United Nations

The United Nations says new US sanctions against members of the International Criminal Court will undermine justice. In announcing the measures, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the ICC a ‘national security threat’ for its efforts to arrest Israeli leaders over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

On a recent evening in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, an imam named Ibrahima Diane explained to a group of men why they ought to be more involved in household chores.

“The prophet himself says that a man who does not help to support his wife and children is not a good Muslim,” said the 53-year-old, as he described bathing his baby and assisting his wife with other duties.

Some of the men chuckled, not entirely convinced, while others applauded.

Diane was participating in a “school for husbands”, a United Nations-backed initiative in which respected male community members learn about “positive masculinity” in relation to health and social issues, and promote these concepts within their communities.

In Senegal, as in many other West African countries with large rural or conservative populations, men often have the final say in major household decisions, including those related to health.

Women may require their husbands’ permission for life-changing decisions, such as accessing family planning or other reproductive health services, as well as hospital deliveries or prenatal care.

After attending the school for husbands, Diane regularly delivers sermons during Friday prayers, in which he discusses issues around gender and reproductive health, from gender-based violence to combating stigma surrounding HIV.

“Many women appreciate my sermons,” he said. “They say their husbands’ behaviour has changed since attending them.” He added that some men have told him the sermons inspired them to become more caring husbands and fathers.

The programme was launched in Senegal in 2011, but in recent years has attracted the attention of the Ministry of Women, Family, Gender and Child Protection, which regards it as an effective strategy for combatting maternal and infant mortality.

“Without men’s involvement, attitudes towards maternal health will not change,” said Aida Diouf, a 54-year-old female health worker who collaborates with the programme. Many husbands prefer their wives not to be treated by male health workers, she explained.

Discussions for men have also focused on girls’ rights, equality, and the harmful effects of female genital mutilation.

The programme now operates at least 20 schools throughout Senegal, and more than 300 men have been trained.

In some communities, men who once enforced patriarchal norms now promote gender equality, a shift which has led to a reduction in the number of forced marriages and greater acceptance of family planning, according to Senegal’s Ministry of Gender.

Men join the groups after being recruited based on trust, leadership and commitment. Candidates must be married, respected locally, and supportive of women’s health and rights.

After training, the men serve as peer educators, visiting homes and hosting informal discussions.

Although maternal and infant deaths in Senegal have declined over the past decade, experts say there is still much progress to be made. The country recorded 237 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023, and 21 newborns out of every 1,000 died within their first month. The UN’s global target is to reduce maternal deaths to 70 per 100,000 live births and newborn deaths to under 12 per 1,000 by 2030.

A key problem is that many women have continued to give birth at home, said El Hadj Malick, one of the programme’s coordinators.

“By educating men about the importance of supporting their wives during pregnancy, taking them to hospital and helping with domestic work at home, you are protecting people’s health,” Malick said.

He noted that he still encounters difficulty in changing attitudes on some issues.

“But when we focus on women’s right to be healthy, it gives a human face to the concept and it becomes universal,” Malick said.

The highest number of attacks on aid workers was in Palestinian territory, followed by Sudan, the UN says.

United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher has issued a “shameful indictment of international inaction and apathy” as he has shared statistics on the killing of 383 aid workers last year worldwide, nearly half in Gaza.

Marking World Humanitarian Day on Tuesday, Fletcher said the killings rose by 31 percent from the year before, “driven by the relentless conflicts in Gaza, where 181 humanitarian workers were killed, and in Sudan, where 60 lost their lives”.

“Even one attack against a humanitarian colleague is an attack on all of us and on the people we serve,” Fletcher said. “Attacks on this scale with zero accountability are a shameful indictment of international inaction and apathy.”

The UN said most of those killed were local staff and were either attacked in the line of duty or in their homes.

“As the humanitarian community, we demand – again – that those with power and influence act for humanity, protect civilians and aid workers and hold perpetrators to account,” said Fletcher, who is the UN’s undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator.

This year’s toll

The Aid Worker Security Database, which has compiled UN reports since 1997, said the number of killings rose from 293 in 2023.

