This is the News in Brief from the United Nations. 

Gaza hospitals hanging on by a thread: UN humanitarians

With the Israel-Palestine crisis in its fourth week, UN aid teams on Monday highlighted the mounting pressure on north Gaza hospitals where patients and health workers remain, amid reports of expanded Israeli ground incursions.

“Palestinian and Israeli civilians have suffered enough”, UN relief chief Martin Griffiths wrote on social platform X on Monday. 

He revealed that he is in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory and “will be discussing with the leadership of both parties how we can ramp up the humanitarian response”.

“My plea to all parties is: free the hostages. Protect civilians, wherever they are. Allow the delivery of aid swiftly, safely and at scale. Respect international humanitarian law,” he wrote.

UN humanitarian affairs coordination office OCHA said that the vicinities of Shifa and Al Quds hospitals in Gaza city and of the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza have been reportedly bombarded over the weekend.

“This followed renewed calls by the Israeli military to evacuate these facilities immediately,” OCHA added. 

According to OCHA, some 117,000 displaced people are sheltering in the 10 hospitals still operational in Gaza city and elsewhere in the north of the Strip, while UN health agency WHO reiterated that “evacuation of hospitals is impossible without endangering patients’ lives”.

Meanwhile, according to the Israeli authorities, 239 Israelis and foreign nationals, including some 30 children, are held captive in Gaza and 40 people are still reported missing following Hamas’ attacks on Israel on 7 October which killed 1,400 people. 

‘Stop the madness’ says UN chief as record Himalaya glacier melt threatens devastation 

Fast-melting glaciers in a warming world spell “catastrophe” for millions – but the worst could be averted if we “end the fossil fuel age”.

That’s the message from UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who warned in Nepal on Monday that the country’s glaciers melted 65 per cent faster in the last decade than they had in the previous one, while Antarctica and Greenland were losing “billions of tons of ice mass” every year.

The UN chief said that this meant “swollen lakes and rivers flooding, sweeping away entire communities” and record sea level rise threatening coastal residents. 

In an appeal to “stop the madness” before glaciers disappear altogether, Mr. Guterres called for action now “to protect people on the frontline” and limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, “to avert the worst of climate chaos”.

DRC displacement nears 7 million: IOM

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the number of internally displaced has reached a record 6.9 million amid escalating conflict, with humanitarian needs soaring, the UN migration agency (IOM) said on Monday.

IOM stressed that the DRC is facing “one of the largest” internal displacement and humanitarian crises in the world and that the most recent escalation of the conflict has “uprooted more people in less time, like rarely seen before”.

Four in every five internally displaced persons live in the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri, and Tanganyika. In North Kivu alone, up to one million people have been displaced due to the ongoing conflict with the rebel group M23. 

The UN migration agency said that teams have been actively involved in managing 78 displacement sites hosting over 280,000 people, providing residents with essential supplies, water, sanitation and hygiene assistance as well as psychosocial support. 

The agency aims to support an additional 50,000 people in the next three months but its operations in the DRC remain underfunded by more than 50 per cent. 

Dominika Tomaszewska-Mortimer, UN News.