The Irish Times view on displaced people: a crisis rapidly worsening
and 9.8 million, because of 'natural' disasters,
29 per cent up. Internally displaced people stay in their own country, in contrast to refugees who move elsewhere.
The figures are more than double the level of just six years ago, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) say in their annual joint report on internal displacement, testimony to an accelerating deterioration worldwide.
The recent rise in conflicts, particularly in
Sudan,
the Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Ukraine and Palestine, has displaced millions, adding to the tens of millions already living in protracted displacement in countries such as Afghanistan, Colombia, Syria and Yemen.
More than 5 million conflict displacements occurred last year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the most of any country. In Gaza, some 90 per cent of the 2.4 million population have been forced to move by Israeli attacks, with 'some displaced 10 times or more,' UN relief agency UNRWA reports. Civil war-ravaged Sudan alone is home to a staggering 11.6 million IDPs, the most ever recorded in a single country.
READ MORE
So-called 'natural' disasters and conflict-related disasters both reflect a terrible failure by humanity to manage its own affairs. Much of the aggravated weather causing 'natural disasters' is attributable to man-made global warming – some 11 million US residents had to relocate, for example, because of hurricanes, floods and wildfires.
The number of countries reporting both conflict and disaster displacement has tripled in 15 years, with more than three-quarters of people internally displaced by conflict living in countries that are very vulnerable to climate change. People in large parts on the planet, in other words, are terribly exposed.
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Irish Times
05-08-2025
- Irish Times
Funding cuts drive Sudan's children to the brink of irreversible harm, says Unicef
Funding cuts are driving an entire generation of children in Sudan to the brink of irreversible harm as support is scaled back and malnutrition cases persist across the country, the UN children's agency said on Tuesday. UNHCR and other UN agencies face one of the worst funding crises in decades, compounded by US and other donor states' decisions to slash foreign aid funding. 'Children have limited access to safe water, food, healthcare. Malnutrition is rife, and many good children are reduced to just skin, bones,' said Sheldon Yett, Unicef 's representative in Sudan, speaking via video link from Port Sudan. Sudan's conflict between the army and rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has displaced millions and split the country into rival zones of control with the RSF still deeply embedded in western Sudan. READ MORE Several areas to the south of Sudan's capital Khartoum are at risk of famine, the World Food Programme said in July. Children were being cut off from life-saving services due to funding cuts, while the scale of need is staggering, Unicef said. 'With recent funding cuts, many of our partners in Khartoum and elsewhere have been forced to scale back ... We are being stretched to the limit across Sudan, with children dying of hunger,' Mr Yett said. 'We on the verge of irreversible damage being done to an entire generation of children in Sudan.' Only 23 per cent of the $4.16 billion (€3.59 million) global humanitarian response plan for Sudan has been funded, according to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Access to areas in need also continues to be a challenge, with some roads rendered inaccessible due to the rainy season, hampering aid delivery efforts, Unicef said. Other areas continue to be under siege, such as Al-Fashir. 'It has been one year since famine was confirmed in Zamzam camp and no food has reached this area. Al-Fashir remains under siege. We need that access now,' said Jens Laerke of the OCHA. – Reuters
Irish Times
05-08-2025
- Irish Times
Gaza is also a war on the human instinct for compassion
It's impossible at the moment to look at a historical documentary about war and not think of what is happening in Gaza . I recently watched one of those vividly colourised films of the second World War where scenes of carnage are interspersed with the memories of aged veterans. Two moments hit hard. One was a Canadian pilot called Donald Wickens, who served in the Royal Air Force in 1943 when it began its carpet bombing of German cities. He had taken part in Operation Gomorrah which created a massive firestorm to engulf Hamburg, killing an estimated 37,000 people. He was then summoned to a further mission briefing and told 'Well, the only building left standing is the main post office and they've built emergency shelters and there are 60,000 civilians. That's your target.' Telling this story as an old man, Wickens was close to tears: 'You're thinking just what we thought. You closed your eyes. They're the bad guys and here we were the good guys – and