UN News Today 05 June 2026 |

Lebanon: needs soar as UN appeals for $331 million to support relief mission

The UN in Lebanon appealed for an additional $331.5 million on Friday to help 1.4 million people in crisis as already massive needs continue to grow.

It’s three months since hostilities erupted again between Hezbollah fighters and Israeli forces and humanitarian needs are soaring with each day of the conflict, said Imran Riza, the UN’s top aid official in Lebanon. 

Speaking from Beirut, the veteran humanitarian expressed his dismay at the devastation caused by air and drone strikes and shelling:

“I was shocked by the devastation of infrastructure and essential services; hospitals and clinics hit by airstrikes, government buildings destroyed, agricultural land scorched, water stations demolished and schools turned to displacement sites.” 

The UN population fund, UNFPA, meanwhile, warned that repeated mass displacement has increased the risks for women and girls across Lebanon.

Today, more than 600,000 women and girls are estimated to be at risk of gender-based violence, the agency said, with 1,800 women expected to give birth per month across Lebanon, while healthcare facilities have continued to come under attack.

We’re running out of food in Somalia, says WFP

To Somalia, where the UN World Food Programme, WFP, has warned that it is running out of food to sustain hungry people increasingly unable to afford a nutritious daily meal. 

The alert is linked to the shipping crunch in the Strait of Hormuz, caused by the Israeli-US war with Iran that began on 28 February.

This has driven up energy prices and disrupted seaborne deliveries of humanitarian relief to Somalia, with food import volumes down by 40 per cent, compared with before the Middle East crisis.

Here’s WFP’s Jean-Martin Bauer, speaking to journalists in Geneva:

“The pipeline break that is going to happen in July, according to my colleagues in Somalia. So that’s very close to where we’re at now. So, we are running out of food, the food is not available for distribution, and the ones who will experience the impact of this are going to be very vulnerable children under the age of five.”

At the start of the Middle East war, WFP projected that 45 million people globally could fall into acute food insecurity if the conflict continued and oil prices remained around $100 by the end of June. 

“This scenario is now unfolding,” the agency said, highlighting the particular vulnerability of “ultra-poor urban populations”. Marginalized rural groups, such as Somalia’s pastoralists, are another demographic at risk.

WFP’s Mr. Bauer maintained that even if the crisis in the Middle East de-escalates, “irreversible damage has been done and the impact on prices, livelihoods and humanitarian operations will continue to be felt for a long time”.

He highlighted how the global economic crisis in 2007 sparked food riots in more than 30 countries, a phenomenon repeated in 2011 with the Arab Spring.

Haiti: Harrowing needs must be met with long-term engagement, says IOM

In Haiti, the frontline agency, IOM, described how desperate people are risking their lives to flee gang violence, amid almost-permanent hardship, hunger and climate hazards.

In an update, IOM Chief of Mission in Haiti, Gregoire Goodstein, explained how one woman fled Cité Soleil, one of the largest slums in the capital, Port au Prince, after being attacked by gangs:

“To reach safety, her family waded through the sea up to their necks, then crawled through farm fields covered in mud and waste to avoid being seen by the gangs. When she sat with our colleague colleagues. More than a week later, she said in tears, that she could still smell the cow dung in her hair and that she was ashamed others might too.”

The Caribbean island nation has experienced years of turmoil caused by political instability and a lack of economic development, made worse by a devastating and deadly earthquake in 2010.

Today’s humanitarian crisis has been compounded by the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who’ve been forcibly returned since last year, principally from Dominican Republic. 

For some, “this is the first time in decades, or even in their lives, that they have returned to the country”, IOM’s Mr. Goodstein explained. One in four are women, including breastfeeding mothers, and nearly one in 10 are children, some unaccompanied.

The UN migration agency official added that the new arrivals come “into communities that are barely surviving themselves” where armed gangs hold sway.

Daniel Johnson, UN News