News in Brief 6 May 2024 |

This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

We won’t abandon Gazans in Rafah UN pledges, as Hamas reportedly accepts ceasefire terms

Amid news reports that 100,000 Palestinians have been told to leave Rafah ahead of an Israeli military operation and hopes rose hours later of a lasting ceasefire deal, as Hamas announced it was accepting ceasefire terms, UN humanitarians on Monday insisted they had no intention of quitting the vital aid hub.

Israel has yet to respond to the militant group’s offer and terms of the proposal remain unclear. 

“An Israeli offensive in Rafah would mean more civilian suffering and deaths. The consequences would be devastating for 1.4 million people,” wrote the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, in a post on X. 

UNRWA is not evacuating, the agency stressed and will be in Rafah “as long as possible”, providing lifesaving aid.

With more, here’s UNRWA Communications Officer Louise Wateridge in Rafah:

“There’s nowhere to go. Nobody has a clear path where to go. There is no advice on where to go. There is no safety to be led to. So, in each circumstance, in each family. it’s a lot of panic and a lot of chaos because, even though we’re hearing the evacuation orders are confined to a small area in Rafah, mid-east of Rafah, you can imagine, as people start to move, the panic is going to spread already outside the window. Here we’re in more the centre of Rafah, people are beginning to take down shelters and leave.”

Echoing that alert, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned that a military siege and ground incursion “would pose catastrophic risks to the 600,000 children” sheltering there.

Yemen: lifesaving humanitarian appeal for one in two people

To Yemen, where close to 200 UN and partner aid agencies issued an alert on Monday to help the country, where a staggering one in two people need lifesaving support.

Nine years of conflict between the mainly Houthi-dominated north and the internationally recognised Government in the south have left 18.2 million people in desperate need of help.

There have been slight improvements in Yemen’s humanitarian situation since a UN-brokered truce took effect in April 2022.

This has allowed aid partners to support resilience-building in communities, but significant needs remain and “cannot be addressed without adequate funding to respond”, they warned.

One of Yemen’s major challenges is reversing maternal deaths which are among the highest in the world, the UN population fund, UNFPA, said on Monday. 

It noted that only one out of five functioning health facilities offers maternal and newborn health services. 

In total throughout Yemen, 17.8 million people need healthcare assistance today, including an estimated 5.5 million women who need reproductive health services.

Unexploded ordnance leaves dark legacy in Gaza, warn mine action experts

Almost seven months into the war in Gaza, UN mine action experts warned on Monday that the risk remains lethally high of unexploded weapons and contaminated rubble throughout the devastated enclave. 

Many Gazans are well aware of the need to stick to relatively safe evacuation corridors, but when the hostilities finally end, they will want to go home to start clearing their land – with all the danger this entails.

To help protect Gazans, the UN agency has stepped up its awareness-raising campaigns among camps for internally displaced people, or IDPs, as UNMAS Explosive Ordnance Device Lead, Patrick McCabe, told us at UN News:

“You know, we tell them if you see anything avoid it, Don’t go near it. Don’t move it. Don’t touch it. Just tell. Tell someone in charge and then get it reported, and then we can take, you know, we can mark it and put a safe area around it. There are mitigation measures in place and these messages have been getting out to the IDP camps.”

Mr. McCabe said in addition to the unknown amounts of unexploded weapons in Gaza today, the rubble likely contains “hundreds of thousands of tonnes of asbestos”.

This should be identified and cleared as a priority, the UNMAS official insisted. 

Shanaé Harte, UN News.