribable," medical NGOs blocked from providing care to Palestinians trapped inside besieged territory demand world leaders to stop turning 'blind eye' to Israeli war crimes and violations of humanitarian law.
Oct 19, 2024
As more Israeli bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza killed dozens of people Saturday, health workers from both inside and out of the besieged territory are again pleading with world leaders to bring an end to the indiscriminate attacks and imposed humanitarian crisis that witnesses on the ground increasingly say there are no words to describe.
At al Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis and elsewhere in Gaza, doctors and other medical staff on Saturday staged protests and held press conferences to call attention to the ongoing attacks in northern areas, including the latest targeting of Jabalia in which reporting indicated anywhere from 33 to over 50 people—including civilian men, women, and children—were killed.
"The world is watching, and history will judge us by how we respond to this grave injustice. I call upon each and everyone one of you to join this fight for the preservation of our shared humanity." —Dr. Khaled Saleh, FAJR Scientific
Al-Jazeera reports that hospitals, which have repeatedly been bombed by Israel over the last year, were not immune from this latest round:
Three partially functioning hospitals treating severely wounded patients and sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza are now out of service after coming under intense Israeli fire, a Gaza health official told Al Jazeera, as the siege on Jabalia enters its third week, with at least 33 more people killed in the northern area.
Israeli forces bombed al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia early on Saturday, and have also shelled Kamal Adwan and the Indonesian hospitals in Beit Lahiya over the past few hours, Al Jazeera correspondents have reported.
Saturday's attacks come days after Israel barred at least six medical service NGOs from continuing their life-saving work in Gaza. According to the Washington Post:
Two of those medical NGOs, Glia and the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), confirmed to The Washington Post that they were notified by the WHO this week about the bans. Both groups have worked in Gaza for years preceding the war.
"WHO is concerned about the impact of these denials on Gaza's strained healthcare system," the organization said Thursday in a statement. It added that international emergency medical teams (EMTs) deployed to Gaza are essential to keeping the system operational, as only 17 of the enclave's 36 hospitals remain functionaland "healthcare needs far exceed the system's capacity."
Dr. Khaled Saleh, chair of FAJR Scientific, which provides surgical expertise and trauma specialists to war-torn regions and was another of the groups notified by the WHO that it had been barred from entering Gaza, said in a statement that the move by the Israeli government filled him with "deep sadness and concern for the current state of our global family, questioning our shared humanity and ethics."
Blocked from providing aid to people in dire need, Saleh called on people worldwide to push for an end to Israel's blocking of vital medical aid and those seeking to provide it.
"This is a devastating blow to humanity, representing a level of destruction that we have not witnessed since World War II, yet our world leaders turn a blind eye," he said.
"As a member of the global community," Saleh continued, "I implore all of you who value compassion, ethics, and the sanctity of human life to stand with us and raise your voices against this unconscionable decision. Together, we must advocate for the voiceless and demand restoration of the fundamental right to access to medical care."
Israel's ban on the medical NGOs comes after a string of healthcare professionals who spent time in the Gaza strip have gone public with what they witnessed on the ground, telling tales of unspeakable horror and trying to shake the world out of its complacency on what experts say is a genocide in motion being carried out by Israeli forces.
Earlier this week, the UN humanitarian office, OCHA, said that Israel's continued blocking of food and medical supplies to Jabalia and other ares in the northern was "having life-threatening impacts" for the people there.
OCHA spokesperson Farhan Haq said the OCHA was calling on Israeli authorities "to allowed safe, sustained and unimpeded access to Jabalia and all areas of the north where people are in desperate need of assistance."
In a post on Friday, Oxfam International mourned the killing of Dr. Ahmad Al-Najar and midwife Laila Jneid, both of whom worked with Juzoor, "killed by Israeli airstrikes on Jabalia," the group said. "They were providing lifesaving health care in Gaza. Attacking aid workers is a war crime." Oxfam repeated its demand for a "cease-fire now" and said healthcare workers should never be a target.
In a dispatch on Friday, Dr. Taghreed Al-Imawi, Juzoor staff and an OBGYN doctor at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, described the untenable situation on the ground.
"The situation is beyond horrific and is very difficult and indescribable," said Al-Imawi. "Dead people, severed body parts and injured people everywhere. We are receiving emergency calls from all the areas of the north. Ambulances are not able to reach the injured. We have seen more than 23 pregnant women among the injured coming to the hospital since last week, wounded either by shrapnel or gunfire, suffering from fractures. Some were in a critical condition. Kamal Adwan Hospital and other semi-operational hospitals have received displacement orders but there is no way to evacuate in any case."