we've got to do this ? We had no choice – we went and did it. I never saw a sicker bunch of young fellas when that chore was given to us.' READ MORE The other moment that struck home was, as it happens, another Canadian called Maurice White, who took part in the Allied invasion of Sicily. Maurice and his comrades entered a village: 'We could hear some noise in this big house ... We busted in and it was about 20 people in there, old people and women and children and they hadn't eaten for days. They were starving to death, really they were. If you gave them a can of bully beef that was like giving them life.' And he too cried as he relived it in his mind. The faces of these old men were haggard and haunted. Seventy years had not been long enough to exorcise the spectres of memory. They had lived with these ghosts for most of their lives and you could see and hear the pain of it in their expressions and voices. And yet, there was also consolation in their distress – not the sadistic pleasure of witnessing pain but the relief of remembering that most human beings are not naturally cruel. For these are good ghosts. Without this night-visiting anguish, there is no hope. If the 'bunch of young fellas' going off to bomb the refugees in an already destroyed city are not sick to their stomachs, humanity itself is terminally ill. If a soldier is not plagued by the sight of 'old people and women and children ... starving to death', the plague of indifference is more rampant than the Black Death. Seeing the phantoms of grief behind the eyes of those old men, I thought of a poem by another warrior, Wilfred Owen's Insensibility, written from the abyss of the first World War. Owen evokes those so deeply immersed in carnage that they 'Can let their veins run cold' – 'Happy are these who lose imagination:/ They have enough to carry with ammunition./ Their spirit drags no pack.// ... Having seen all things red,/ Their eyes are rid/ Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.' Owen's last verse rings out now like a thousand discordant alarm bells going off all around us: 'By choice they made themselves immune/ To pity and whatever mourns in man/ Before the last sea and the hapless stars;/ Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;/ Whatever shares/ The eternal reciprocity of tears.' The eternal reciprocity of tears – our inability not to be tormented by the anguish of others – is the beating heart of humanity. Which is why despots and mass murderers (the Venn diagram shows a great area of overlap) need to put a stop to it. It is hard, though, to do this all at once. The heart has to be hardened before it can be stopped. Insensibility is induced gradually. Immunity to pity is built up through multiple doses of the vaccines of polarisation, mendacity and whataboutery. The rise of the far right throughout the democratic world is fuelled by its ability to channel pity into self-pity. Compassion must not be reciprocal. It can be felt only for 'people like us': real Americans, true Christians, proper patriots, the civilised who are eternally at war with the barbarians. When we venture out there, beyond our pale, we must drag no packs of sympathy or imagination. The war on Gaza is of course primarily a war on those who are being murdered, starved and murdered when they try not to die of starvation. But it is also a war on the human instinct for compassion. It is a toughening-up exercise. We are all being induced to inure ourselves to depravity. 'Habit', as Samuel Beckett has it, 'is a great deadener.' This is how fascism proceeds – people can be blooded like hunting dogs. We can get used to masked men plucking people from the streets, to disappearances into holding areas (let's not call them concentration camps – yet), to children dragged from their parents and kept in cages, to cries of ' burn them out! '. And it helps if we have before our eyes examples of even worse stuff playing on our screens every night: pulverised cities, bombed hospitals, emaciated children, glib spokesmen telling us that none of it is really happening and/or they deserve it anyway. Democratic leaders simultaneously wringing their hands and washing them. If you get used to that you can used to anything. [ 'Revenge is not a policy': dissenting Israeli voices begin to penetrate silence over Gaza Opens in new window ] Resistance to insensibility is not just a moral duty to far-off people. It is an imperative for self-preservation. When the good ghosts of grief for our fellow human beings are banished, in come the dark ghouls of vicious despotism. [ Una Mullally: Ireland will be remembered as a beacon in dark times if we pass the Occupied Territories Bill Opens in new window ] When we learn to shut down pity, we summon the pitiless to power. Between March and June, Israel allowed just 56,000 tonnes of food to enter the territory, less than a quarter of Gaza's minimum needs for that period B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, described an 'official and openly declared policy' of mass starvation.
