UN News Today 31 March 2026 |

Middle East war: WFP warns that vital food aid blocked

Civilians continue to suffer the worst impacts of the war in the Middle East, which was already home to the world’s largest number of people in need of humanitarian assistance, UN aid coordinators OCHA said on Tuesday.

This includes 3.6 million people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, 16.5 million in Syria, and more than 22 million in Yemen.

Early on in the war, aid agencies warned about the potential impact on vulnerable people who the UN helps every day.

Now, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) says that its operations “are buckling” in Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia, among others, because of longer shipping times and higher costs.

With more, here’s WFP’s Corinne Fleischer:

“The World Food Programme has currently 70,000 metric tonnes of food that is impacted by the war in the Middle East. About half of them are on chartered bulk vessel and the other half are in containers which are either en route or stuck in a port and don’t move.”

The situation has been made worse by a lack of financial support for humanitarian operations for several years. “We have eroded any buffer stocks. We’re living from hand-to-mouth in these operations,” Ms. Fleischer stressed.

She noted that WFP has no vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. But the agency has been impacted by the shipping crunch there and attacks on vessels, the latest recorded on Tuesday. 

Syria: 200,000 have fled Lebanon conflict in a month: UNHCR 

Another result of the Gulf war has been traumatic, mass displacement, with more than 200,000 people fleeing “intense Israeli bombardment” in Lebanon since the start of Israeli and US bombing of Iran, and Israeli strikes on Lebanese targets linked to Hezbollah fighters. 

“The vast majority, nearly 180,000, are Syrians, including Syrian refugees who had fled Syria seeking safety in the past in Lebanon and now forced to flee again,” said the UN refugee agency’s representative in Syria, Asseer Al-Madaien.

In an update, Ms. Al-Madaien noted that those arriving in Syria are “exhausted, traumatized” and carrying “very few belongings”.

The UN refugee agency representative said that teams are preparing for as many as 350,000 to cross into Syria.

Condemnation for Knesset death penalty law for Palestinians

The decision by Israeli lawmakers to make execution the default sentence for Palestinians convicted of lethal attacks has been condemned by the head of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinians.

Philippe Lazzarini was speaking in Geneva on Tuesday, after the new law passed in the Israeli Knesset:

“Like many others, I have been absolutely appalled by this abject law, which I really hope will be rejected by the Supreme Court.”

He said he was unaware of any democratic country ever having reinstated the death penalty.

Mr. Lazzarini insisted that the new law would be “extraordinarily discriminatory” as it targeted Palestinians.

Those concerns echo UN human rights chief Volker Türk, who warned in January that military courts would be obliged to impose mandatory death penalties for all convictions for intentional killing in the occupied West Bank.

Human Rights Council-appointed independent rights experts Ben Saul and Francesca Albanese have also condemned the death penalty change, calling it incompatible with international law and one that in their view “entrenches racial discrimination and apartheid”.

Daniel Johnson, UN News.