"The pediatrics section is closed as it is full of injured people," Al-Imawi added, "the surgery section is full of injured people, even the reception, the hospital has been shelled several times and targeted by snipers, people are terrified to come to the hospital now."
Having recently returned from a field mission in Gaza, pediatric nurse Becky Platt, working through Save the Children—who posted her testimony Saturday—described a situation on the ground that was "like nothing I've seen before."
Platt said the horrific situation is "both in terms of healthcare need and just in terms of the whole humanitarian context—seeing homes and landscapes completely devastated and seeing just the absolute level of human suffering and need as absolutely mind blowing."
❗️ “Gaza was like nothing I’ve ever seen before”
With Gaza’s health system decimated, children being treated lack adequate pain relief. Healthcare workers have limited access to morphine and are having to treat blast injuries with paracetamol.
Paediatric nurse Becky Platt spoke… pic.twitter.com/zsb4OIvcvI
— Save the Children UK (@savechildrenuk) October 19, 2024
"No child should have to be in pain," she said. "And it just feels like your hands are tied when you can't do what you know that you could do easily at home or in another context. I think that when it really hits. It's just—it's just not fair. It's not okay that we've got children with devastating injuries who don't have access to pain relief."
For his part, Dr. Saleh of FAJR Scientific, said it was up to everyone in the world to make their voices heard.
"The world is watching," he said, "and history will judge us by how we respond to this grave injustice. I call upon each and everyone one of you to join this fight for the preservation of our shared humanity."
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The Cost of War for Women and Girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo
The conflict raging in DRC is largely for the control of the country's important raw materials, with the most vulnerable paying the highest price.
Oct 14, 2024
Decades long conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has ravaged lives of millions. Nearly six million people have been killed since 1996 and the country has the largest population of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Africa with 7.1 million people forced from their home or community. North Kivu Province is particularly impacted with almost one million IDPs living in makeshift camps with limited access to essential services like water, shelter, sanitation and food around the capital city of Goma.
Sexual Violence – A Weapon of War
One of the most distinct elements of this conflict is the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. From 2021 to 2022, there was a 91 percent rise in reports of gender-based violence (GBV) in North Kivu. Between January and March 2024, more than 12,600 cases of sexual violence were recorded. These numbers, however, are only the tip of the iceberg. Many survivors are unable to access life-saving GBV services; and many do not report abuse out of fear of stigmatization by their communities or retaliation by perpetrators. Both Human rights groups to humanitarian relief organizations report that tens of thousands of women and girls have been victims of systemic sexual violence, including rape, sexual slavery, and forced prostitution.
Most cases of sexual violence involve armed combatants and militias with majority of victims being women and girls—some as young as three years old and others as old as 80. These acts have profound and lasting health consequences for the victims, ranging from physical injuries and psychological trauma to the risk of sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies. Unfortunately, 2024 has been marked by an increase in this violence against women and girls in North Kivu. According to a recently released report, We Are Calling for Help, Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF) provided treatment to 25,166 victims and survivors of sexual violence across the country in 2023. Between January and May 2024, it had already treated 17,363 victims and survivors in North Kivu alone – 69 percent of the total number of victims treated in 2023.
Displacement resulting from heavy fighting between the Congolese armed forces (FARDC) and the M23 rebel group has exacerbated the vulnerability of individuals to sexual violence. Victims are often attacked when they venture outside the IDP camps to gather firewood or seek food. The disruption of humanitarian aid due to insecurity has compounded the challenges. Women and girls are being forced to take greater risks to meet critical needs. Food insecurity and the lack of livelihood opportunities have also led to women being forced to resort to harmful coping mechanisms, including prostitution.
Urgent International Response Needed to Protect Women & Children
The situation in North Kivu is an ugly reminder of the human toll of armed conflicts, with the worst price paid by women and children. Despite the horrors unleashed on the most vulnerable, international response has yet to meet the need of the hour.
With 25.4 million people affected, DRC has the highest number of people in need of humanitarian aid in the world and yet remains one of the most underfunded crises. The United Nations $2.6 billion Humanitarian Response Plan to assist 8.7 million people in 2024, is only 16% funded. At the end of 2023, World Food Programme reported the need for $546 million to sustain its emergency response in the region over the next six months, or be forced to sharply cut assistance, provide reduced support to fewer people — and over a shorter time period. The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, received only 41% of the required $298.9 million for the emergency situation in DRC. In the absence of sustained humanitarian support, strengthened protection measures for civilian populations, and increased funding for the Humanitarian Response Plan, especially for programs addressing GBV, displaced women are endlessly enduring violence day after day.
