UN News Today 21 May 2025 |

Gaza: aid trucks still waiting to deliver food, medicines inside enclave

UN aid workers said on Wednesday that they are still waiting for permission from Israel to distribute the little lifesaving relief that has been allowed into Gaza, after an 80-day blockade.

The development comes a day after UN humanitarians said that they had been allowed to send “around 100” aid trucks loaded with supplies into Gaza.

Several dozen lorries arrived at Gaza’s Kerem Shalom crossing on Tuesday but they have gone no further.

While needs are so desperate any aid relief would be welcome, but humanitarians say that at least 500 trucks need to enter the enclave every day to help people meet their basic needs – as was the case before the war began in October 2023.

Today, one in five Gazans faces starvation, according to respected food security experts from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification platform – or IPC.

On Wednesday the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, said that its nutrition stocks to prevent increasing malnutrition “are almost gone”.

Occupied West Bank demolitions continue

In the occupied West Bank, meanwhile, demolitions of Palestinian property have continued on a daily basis, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said.

It reported new destruction of a park, a public hall and a swimming pool earlier this week in Beit Sahur, Shu’fat and Nahhalin.

“This is an area that the settlers have been seeing and observing for a while to take over,” said OHCHR head of office in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Ajith Sunghay.

He explained that Palestinian properties are demolished every day on the grounds that they do not have Israeli building permits – even though these are almost “impossible for Palestinians” to obtain.

Every day, meanwhile, Israeli settlers install “new outposts which encroach on Palestinian lands…as a calculated tactic to displace Palestinians and consolidate the annexation of West Bank”, Mr. Sunghay told UN News.

“There is an international Court of Justice advisory opinion, which asks the Israelis to end the occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory as soon as possible. The harm that it causes to the Palestinians on their daily lives, on their family’s lives, on their rights is immeasurable and this is happening by the hour.”

According to the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, Israeli settlers have damaged water infrastructure in the West Bank more than 60 times since the start of the year. Herding communities have been impacted most severely.

Scam centres are a ‘human rights crisis’, independent experts warn

Southeast Asian nations should do more to protect people from being reeled into scam centres, top independent human rights experts said on Wednesday.

It’s believed that hundreds of thousands of trafficked people of different nationalities are forced to work in the centres in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, the Philippines and Malaysia.  

“The situation has reached the level of a humanitarian and human rights crisis,” said right experts Tomoya Obokata, Siobhán Mullally and Vitit Muntarbhorn.

They stressed that thousands of released victims remain stranded in inhumane conditions at the Myanmar-Thailand border.

Many victims are kidnapped and sold to other criminal operations, said the Special Rapporteurs, who report to the Human Rights Council and are not UN staff.

They noted that workers are not freed unless a ransom is paid by their families and that if they try to escape, they are often tortured or killed with total impunity and with corrupt government officials complicit.  

The experts urged Asian countries, as well as the countries of origin of the trafficked workers, to go beyond just public awareness campaigns and to effectively address the drivers of forced cyber-criminality, such as poverty and lack of access to reasonable work.

Daniel Johnson, UN News

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