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The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) is “irreplaceable” and “indispensable” – not just for Gaza and the occupied West Bank but for the entire region.

That was the message several top diplomats stressed on Thursday at the UN General Assembly as they pleaded for political and financial support for the agency.

“UNRWA is a force for stability in the most unstable region of the world,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at a meeting held on the sidelines of the summit.

“UNRWA is vital to any prospects of peace and stability in the region. I urge you to do all you can to support its work.”

The agency’s role has been under the microscope since the outbreak of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023.

As bombing campaigns and a ground invasion displaced thousands of Palestinians, UNRWA became one of the main distributors of aid in the territory.

But with the United States – once UNRWA’s largest donor – cutting off funding, the UN agency is now facing a major financial crisis with a budget deficit of $200m.

On Thursday, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi warned that “UNRWA is collapsing”.

“I do not have to make the case for UNRWA. The starving children of Gaza so painfully make that case,” Safadi said.

“The mothers who are watching their infants fade before their eyes make the case for UNRWA. The 600,000 or more students in Gaza, who have not gone to school for two years, make the case for UNRWA.”

The UN organisation provides healthcare, education, humanitarian aid and cash assistance to millions of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory and across the Middle East.

The agency was founded in 1949 to look after the needs of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their towns during the establishment of the state of Israel a year earlier.

Since then, UNRWA has been providing services to displaced Palestinians and their descendants, who remain stateless refugees.

For years, successive Israeli governments have pushed to delegitimise UNRWA, accusing it of distributing anti-Semitic materials and having ties to armed groups.

But critics have argued that efforts to undermine UNRWA are designed to erase the plight of Palestinian refugees who seek to return to their homes in modern-day Israel.

In the wake of the Hamas-led attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, pressure on UNRWA increased.

Israel falsely claimed that a significant number of UNRWA employees participated in the attack, despite providing no credible evidence.

That led several countries to suspend funding for the agency. While many subsequently restored the aid to UNRWA, the US has not.

At Thursday’s meeting, which aimed to rally international support for UNRWA, Safadi explained that the agency had been facing a “political assassination campaign” long before October 2023.

He also paid tribute to the sacrifices of UNRWA staff members, hundreds of whom have been killed since Israel’s war on Gaza began.

“And yet, UNRWA persists. It perseveres,” the Jordanian diplomat said.

“UNRWA staff, who bury their kin, leave and try to give help to others in need in Gaza. That’s why we must save. That’s why we say UNRWA is indispensable. Its role is irreplaceable.”

For his part, Brazil’s Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira decried the push to discredit UNRWA.

“Legal restrictions on UNRWA operations and the closure of UNRWA offices and facilities in East Jerusalem are part of a troubling pattern of obstruction and violence carried out by the Israeli government,” he said.

“Equally concerning are attempts to delegitimise UNRWA through disinformation campaigns, defamation, legal harassment [and] initiatives aimed at replacing the agency with other humanitarian actors in Gaza with mechanisms that militarise aid distribution.”

In recent months, Israel has passed laws to ban the agency from the country and prohibit contact with it.

That, in turn, has hampered UNRWA’s operations in occupied East Jerusalem, which has been annexed by Israel.

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares announced his country will provide 10 million euros ($11.66m) to the agency, bringing the sum that Madrid has donated to UNRWA since the start of the war to about 60 million euros ($70m).

“The needs are immense, and we need to stand by the agency and provide the financial support that it requires to operate,” Albares said.

He added that countries that do not like the UNRWA works should push for the establishment of a Palestinian state that would take on UNRWA’s tasks and take care of its own people.

UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said that, despite the dire situation on the ground in Gaza, the agency remains operational in the territory.

“We still have 12,000 staff,” he said. “They are still – on a daily basis and against all odds – providing health services, doing nutritional screening for the children, ensuring access to clean water, managing shelters, [and] providing – whenever it is possible – some psychosocial support to the children.”

Scotland’s former First Minister Humza Yousaf and his wife say their relatives in Gaza, including a baby, are being deliberately starved. In an Instagram video, the couple plead for borders to open and aid to reach Palestinians.

Adolfo Macias, who was recaptured in June after escaping from a prison last year, will appear in a New York state court on Monday.