A Resource Curse
The conflict raging in DRC is largely for the control of the country's important raw materials—tin, tungsten, coltan and gold, collectively known as 3T or 3TG. Electronic products from cell phones, laptops to the surge in electric cars have boosted the demand and competition for DRC’s mineral wealth. 2018 Nobel Prize winner, Denis Mukwege, a Congolese doctor, condemned the global demand for these minerals for fueling conflict and consequently, rape in his country. In April 2024, lawyers representing the Congolese government notified Apple of concerns about its supply chain, stating “their products are tainted by the blood of the Congolese people.” International community and the multinational corporations who benefit from Congo’s mineral wealth have the primary responsibility to ensure the return of peace in the country.
Two neighboring countries, Rwanda and Uganda, are extensively involved in illegal exploitation of DRC’s mineral resources and the violence that has plagued the eastern region in the past three decades. The Rwanda-backed M23 has intensified its activities in recent years, resulting in the resurgence of widespread violence and massive displacement of people. For years, the United Nations has sounded the alarm over Rwanda’s continued assistance to the M23, putting forward solid evidence of the “direct involvement” of Rwandan Defense Forces in the conflict in eastern Congo-Kinshasa, as well as Rwanda’s provision of “weapons, ammunitions, and uniforms” to the M23 rebels. The United Nations has also implicated Uganda, which has allowed M23 “unhindered” access to its territory during its operations.
Despite this evidence, Western countries, especially the United States, have continued to provide support to the two countries, including military aid. This, despite the legal restrictions that are supposed to prohibit the U.S. from releasing International Military Education & Training (IMET) funds to countries in the African Great Lakes region that “facilitate or otherwise participate in destabilizing activities in a neighboring country, including aiding and abetting armed groups.” It was only in October 2023 that the U.S. State Department placed Rwanda on a blacklist for violating the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA) due to Rwandan support for M23, which recruits child soldiers. Support to Uganda continues.
Armed groups, competing for control of profitable minerals, will continue to unleash terror and perpetrate violent crimes against humanity until the impunity for the warring parties is brought to an end; Rwanda and Uganda end military support for M23; and the international community, including the United States, suspends military assistance to governments supporting armed groups. If not, the price of war and conflict will continue to be paid by women and children—victims of DRC’s “resource curse.”Keep ReadingShow Less
As in Gaza, the Starvation and Deprivation in Sudan Is Deliberate
While it’s important indeed that Gaza remains a focus of our attention as long as the nightmarish Israeli campaign there continues, it’s no less important that those of us in the Global North focus on the less visible war and atrocities taking place in Sudan.
Aug 02, 2024
For months, we’ve all been able to stay reasonably informed about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But there’s another horrific war that’s gotten so little coverage you could be excused for not knowing anything about it. What we have in mind is the seemingly never-ending, utterly devastating war in Sudan. Think of it as the missing war. And if we don’t start paying a lot more attention to it soon — as in right now — it’s going to be too late.
After 15 months of fighting in that country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), experts in food insecurity estimate that almost 26 million people (no, that is not a misprint!), or more than half of Sudan’s population, could suffer from malnutrition by September. Eight and a half million of those human beings could face acute malnutrition. Worse yet, if the war continues on its present path, millions will die of hunger and disease in just the coming months (and few people in our world may even notice).
By now, those warring armies have driven Sudan to the brink of all-out famine, partly by displacing more than a fifth of the population from their homes, livelihoods, and farms, while preventing the delivery of food to the places most in need. And you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, with their foreign-policy eyes focused on Gaza and Ukraine, our country’s government and others around the world have paid remarkably little attention to the growing crisis in Sudan, making at best only half-hearted (quarter-hearted?) gestures toward helping negotiate a cease-fire between the SAF and RSF, while contributing only a small fraction of the aid Sudan needs to head off a famine of historic magnitude.
From Emergency to Catastrophe
In late June, the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, which monitors regions at risk of starvation, reported “a stark and rapid deterioration of the food security situation” in Sudan. It noted that the number of people suffering hunger severe enough to qualify, in IPC terms, as Phase 3 (“Crisis”) or Phase 4 (“Emergency”) has ballooned 45% since the end of last year. In December 2023, no Sudanese had yet made it to Phase 5 (“Catastrophe”), a condition characteristic of famines. Now, more than three-quarters of a million people are in that final phase of starving to death. Indeed, if the conflict continues to escalate, large parts of Sudan may spiral into full-blown famine, a state that exists, according to the IPC, when at least 20% of an area’s population is suffering Phase-5 hunger.