Irish Times
27-07-2025
- Irish Times
Israel announces military pause in parts of Gaza amid pressure over humanitarian crisis
The Israeli military announced on Sunday a pause in military activity in three designated areas of Gaza , shortly after it said it was taking several steps to ease the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian enclave. The pause will take place daily in al-Mawasi, Deir al-Balah, and Gaza City, from 10am (7am Irish time) to 8pm (5pm Irish time) until further notice, the military said. Designated secure routes will also be in place permanently from 6am until 11pm, it added. Aid trucks started moving towards Gaza from Egypt , the Egyptian state-affiliated Al Qahera News TV said on Sunday, after months of international pressure and warnings from relief agencies of starvation spreading in the Palestinian enclave. READ MORE Israel said that it began aid airdrops to Gaza on Saturday and was taking several other steps to ease the humanitarian crisis. The Israeli military said 'humanitarian corridors' would be established for safe movement of United Nations convoys delivering aid to Gazans and that 'humanitarian pauses' would be implemented in densely populated areas. Dozens of trucks carrying tonnes of humanitarian aid moved towards the Karam Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing in southern Gaza, the Al Qahera correspondent said from the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza. International aid organisations say there is mass hunger among Gaza's 2.2 million people, with food running out after Israel cut off all supplies to the territory in March, before resuming it in May with new restrictions. [ Words like 'humanitarian' have lost all meaning. Let the images speak instead Opens in new window ] Israel says it has let enough food into Gaza and accuses the UN of failing to distribute it. The UN says it is operating as effectively as possible under Israeli restrictions. Israel's announcement on airdrops came after indirect ceasefire talks in Doha between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas were broken off with no deal in sight. The Israeli military said in a statement that the airdrops would be conducted in co-ordination with international aid organisations and would include seven pallets of aid containing flour, sugar and canned food. Palestinian sources confirmed that aid had begun dropping in northern Gaza. Israel's ministry of foreign affairs said the military would 'apply a 'humanitarian pause' in civilian centres and in humanitarian corridors' on Sunday morning. It provided no further details. 'The IDF emphasises that there is no starvation in the Gaza Strip; this is a false campaign promoted by Hamas,' the Israeli military said in its Saturday statement. 'Responsibility for food distribution to the population in Gaza lies with the UN and international aid organisations. Therefore, the UN and international organisations are expected to improve the effectiveness of aid distribution and to ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas.' The Israeli military stressed that despite the humanitarian steps, 'combat operations have not ceased' in the Gaza Strip. Separately, international activists on an aid ship that set sail from Italy en route to Gaza said in a post on X that the vessel had been intercepted. The Israeli ministry of foreign affairs said on X that naval forces 'stopped the vessel from illegally entering the maritime zone of the coast of Gaza,' that it was being taken to Israeli shores and all passengers were safe. The UN said on Thursday that humanitarian pauses in Gaza would allow 'the scale up of humanitarian assistance' and said Israel had not provided enough route alternatives for its convoys hindering aid access. Dozens of Gazans have died of malnutrition in the past few weeks, according to the Gaza ministry of health, while 127 people have died due to malnutrition, including 85 children, since the start of the war, which began nearly two years ago. On Wednesday, more than 100 aid agencies warned that mass starvation was spreading across the enclave. The military also said on Saturday that it had connected a power line to a desalination plant, expected to supply daily water needs for about 900,000 Gazans. Israel launched its assault on Gaza after Hamas-led fighters stormed Israeli towns near the border, killing some 1,200 people and capturing 251 hostages on October 7th, 2023. Since then, Israeli forces have killed nearly 60,000 people in Gaza, health officials there say, and reduced much of the enclave to ruins. – Reuters
