This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

Gaza: underweight babies, heavy fighting and more displacement

Amid some of the fiercest reported fighting in Gaza yet, UN humanitarians on Wednesday repeated warnings that famine is still imminent and not enough aid is getting into the enclave.

More than seven months into the war, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, also warned that babies are being born too small and in unsuitable conditions.

“Habiba was born in a small tent. She’s two weeks old and weighs less than two kilogrammes,” the UN agency said in a post on X, adding that more than 150,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women continue to face dire sanitary conditions and health hazards.

Fellow UN agency the World Food Programme, WFP, highlighted the massive challenge parents face keeping their children safe and fed. 

To stave off malnutrition, WFP distributes fortified date bars and other relief supplies – but it insisted that what’s needed is a ceasefire to scale up aid to all 2.2 million people in Gaza.

Continuing aid efforts come amid reported gun battles between Israeli troops and Palestinian fighters in Jabalia in the north and Rafah in the south.

To date, Rafah has emptied of at least 450,000 people in just the last week and another 100,000 have been uprooted from the north of the enclave, amid fresh evacuation orders by the Israeli military.

Sudan alert as civilians remain trapped in war zone

To war-torn Sudan, where UN humanitarians warned on Wednesday that time is running out to save lives, as famine looms.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said that civilians are still trapped by intensified fighting in northern Darfur. 

Aid teams are also concerned that critical transport routes will become inaccessible when the rainy season starts in the coming month, This is when the lean season hits – and when food stocks run out and hunger peaks.   

Today WFP is reaching 2.5 million people a month but the situation “is desperate and quickly deteriorating”, said WFP’s Deputy Executive Director, Carl Skau. He insisted that it was possible to “scale up and expand” assistance, but for that to happen, all parties needed to facilitate access across the active front lines and cross-border from Chad and South Sudan. 

At least five million people in Sudan are on the brink of starvation, according to latest food insecurity assessments from December 2023. WFP is deeply concerned that this number “may have significantly increased”, after identifying 41 “hunger hotspots” that are at high-risk of slipping into famine in the coming four weeks.

Most of these at-risk locations are in hard-to-reach areas where conflict is still raging - including in the Darfur and Kordofan regions, along with Khartoum. 

Saudi Arabia violated rights of religious scholar, UN rights experts warn

Top rights experts said on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia has violated the rights of a prominent academic who had criticised the country’s government by keeping him in solitary confinement.

Religious scholar and critic Safar bin Abdulrahman al-Hawali was reportedly detained without a trial or any accommodation for his disability in July 2018.

On Wednesday, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities said that Mr. al-Hawali had been subjected to “a wide range of human rights abuses over the past six years including acts of torture or inhuman treatment.”

For more than two months after his arrest, Mr. al-Hawali’s family could not locate him, until the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances sought information from Saudi authorities that revealed he was being investigated under counter-terrorism laws.

The disability panel – whose rights experts are not UN staff – also found that Saudi Arabia breached Mr. al-Hawali’s rights to due process and urged Saudi Arabia to review his case to “ensure a fair and public trial in accordance with international standards - or to release him”. 

Shanaé Harte, UN News