Provisional figures from the database for this year show 265 aid workers have been killed as of August 14.

One of the deadliest attacks this year took place in the southern Gaza city of Rafah when Israeli troops opened fire before dawn on March 23, killing 15 medics and emergency responders travelling in clearly marked vehicles.

The Israeli army drove bulldozers over the bodies and the emergency vehicles and buried them in a mass grave. UN and rescue workers were able to reach the site only a week later.

The UN reiterated that attacks on aid workers and their operations violate international humanitarian law and damage the lifelines sustaining millions of people trapped in war and disaster zones.

“Violence against aid workers is not inevitable. It must end,” Fletcher said.

Elsewhere

Lebanon, which Israel battered in a war with Hezbollah last year, saw 20 aid workers killed, compared with none in 2023.

Ethiopia and Syria each had 14 killings, about double their numbers in 2023, and Ukraine had 13 aid workers killed in 2024, up from six in 2023, according to the database.

Meanwhile, the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) said it verified more than 800 attacks on healthcare in 16 territories so far this year with more than 1,110 health workers and patients killed and hundreds injured.

“Each attack inflicts lasting harm, deprives entire communities of lifesaving care when they need it the most, endangers healthcare providers and weakens already strained health systems,” the WHO said.

World Humanitarian Day marks the day in 2003 when UN rights chief Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 other humanitarians were killed in a bombing of UN headquarters in Iraq’s capital, Baghdad.

MONUSCO condemns the attacks by the ADF ‘in the strongest possible terms’, the mission’s spokesperson says.

Rebels backed by ISIL (ISIS) have killed at least 52 civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo this month, according to the United Nations peacekeeping mission (MONUSCO) in the country, as both the DRC army and Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group accuse each other of violating a recently reached US-mediated ceasefire deal.

Attacks by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) targeted the Beni and Lubero territories of the eastern North Kivu province between August 9 and 16, MONUSCO said on Monday, warning that the death toll could rise further.

The renewed violence comes as a separate conflict between the DRC army and the M23 group continues to simmer in the east of the country, despite a series of peace treaties signed in recent months. The government and M23 had agreed to sign a permanent peace deal by August 18, but no agreement was announced on Monday.

The latest ADF “violence was accompanied by kidnappings, looting, the burning of houses, vehicles, and motorcycles, as well as the destruction of property belonging to populations already facing a precarious humanitarian situation,” MONUSCO said. It condemned the attacks “in the strongest possible terms”, the mission’s spokesperson said.

The ADF is among several militias wrangling over land and resources in the DRC’s mineral-rich east.

Lieutenant Elongo Kyondwa Marc, a regional Congolese army spokesperson, said the ADF was taking revenge on civilians after suffering defeats by Congolese forces.

“When they arrived, they first woke the residents, gathered them in one place, tied them up with ropes, and then began to massacre them with machetes and hoes,” Macaire Sivikunula, chief of Lubero’s Bapere sector, told the Reuters news agency over the weekend.

After a relative lull in recent months, authorities said the group killed nearly 40 people in Komanda city, Ituri province, last month, when it stormed a Catholic church during a vigil and fired on worshippers, including many women and children.

The ADF, an armed group formed by former Ugandan rebels in the 1990s after discontent with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, has killed thousands of civilians and increased looting and killings in the northeastern DRC.

In 2002, following military assaults by Ugandan forces, the group moved its activities to neighbouring DRC. In 2019, it pledged allegiance to ISIL.

Among the 52 victims so far this month, at least nine were killed overnight from Saturday to Sunday in an attack on the town of Oicha, in North Kivu, the AFP news agency learned from security and local sources.

A few days earlier, the ADF had already killed at least 40 people in several towns in the Bapere sector, also in North Kivu province, according to local and security sources.

In response to the renewed attacks, MONUSCO said it had strengthened its military presence in several sectors and allowed several hundred civilians to take refuge in its base.

At the end of 2021, Kampala and Kinshasa launched a joint military operation against the ADF, dubbed “Shujaa”, so far without succeeding in putting an end to their attacks.