Until recently, the worst conflict and hunger were concentrated in western Sudan and around Khartoum, the country’s capital. Now, however, they’ve spread to the east and south as well. Worse yet, the war in Sudan has by now displaced an astounding 10 million people from their homes, more than four million of them children — a figure that looks like but isn’t a misprint. Many have had to move multiple times and two million Sudanese have taken refuge in neighboring countries. Worse yet, with so many people forced off their land and away from their workplaces, the capacity of farmers to till the soil and other kinds of workers to hold down a paycheck and so buy food for their families has been severely disrupted.
Not surprisingly, 15 months of brutal war have played havoc with crop production. Cereal grain harvests in 2023 were far smaller than in previous years and stocks of grain (which typically supply 80% of Sudanese caloric intake) have already been fully consumed, with months to go before the next harvest, a stretch of time known, even in good years, as the “lean season.” And with war raging, anything but a bumper crop is expected this year. Indeed, just as planting season got underway, fierce fighting spilled over into wheat-growing Gezira, one of Sudan’s 18 “states” and renowned as the nation’s breadbasket.
Sudan desperately needs food aid and it’s simply not getting enough. The U.N. High Commission for Refugees has received less than 20% of the funds necessary to help feed the Sudanese this year and has had to “drastically cut” food rations. As Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, head of the aid nonprofit Mercy Corps, told the New York Times, “World leaders continue to go through the motions, expressing concern over Sudan’s crisis. Yet they’ve failed to rise to the occasion.”
Worse yet, in the swirling chaos, even the food aid that does make it to Sudan is largely failing to reach starving populations in anything approaching adequate quantities — and when available, it’s usually unaffordable. Famished people are reportedly boiling leaves, as well as eating grass, peanut shells, and even dirt.
Starvation: “A Cheap and Very Effective Weapon”
For many families, the one thing keeping starvation at bay may be a local free soup kitchen. In a report published in May, Timmo Gaasbeek of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations noted, “Sudan has a long tradition of sharing food. After the war broke out and hunger spread, community-level initiatives for sharing food sprang up across the country. These ‘soup kitchen’ initiatives are often informal but can be very well organized.”
Gaasbeek warned, however, that soup kitchens can fill only so many gaping holes in a system shattered by wartime destruction, displacement, and crop failure. His institute estimates that at current rates of food sharing, 2.5 million people could die of hunger and disease by the time crops are harvested in September. In other words, a shocking 10-20% of the Sudanese in the hardest-hit areas could die — mortality rates similar to ones suffered during horrendous famines in parts of Nigeria in 1969, Ethiopia in 1984, and Somalia in 1992.
By Gaasbeek’s calculations, more aggressive food sharing through soup kitchens and other means could cut the total death toll to a still-appalling one million. But that seems unlikely since even the existing efforts by local mutual-aid groups and international organizations to provide food have come under attack from both sides in the war. Six international experts writing for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have accused SAF and RSF of “using food as a weapon and starving civilians.” They also found that the “deliberate targeting of humanitarian workers and local volunteers has undermined aid operations, putting millions of people at further risk of starvation.”
We recently got in touch with Hadeel Mohamed, an educator with whom we’d spoken last October after she fled Sudan for Egypt. In a July 16th email to us, she wrote that “the war in Sudan, like many wars, has proved to be more an attack on civilians than on any armed forces.” Still in contact with neighbors who stayed behind in Khartoum, she reports that neither army is protecting civilians. In fact, the two at times appear to be tag-teaming to do them in. When, for instance, RSF forces carry out a raid, her contacts tell her, SAF troops are often “removed from the locations hours before the attacks occur.” Worse yet, for those now trying to flee as she did last year, “Some said that, in their attempts to escape Khartoum, they’ve encountered RSF forces waiting to loot them. All their supplies were stolen once again!”
Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation told the BBC that the RSF paramilitary is “essentially a looting machine. They rampage through the countryside and towns, stealing everything there is.” They even bombed and looted the last hospital still functioning in Northern Darfur state. No less horribly, the government’s SAF troops are guilty of trying to starve people in areas now occupied and controlled by the RSF and, according to De Waal, neither side is willing to “relinquish what is a cheap and very effective weapon.”
Echoes from a Thousand Miles Away
Is Sudan’s nightmare starting to sound grimly familiar?
* Families displaced multiple times, with war following hot on their heels.