Ecuadorean gang leader Adolfo Macias Villamar, also known as “Fito”, is set to appear in a federal court in the United States, where he will plead not guilty to international charges of drug and weapons trafficking, his lawyer says.

The Ecuadorean government on Sunday extradited the notorious drug trafficker, a month after he was recaptured following a 2024 escape from a maximum-security penitentiary, the country’s prison authority said.

Macias, the leader of the Los Choneros gang, was serving a 34-year sentence at a prison in Guayaquil for a slew of crimes, including drug trafficking, organised crime, and murder.

The flight transporting Macias landed in New York state on Sunday night, the report said. His lawyer told the Reuters news agency that Macias “will plead not guilty” before the Brooklyn federal court on Monday.

Details of the handover to the US government and the extradition were not specified. The US government has yet to issue an official statement following the extradition.

The US Attorney’s Office had filed charges in April against Macias on suspicion of cocaine distribution, conspiracy and firearms violations, including weapons smuggling.

The former taxi driver turned crime boss agreed in a Quito court last week to be extradited to the US to face the charges.

He is the first Ecuadorean extradited by his country since a new measure was written into law last year, after a referendum in which President Daniel Noboa sought the approval of moves to boost his war on criminal gangs.

Ecuador, once a peaceful haven between the world’s two top cocaine exporters, Colombia and Peru, has seen violence erupt in recent years as rival gangs with ties to Mexican and Colombian cartels vie for control.

Cult following

Soon after Macias escaped from prison in January 2024, Noboa declared Ecuador to be in a state of “internal armed conflict” and ordered the military and tanks into the streets to “neutralise” the gangs. The move has been criticised by human rights organisations.

As a drug lord, Macias cultivated a cult status among fellow gang members and the public.

While behind bars in 2023, he released a video addressed to “the Ecuadorian people” while flanked by armed men. He also threw parties in prison, where he had access to everything from liquor to roosters for cockfighting matches.

Macias’s Los Choneros has ties to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, Colombia’s Gulf Clan, which is considered the world’s largest cocaine exporter, as well as Balkan mafias, according to the Ecuadorian Organised Crime Observatory.

His escape from prison prompted widespread violence and a massive military and police recapture operation, including government “wanted” posters offering $1m for information leading to his arrest.

On June 25, Macias was found hiding in a bunker concealed under floor tiles in a luxury home in the fishing port of Manta, the centre of operations for Los Choneros. Noboa declared he would be extradited, “the sooner the better”.

“We will gladly send him and let him answer to the North American law,” Noboa told CNN at the time.

More than 70 percent of all cocaine produced in the world now passes through Ecuador’s ports, according to government data. In 2024, the country seized a record 294 tonnes of drugs, mainly cocaine.

Watching the president of France and the prime minister close up was to see two men under the cosh, behind in the opinion polls and fighting for what they see as the essence of their political creed.

It boils down to this – how do Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron make the case for what they see as the virtues of patience, nuance, subtleties and trade-offs in an era of growing impatience at the perceived repeated failures of those in high office?

There were just two lecterns and two speakers at the news conference the leaders hosted, but two other parties hovered in the air.

Reform UK and National Rally, the party of Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen, were never mentioned explicitly. Nor were their leaders. But they were repeatedly mentioned implicitly.

The two parties on either side of the Channel are not the same, but they have the same capacity to frighten the life out of those in power now.

They do it with an anti-establishment zeal, a knack of communicating in plain language and at a time of disillusionment with the traditional political classes. Quite the combination.

“Whilst we have been working hard to get a returns agreement, others have been simply taking pictures of the problem,” the prime minister told us.

Whoever could he possibly have been thinking of?

“That is where the politics is. We have to show that pragmatic politics is the way to deliver the results that matter for both of our peoples,” he added, to ensure people weren’t seduced by what he called “the politics of easy answers”.

Reform leader Nigel Farage had spent the morning on a boat in the English Channel in the company of a camera from GB News and regards this new deal between Paris and London as a humiliation for the UK.

He says the UK should abandon the European Convention on Human Rights and makes a wider argument that the country can escape the funk many feel it is trapped in by embracing a party willing to be unorthodox, noisy and pick a few fights. Why not, after the last few years, goes the argument.