A total of 22,000 cases registered in province in 2023; in first five months of 2024, figure had already reached 17,000.

Healthcare providers in the war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) treated more than 17,000 victims of sexual violence over just five months last year, according to a United Nations report.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s annual report on conflict-related sexual violence, released on Thursday, said the cases were registered in the province of North Kivu between January and May last year, as fighting between Congolese forces and Rwanda-backed M23 rebels intensified.

“Many survivors sought care after violent sexual attacks, including penetration with objects, perpetrated by multiple perpetrators,” said the report, which charted crimes like rape, gang rape and sexual slavery.

The conflict, which has killed thousands this year alone and displaced millions, is still ongoing despite a Qatar-mediated agreement between DRC and M23 last month that was supposed to pave the way to a ceasefire, running parallel to United States efforts to broker peace between Kinshasa and Kigali.

Last year’s figure marked a continued surge in sexual violence as the Rwanda-backed M23 rampaged through the east, with a total of 22,000 cases registered throughout 2023. That figure was more than double the previous year’s tally.

In 2023, the spike in violence occurred as the conflict spilled over from North Kivu into South Kivu, forcing UN peacekeeping mission MONUSCO to withdraw from the latter.

The report said that MONUSCO’s operations narrowed, “owing to military operations and widespread insecurity”. The mission had documented 823 cases of sexual violence in 2024, affecting 416 women, 391 girls, seven boys and nine men.

The UN said that 198 of last year’s cases were perpetrated by DRC “state actors”, including the army. It found that “M23 elements”, which “continued to receive instructions and support from the Rwanda Defence Force”, were implicated in 152 cases.

According to the report, survivors reported that they were exposed to the threat of sexual violence while searching for food in the fields and areas around displacement sites.

Many displaced women had resorted to prostitution to survive, “highlighting the nexus between food insecurity and sexual violence”.

Denis Mukwege, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for his work combating sexual violence in DRC, told The Times newspaper this year: “When you have people raping with complete immunity – and think they can go on and on without any consequence, nothing will change.”

Guterres’s report charted violations in 21 countries, with the highest numbers recorded in DRC, the Central African Republic, Haiti, Somalia and South Sudan.

While women and girls made up 92 percent of victims, men and boys were also targeted.

Protesters in New York City rallied outside The New York Times over the killing of Al Jazeera journalists including Anas al-Sharif in a targeted Israeli air attack in Gaza, accusing US media of shielding Israel from genocide allegations. Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo was there.

Violence remains widespread in Haiti, where powerful armed gangs have surged amid political and economic chaos.

The United Nations has said that efforts to address widespread economic and political dysfunction and debilitating violence in Haiti are falling far short, with a UN response plan receiving the lowest funding of any in the world.

In a briefing on Tuesday, coordinator Ulrika Richardson said that the UN hopes to raise more than $900m for Haiti this year, but that effort is just 9.2 percent funded.

“We have tools, but the response from the international community is just not at par with the gravity on the ground,” Richardson said.

The lacklustre funding numbers underscore concerns over flagging international efforts to assist the Caribbean island nation, which is reeling from violence as powerful armed gangs jostle for control of territory and resources amid political and economic instability.

Richardson said that a $2.63bn appeal for Ukraine is 38 percent funded and that a $4bn appeal for the occupied Palestinian territories is 22 percent funded, by comparison.

More than 1.3 million people have been displaced by the violence in Haiti, and more than 3,100 people have been killed this year.

Armed gangs, some with links to powerful political and economic figures, have taken control of large swathes of the capital of Port-au-Prince since the assassination of former president Jovenel Moise in July 2021.

The UN has said that cutting off the supply of arms pouring into the country, largely smuggled from the US state of Florida, is a key step towards staunching the violence, along with applying sanctions on networks connected to the gangs.

“Haiti can quickly spiral up again, but the violence needs to end,” said Richardson.

But international efforts to address the fighting thus far have little to show, and some Haitians are sceptical of such efforts given a long history of destructive interventions by outside powers.

