Interviews

Until we tackle the issues presently driving 258 million people to leave their home countries, the world’s refugee crisis “will not stop,” said the President of the UN General Assembly, María Fernanda Espinosa on Monday.

“No one in their right mind” wants to flee their home, she said, adding that climate-change, economic challenges, and discrimination are pushing people to seek refuge.

Gaza Hospitals unable to feed their own patients, elective surgeries postponed for years – those are just a few examples of what the UN’s Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East, Jamie McGoldrick, describes as a “collapsing system in freefall”.

On Monday, he issued an appeal as part of the Humanitarian Response Plan for next year, for $350 million, to help 1.4 million people in the most need, across the occupied Palestinian territories, chiefly the the Gaza Strip.

A $5.5 billion appeal has been launched by the UN to help 5.6 million Syrian refugees and millions more people hosting them in neighbouring countries.

In an interview with UN News, Samuel Rizk from the UN Development Programme (UNDP), explained that although around 30,000 Syrians have gone home so far this year, the overwhelming majority still need help in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq.

At COP24, thousands gathered to find concrete ways to move forward on the historic Paris Agreement.

In Libya’s capital city of Tripoli, the humanitarian crisis is so intense, pregnant women are being asked to bring their own medical supplies for doctors to deliver their babies, and in some camps for the displaced, every toilet and kitchen in the city is being shared by up to 100 people.

Those are some of the stark scenes witnessed over the past few days by UN Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Ursula Mueller, who’s just completed a five-day visit to the country.

The private sector and civil society, working in tandem, “hold the biggest promise” for making the first-ever Global Compact on migration a success for the countries who have signed up. 

That’s the opinion of Tarek Yousef, the director of the Brookings Institution at Doha Centre in Qatar; a think-tank focusing on the socio-economic and political issues facing the Middle East.

When “conflict was underway, and checkpoints were increasing everywhere” in the Syrian capital, Damascus, Sarah Zein started biking to avoid the traffic, but verbal sexual harassment on the streets, soon became a big problem.

Since then, she’s become an eco-friendly advocate for both a greener environment and the rights of women, attracting more than 4,000 girls to her cycling events, and helping increase bike ownership among women.

Many Palestinians living under Israeli occupation suffer from a “coercive environment” where settlement expansion has made people’s lives so unbearable that they feel pressured to move, according to a top UN official there.

James Heenan, head of the UN human rights office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said that permits for building in the West Bank, were “almost non-existent” now for Palestinians.