The International Committee of the Red Cross is deeply saddened by the fatal shooting on Monday of one of its physiotherapists in Afghanistan.
Around the world, humanitarian needs are growing, and those needs will not disappear once the immediate crisis is over. The effects of conflict and catastrophe continue for decades, lifetimes even.
Residents of the village of Beit Skaria traditionally grow fresh fruit and vegetables; grapes, olives, or figs. But their path to making a living can be a stony one. Today the village is almost completely surrounded, trapped, in effect, by settlements.It makes ordinary life, the simple act of getting from home, to work, and back again, extraordinarily difficult.
In recent months, Gaza has witnessed an accelerated and worrying degradation of the humanitarian situation. Restrictions imposed on the movement of people and goods, aggravated by internal Palestinian differences, has fenced off Gaza from the rest of the world and is suffocating its economy.
For more than three years, eastern Ukraine has suffered conflict. Amid the world’s many other humanitarian crises, in Syria, or in Yemen for example, it can be easy to forget Ukraine. But the UN estimates that 10,000 people have lost their lives here since 2014. Thousands of families are grieving, and many, like Yuliia and Olha, have been condemned to wait for years to find out exactly what happened to their loved ones.
The numbers associated with South Sudan’s violence reveal the level of brutality being carried out against civilians. Of the country’s population of 12 million, one in three residents has been displaced, while one in two is severely hungry and in need of food assistance.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is carrying out a major distribution of food and other essential items to more than 64,000 people in West Mosul. This is not only the first such distribution of its kind since the western part of the city was recaptured by the authorities on 10th July, but the first major delivery of aid to the area since Mosul was cut off from the world in 2014.
While hundreds of thousands have managed to escape Raqqa city since April 2017 (205,000 people according to the UN), the fate of tens of thousands of civilians trapped in Raqqa city remains unknown.
The number of war wounded is on the rise in northern Mali and therefore the need for war surgery. Since the beginning of the year, 268 war-wounded patients have been operated on by teams from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
35 years after the end of the conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom, a forensics mission has just started on the islands. For the next couple of months, scientists from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) will collect DNA samples from the mortal remains of 123 unidentified Argentine soldiers buried in the Darwin cemetery.