Deep Dive
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This is UN News Today with me, Daniel Johnson. The headlines. UN agencies have rejected Israel's aid distribution proposal for Gaza. Action is needed now to prevent a deepening hunger crisis in West and Central Africa, says the World Food Programme. And Costa Rica's generous asylum seeker policy is under threat from the funding crunch.
UN agencies still working in Gaza repeated deep reservations on Friday about the Israeli plan to take control of the aid operation in the war-torn enclave. One of their main concerns is that Gaza's most vulnerable won't be able to get to a small handful of aid hubs that are to be based exclusively in the south of the Strip.
Here's James Elder from the UN Children's Fund, UNICEF. And according to the plan, as we've seen it, there'd only be 60 trucks delivering aid to the Gaza Strip every day. This is one-tenth of what was being delivered during the ceasefire. It's not nearly enough to meet the needs of 1.1 million children, 2.1 million people. So civilians must not be forced to flee again and the use of humanitarian aid as a bait to force displacement, especially from the north to the south...
will create this impossible choice between displacement and death. The development comes more than nine weeks since Israel blocked all humanitarian and commercial deliveries of food, fuel and medicines from reaching the enclave. UN aid teams have also reported that the Israeli authorities continue to routinely deny humanitarians access to most available reserves still inside Gaza.
An alert now on a deepening hunger crisis in West and Central Africa from the UN World Food Programme , which has warned that millions of people are in danger. Latest food security analysis shows that more than 36 million people are already struggling to meet their basic food and nutrition needs. This number is set to rise to at least 52 million during the lean season from June to August.
The most acute hunger is expected to happen in Mali, where 2,600 people could face extreme food shortages, starvation and death. The drivers for this are persistent conflict, displacement, strained public finances and recurrent extreme weather shocks, the WFP said.
Fighting alone has forcibly displaced more than 10 million of the most vulnerable across the region, including 2.4 million refugees and asylum seekers in Chad, Cameroon, Mauritania and Niger. Almost 8 million more have been internally displaced, mainly in Nigeria and Cameroon, WFP said, while many have been cut off from their livelihoods, fleeing farms and grazing lands in search of food and shelter.
Rising food and fuel costs are also pushing crisis levels of hunger to new highs in Ghana, Guinea and the Cote d'Ivoire. Food prices are also continuing to rise in Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, placing nutritious food far out of reach for the most vulnerable. To help, WFP plans to reach almost 12 million people in West Africa and the Sahel this year, with critical assistance, including nutritional support.
Costa Rica's long-standing open-door policy for asylum seekers is under threat as severe funding cuts cripple support for a growing number of Nicaraguans arriving there, the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, said on Friday. Without funding, asylum seekers are left in limbo, undocumented, unsupported and increasingly desperate, said Rivendrini Menikdiduela, UNHCR's Assistant High Commissioner for Protection.
What we have seen is that already we and the government have had to cut back on essential critical life-saving assistance to many of these refugees and asylum seekers. We have seen 77% drop in the operational registration of asylum seekers.
So without that registration, without that documentation, these people are being left in a limbo. Ms. Menik Diwele's comments follow a 41% budget cut to the UN agency's operations in Costa Rica. They've already forced it to scale back or suspend legal support, mental health services, education, job training and child protection. The Central American nation hosts more than 200,000 refugees and asylum seekers. They make up nearly 4% of the population.
and more than eight in ten are from Nicaragua, who fled worsening political and social turmoil there, linked to what top independent rights experts have called systemic repression at the highest levels of government. Daniel Johnson, UN News.