A UN-backed policing mission, staffed largely by Kenyan security officers, has failed to bring stability to the country or tackle the gangs. Haiti’s government also declared a three-month state of emergency earlier this month, covering the West, Centre and Artibonite departments of the country.

Investigators name senior figures among those responsible for alleged abuses at detention facilities.

United Nations investigators say they have gathered evidence of systematic torture in Myanmar’s detention facilities, identifying senior figures among those responsible.

The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), set up in 2018 to examine potential breaches of international law, said on Tuesday that detainees had endured beatings, electric shocks, strangulation and fingernail removal with pliers.

“We have uncovered significant evidence, including eyewitness testimony, showing systematic torture in Myanmar detention facilities,” Nicholas Koumjian, head of the mechanism, said in a statement accompanying its 16-page report.

The UN team said some prisoners died as a result of the torture.

It also documented the abuse of children, often detained unlawfully as proxies for their missing parents.

According to the report, the UN team has made more than two dozen formal requests for information and access to the country, all of which have gone unanswered. Myanmar’s military authorities did not respond to media requests for comment.

The military has repeatedly denied committing atrocities, saying it is maintaining peace and security while blaming “terrorists” for unrest.

The findings cover a year that ended on June 30 and draw on information from more than 1,300 sources, including hundreds of witness accounts, forensic analysis, photographs and documents.

The IIMM said it identified high-ranking commanders among the perpetrators but declined to name them to avoid alerting those under investigation.

The report also found that both government forces and armed opposition groups had committed summary executions. Officials from neither side of Myanmar’s conflict were available to comment.

The latest turmoil in Myanmar began when a 2021 military coup ousted an elected civilian government, sparking a nationwide conflict. The UN estimates tens of thousands of people have been detained in efforts to crush dissent and bolster the military’s ranks.

Last month, the leader of the military government, Min Aung Hlaing, ended a four-year state of emergency and appointed himself acting president before planned elections.

The IIMM’s mandate covers abuses in Myanmar dating back to 2011, including the military’s 2017 campaign against the mostly Muslim Rohingya, which forced hundreds of thousands of members of the ethnic minority to flee to Bangladesh, and postcoup atrocities against multiple communities.

The IIMM is also assisting international legal proceedings, including cases in Britain. However, the report warned that budget cuts at the UN could undermine its work.

“These financial pressures threaten the Mechanism’s ability to sustain its critical work and to continue supporting international and national justice efforts,” it said.

The WFP says aid is being cut by 60 percent for the most vulnerable groups, including pregnant women and disabled people.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has said it will need to drastically cut rations to refugees in Kenya due to reductions in global aid, including major funding cuts from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Residents of the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps were beginning to feel the impact of food aid cuts on Monday as the WFP implemented a new assistance system there in which certain groups are prioritised over others.

The WFP said aid is being cut by 60 percent for the most vulnerable groups, including pregnant women and disabled people, and by 80 percent for refugees with some kind of income.

The two camps host nearly 800,000 people fleeing conflict and drought in Somalia and South Sudan, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“WFP’s operations supporting refugees in Kenya are under immense strain,” Baimankay Sankoh, WFP’s deputy country director in Kenya, said in May. “With available resources stretched to their limits, we have had to make the difficult decision to again reduce food assistance. This will have a serious impact on vulnerable refugees, increasing the risk of hunger and malnutrition.”

“There has been a lot of tension in the last couple of weeks or so,” Al Jazeera’s Catherine Soi said, reporting from Kakuma.

“People were very angry about what WFP is calling the priority food distribution, where some people will not get food at all and others are going to get a small fraction of the food.”

These tensions boiled over, triggering protests last week, which left one person dead and several others injured, said Soi, adding that WFP officials she spoke with said the aid cuts from organisations like USAID meant they have had to make “very difficult decisions about who gets to eat and who doesn’t”.

WFP worker Thomas Chica explained to Soi that the new system was rolled out after assessments were conducted by WFP and its partners.

Refugees are now assessed based on their needs, rather than their status, said Chica. “We need to look at them separately and differently and see how best we can channel the system so that it provides.”