President Macron, confronting similar arguments back home from National Rally, made similar arguments to the prime minister.

There was a need, the president argued, to recognise “the complexity of the world” and to avoid what he saw as the “temptation” for some of those he described as “populists”.

As I wrote here the other day, this is the latest evidence we are seeing of the prime minister’s shifting argument – a sharpening public critique of Farage and what Sir Keir believes will be the choice at the next election: one of the two of them in Downing Street.

And an outsized part of the argument between the two of them, today and in the coming years, will be over small boat crossings.

New polling for Portland Communications suggests 26% of Labour’s voters in last year’s general election who have since switched to Reform would be much more likely to come back to Labour if the number of small boat crossings fell.

The same polling suggests that eight out of ten Reform-leaning voters say that after one year, Labour has had enough time to improve things across the piece.

And nearly half of all voters see Nigel Farage as the leader who most represents change.

This is an insight into the challenge and, potentially, opportunity for the prime minister.

Hoping for patience in an era of the opposite, but arguing his opponent is offering a false promise.

Hoping the levers of government can, in time, deliver. Let’s see.

One final thought.

On two separate occasions this week I have spoken privately to senior figures in both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, who, unprompted, offered near identical reflections about how the next few years may pan out.

It won’t surprise you that both the people I spoke to don’t want to see Reform UK win a general election.

Both acknowledged that it was a real possibility, but both had a deep worry beyond that.

They both reflected that many in the electorate concluded last year that the Conservatives had failed and many in the electorate are concluding this year, or may soon conclude, that Labour are failing too.

Reform could deliver in a way its predecessors never managed.

But what happens, pondered the two people I spoke to, if Nigel Farage was to win and he too was subsequently deemed to have failed?

Where, they wonder, and in what political direction would the country turn in next?

ISLAMABAD — Afghans who worked for the U.S. during its war against the Taliban urged President Trump on Thursday to exempt them from a travel ban that could lead to them being deported to Afghanistan, where they say they will face persecution.

Their appeal came hours after Trump announced a U.S. entry ban on citizens from 12 countries, including Afghanistan.

It affects thousands of Afghans who fled Taliban rule and had been approved for resettlement through a U.S. program assisting people at risk due to their work with the American government, media organizations, and humanitarian groups. But Trump suspended that program in January, leaving Afghans stranded in several locations, including Pakistan and Qatar.

Pakistan, meanwhile, has been deporting foreigners it says are living in the country illegally, mostly Afghan, adding to the refugees’ sense of peril.

“This is heartbreaking and sad news,” said one Afghan, who worked closely with U.S. agencies before the Taliban returned to power in 2021. He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue, fearing Taliban reprisals and potential arrest by Pakistani authorities.

He said the travel ban on an estimated 20,000 Afghans in Pakistan could encourage the government to begin deporting Afghans awaiting resettlement in the U.S. “President Trump has shattered hopes,” he told the Associated Press.

He said his life would be at risk if he returned to Afghanistan with his family because he previously worked for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on public awareness campaigns promoting education.

“You know the Taliban are against the education of girls. America has the right to shape its immigration policy, but it should not abandon those who stood with it, risked their life, and who were promised a good future.”

Another Afghan, Khalid Khan, said the new restrictions could expose him and thousands of others to arrest in Pakistan.

He said police had previously left him and his family alone at the request of the U.S. Embassy. “I worked for the U.S. military for eight years, and I feel abandoned. Every month, Trump is making a new rule,” said Khan. He fled to Pakistan three years ago.

“I don’t know what to say. Returning to Afghanistan will jeopardize my daughter’s education. You know the Taliban have banned girls from attending school beyond sixth grade. My daughter will remain uneducated if we return.”

He said it no longer mattered whether people spoke out against Trump’s policies.

“So long as Trump is there, we are nowhere. I have left all of my matters to Allah.”

There was no immediate comment on the travel ban from the Taliban-run government.

Pakistan previously said it was working with host countries to resettle Afghans. Nobody was available to comment on Trump’s latest executive order.

Ahmed writes for the Associated Press.