* Food aid falling desperately short of what’s needed.
* Humanitarian aid intercepted by soldiers and other armed men before it can reach intended recipients.
* Soup kitchens attacked.
* Aid workers targeted for death.
* Hospitals bombarded, invaded, and shut down.
* Crop production capacity sabotaged during a hunger emergency.
* Washington doing little or nothing to stop the horror.
Might we be thinking, perhaps, of a small 25-mile strip of territory a thousand miles directly north of Khartoum, just on the other side of Egypt?
Sadly enough, there are many striking parallels between the wars being waged on the civilian populations of Sudan and Gaza. It would nonetheless be wrong to blame world interest in the nightmare in Gaza for drawing attention away from the civil war in Sudan. Neither of those crimes against humanity, in their scale and ghastliness, should be exploited by anyone to minimize the weight and urgency of the other. Worse yet, simply paying more attention to the nightmare in Sudan and sending its people more food aid won’t address the imbalance. The fact is that neither the Sudanese nor the Gazans have received what they most urgently need right now: an end to their respective conflicts.
Efforts by the U.S. and other countries to push for cease-fires in both places and an end to each of those wars have proven almost cataclysmically inadequate and ineffective. For Sudan, it’s been especially discouraging. Talks last year between the SAF and RSF brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States failed to even reduce the fighting there and recent attempts to revive those talks all too expectably broke down. In early June, Egypt hosted supporters of both of Sudan’s warring parties in Cairo for negotiations. The only outcome: the creation of a supremely bureaucratic subcommittee to draft a meaningless communique.
Collective Courage
Last October, Hadeel Mohamed wrote that there was then only one modest hope in Sudan. For the millions of Sudanese living through their latest national nightmare, she told us, “You really come back to more community-based aid. With our limited resources, with our limited abilities, we still find people rising up to take care of each other.” And they’re still doing it. It’s just not enough to prevent a disastrous famine, as long as the sectarian fighting continues.
With weak support from the outside world, civilians in Sudan have little choice but to rely on long traditions of social cohesion and mutual aid as they work to survive and somehow bring the war in their country to an end. In that, there’s yet another parallel with the war on Gaza’s civilians: the coordinated service, heroism, and sacrifice personified by Palestinian journalists, taxi drivers, first responders, healthcare professionals, and countless other people is now legendary.
Civilians in many such situations are too often portrayed in the world media as nearly helpless victims. The Sudanese and Palestinian people are showing that image to be fallacious by acting with the kind of collective courage, endurance, and solidarity that’s all too rare in the comfortably situated societies that are leaving them to starve. They’re being cruelly victimized, yet they’re refusing to play the victim.
The wartime food-sharing movement in Sudan that operates soup kitchens is a good example. It’s led by grassroots neighborhood groups called “resistance committees” that started forming more than a decade ago in the wake of the Arab Spring, with the mission of providing social protection and provisioning in their home communities. They have since proliferated throughout Sudan, operating locally and independently but together forming a remarkably well-integrated national network.
The resistance committees took a leading role in grassroots protests against the October 2021 military coup that cut short a national transition to democratic rule then underway in Sudan. Eighteen months later, the current war erupted when the two generals who had led that coup turned on each other, with one leading the armed forces and the other the Rapid Support Forces. Throughout the ensuing war, at great risk to their own safety, resistance committee members have played essential lifesaving roles. While working to fend off hunger in their communities, they have also prioritized the maintenance of human rights, continuation of social services, and defense of direct democracy, while urging fervent opposition to the SAF, the RSF, and more generally the incessant militarization of their country. Some are also mobilizing their communities for self-defense.
Sudan expert Santiago Stocker suggested recently that the resistance committees, “because of their support among youth and local legitimacy in Sudan, are a voice the international community should support and elevate.” The committees are one part of a broader grassroots civilian movement that participated in those ill-fated Cairo talks. That movement, Stocker argues, could sooner or later help break the deadlock in Sudan by pressing other nations to move decisively to help end the war. They could urge, for example, that “the international community… increase punitive measures, including sanctions, against RSF and SAF leadership and key members of the SAF’s governing coalition, including businesses and hardline religious groups.”
While it’s important indeed that Gaza remains a focus of our attention as long as the nightmarish Israeli campaign there continues, it’s no less important that those of us in the Global North focus on the less visible war in Sudan and push our governments to impose punitive measures on that country’s generals and other elites, while pulling out all the stops (and ample cash) to get food to the millions who desperately need it.
Sudan should simply no longer be callously ignored.
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