The impact of these cuts is severe amid concerns over malnutrition. The Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) rate among refugee children and pregnant or breastfeeding women in Kenya is above 13 percent. A GAM rate over 10 percent is classed as a nutrition emergency.

“Already the food that is being issued is quite low, 40 percent of the recommended ration, and this is being shared by a bigger chunk of the population,” Chica said, adding that stocks will therefore not last as long as hoped.

This reduction took effect in February and is based on a daily recommended intake of 2,100kcal.

With its current resources dating from last year, WFP will only be able to provide assistance until December or January, said Chica.

WFP said in May that $44m was required to provide full rations and restore cash assistance for all refugees just through August.

The IAEA is yet to make a statement about the meeting, which will not include a visit to Iranian nuclear sites.

Iran’s talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be “technical” and “complicated”, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said, ahead of a visit by the United Nations nuclear watchdog for the first time since Tehran cut ties with it last month in the wake of the June conflict triggered by Israeli strikes.

Esmaeil Baghaei, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told reporters on Monday that a meeting may be organised with Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi during the IAEA’s visit, “but it is a bit soon to predict what the talks will result since these are technical talks, complicated talks”.

The IAEA’s visit marks the first to Iran since President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered the country on July 3 to suspend its cooperation with the nuclear watchdog after an intensive 12-day war with Israel. The conflict also saw the United States launch massive strikes on Israel’s behalf against key Iranian nuclear sites.

Pezeshkian told Al Jazeera in an interview last month that his country is prepared for any future war Israel might wage against it, adding that he was not optimistic about the ceasefire between the countries. He confirmed that Tehran is committed to continuing its nuclear programme for peaceful purposes.

He added that Israel’s strikes, which assassinated leading military figures and nuclear scientists, damaged nuclear facilities and killed hundreds of civilians, had sought to “eliminate” Iran’s hierarchy, but “completely failed to do so”.

Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi told Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency on Monday that Massimo Aparo, the IAEA’s deputy director general and head of safeguards, had left Iran. Aparo met with an Iranian delegation, which included officials from the Foreign Ministry and the IAEA, to discuss “the method of interaction between the agency and Iran”.

Gharibabadi said they decided to continue consultations in the future, without providing further details.

The IAEA did not immediately issue a statement about Aparo’s visit, which will not include any planned access to Iranian nuclear sites.

Relations between the IAEA and Iran deteriorated after the watchdog’s board said on June 12 that Iran had breached its non-proliferation obligations, a day before Israel’s air strikes over Iran, which sparked the conflict.

Baghaei, meanwhile, criticised the IAEA’s lack of response to the Israeli strikes.

“Peaceful facilities of a country that was under 24-hour monitoring were the target of strikes, and the agency refrained from showing a wise and rational reaction and did not condemn it as it was required,” he said.

Araghchi had previously said that cooperation with the agency, which will now require approval by Iran’s highest security body, the Supreme National Security Council, would be about redefining how both sides cooperate. The decision will likely further limit inspectors’ ability to track Tehran’s programme that had been enriching uranium to near weapons-grade levels.

Iran has had limited IAEA inspections in the past, in negotiations with the West, and it is unclear how soon talks between Tehran and Washington for a deal over its nuclear programme will resume, if at all.

US intelligence agencies and the IAEA assessed that Iran last had an organised nuclear weapons programme in 2003. Although Tehran had been enriching uranium up to 60 percent, this is still some way from the weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has condemned Israel’s assassination of five Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza. Guterres is demanding an independent investigation into the killings, his spokesperson said on Monday.

A senior United Nations official has warned the UN Security Council (UNSC) that Israel’s plan to seize Gaza City risked “another calamity” in the Gaza Strip with far-reaching consequences, as five more people in Gaza reportedly died from starvation – bringing the overall toll to 217, including 100 children.

UN Assistant Secretary-General for Europe, Central Asia and the Americas Miroslav Jenca on Sunday told an emergency weekend meeting that if implemented, the plan could result in the displacement of all civilians from Gaza City by October 7, 2025, affecting some 800,000 people, many of them already previously displaced.

This “will likely trigger another calamity in Gaza, reverberating across the region and causing further forced displacement, killings and destruction, compounding the unbearable suffering of the population,” Jenca said.

Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour told the UNSC that Israel was aiming for “the destruction of the Palestinian people through forced transfer and massacres to facilitate its annexation of our land”.

“What will force Israel to change course is our ability to transform justified condemnation into just actions … History will judge us all,” he said.

Foreign powers, including some of Israel’s allies, have slammed Israel’s plan. The United Kingdom, a close ally of Israel which nonetheless pushed for an emergency meeting on the crisis, warned the Israeli plan risked prolonging the conflict.

“It will only deepen the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This is not a path to resolution. It is a path to more bloodshed,” the British Deputy Ambassador to the UN James Kariuki said.

Another staunch Israel ally, Germany, said it could not actively support Israel’s plan to expand military operations in Gaza and displace of Palestinians.

“Where are these people supposed to go?” Chancellor Friedrich Merz asked in an interview with public broadcaster ARD. “We can’t do that, we won’t do that, and I will not do that.”

France’s Deputy Permanent UN Representative Jay Dharmadhikari condemned “in the strongest possible terms” the plan, which he said would have “dramatic humanitarian consequences” for civilians already “living in horrifying conditions”.

“The images of children dying of hunger or civilians being targeted as they tried to find food are unbearable,” Dharmadhikari said, urging Israel to comply with international humanitarian law.

The UK, Denmark, France, Greece and Slovenia issued a joint statement asking Israel “to urgently reverse this decision and not to implement” the plan, saying it violates international law.

In a separate statement, the foreign ministers of Spain, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Portugal and Slovenia warned that Israel seizing Gaza City would be “a major obstacle to implementing the two-state solution, the only path towards a comprehensive, just and lasting peace”.

Israel to ‘finish the job’ in Gaza

Despite the international backlash and rumours of dissent from Israeli military top brass, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has remained defiant over the plan to seize Gaza’s largest urban centre, which was approved by Israel’s security cabinet on Friday.

“The timeline that we set for the action is fairly quickly,” Netanyahu told a news conference in Jerusalem on Sunday. “I don’t want to talk about exact timetables, but we’re talking in terms of a fairly short timetable because we want to bring the war to an end.”

He said Israel had “no choice but to finish the job and complete the defeat of Hamas”, given the group’s refusal to lay down its arms. Hamas said it would not disarm unless an independent Palestinian state was established.

Netanyahu said the military had been given the green light to “dismantle” what he described as two remaining Hamas strongholds: Gaza City in the north and al-Mawasi further to the south.

“This is the best way to end the war and the best way to end it speedily,” he said. “We will do so by first enabling the civilian population to safely leave the combat areas to designated safe zones.”

While the prime minister stressed that these “safe zones” would be given “ample food, water, and medical care”, guards at the controversial Israel- and United States-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), purportedly established to deliver aid to the starving Palestinian population, have routinely opened fire on the aid seekers, killing dozens at a time.

Asked about the growing criticism targeting his cabinet’s decision, Netanyahu said the country was prepared to fight alone. “We will win the war, with or without the support of others,” he said.

Hamas released a statement responding to Netanyahu’s claim that Israel did not intend to occupy Gaza but “liberate” it from the Palestinian group.

The group said the use of the term “liberation” was an attempt to distort the reality of occupation “that will not cover up the crime of extermination, killing, and systematic destruction for more than 22 months”.

Hamas added that it constituted a “desperate attempt to exonerate” Israel after it killed more than 61,400 Palestinians, including more than 18,000 children.

Israel’s Deputy Ambassador to the UN Jonathan Miller fired back at Hamas at the UNSC session, saying the group was “exploiting” the captives and Gaza’s population to “maintain its position, benefiting from attempts to pressure Israel and from the willingness of some countries to recognise a Palestinian state”.

The United States, a veto-wielding permanent member of the UNSC, has so far shielded its staunch ally from any practical measures of UN censure. Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister spoke with US President Donald Trump about its plan, without elaborating on the outcome of the conversation.

Speaking to Fox News, the US vice president said Washington neither endorsed nor rejected Israel’s decision to seize Gaza City and the entire Gaza Strip at large. “Obviously, there are a lot of downsides and upsides”, JD Vance said.

Netanyahu’s plan also received domestic criticism, with opposition leader Yair Lapid saying its implementation would mean that “the hostages will die, soldiers will die, the economy will collapse and our international standing will crash.”

Israel’s Channel 12 reported it will cost billions of dollars within several months, increasing the country’s deficit by 2 percent and leading to widespread budget cuts in areas such as healthcare, education, and welfare.

‘Unacceptable catastrophe’

The director of the coordination division at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that the “unacceptable catastrophe” unfolding in Gaza must be brought to an end as he addressed the UN Security Council via videolink on Sunday.

Ramesh Rajasingham expressed concern over “the prolonged conflict, the reports of atrocities and further human toll that is likely to unfold following the government of Israel’s decision to expand military operations in Gaza”.

Israel has blocked all but a trickle of aid from entering Gaza for months and has prevented UN workers from accessing and distributing lifesaving assistance. “The UN has a plan and the systems in place to respond. We’ve said this before, and we will say it again and again: Let us work,” Rajasingham said.

The Government Media Office in Gaza said only 1,210 aid trucks have entered Gaza over the past 14 days. Officials said this represents just 14 percent of the territory’s minimum actual needs of 8,400 trucks.

Netanyahu acknowledged there have been issues of “deprivation” in Gaza, but denied that Israel has a “starvation policy”. Human Rights Watch, among other international organisations, has repeatedly called Israel’s use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war a “war crime”.

Ahmad Alhendawi, Save the Children International’s director for the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe, told Al Jazeera that his team on the ground was seeing an “exponential increase” in the number of malnutrition cases, with effects that can “span generations”.

“This is not one event. This is not the absence of two or three meals. This is an accumulation of months [of deprivation],” he said. “We can help alleviate the suffering of children in Gaza, but we cannot do that if the government of Israel continues to impose all its limitations.”

Varsen Aghabekian Shahin says international community must take concrete steps to end Israeli impunity for abuses.

The international community must “shoulder its responsibility” and take action against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian foreign affairs minister has told Al Jazeera before an emergency United Nations Security Council session.

In an interview on Saturday, Varsen Aghabekian Shahin said the 15-member council must uphold international law when it convenes at UN headquarters in New York on Sunday to discuss the situation in the Gaza Strip.

The meeting was organised in response to Israel’s newly announced plan to seize Gaza City, which has drawn widespread condemnation from world leaders.

“I expect that the international community stands for international law and international humanitarian law,” Aghabekian Shahin told Al Jazeera.

“What has been going in Palestine for the last 22 months is nothing but a genocide, and it’s part and parcel of Israel’s expansionist ideology that wants to take over the entirety of the occupied State of Palestine.”

The Israeli security cabinet approved plans this week to seize Gaza City, forcibly displacing nearly one million Palestinians to concentration zones in the south of the bombarded coastal enclave.

Palestinians have rejected the Israeli push to force them out of the city while human rights groups and the UN have warned that the plan will worsen an already dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and lead to further mass casualties.

Israel has pledged to push ahead with its plans despite the growing criticism, saying that it wants to “free Gaza from Hamas”.

The country’s top global ally, the United States, has not commented directly on the plan to seize Gaza City. But US President Donald Trump suggested earlier this week that he would not block an Israeli push to take over all of Gaza.

Aghabekian Shahin told Al Jazeera that if Trump – whose administration continues to provide unwavering diplomatic and military support to Israel – wants to reach a solution, Palestinian rights must be taken into account.

“There will be no peace in Israel-Palestine, or the region for that matter, or even the world at large, if the rights of the Palestinians are not respected,” she said, noting that this means a Palestinian state must be established.

The minister also slammed recent remarks from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the future governance of Gaza.

In a social media post on Friday, Netanyahu said he wants “a peaceful civilian administration” to be established in the enclave, “one that is not the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas, and not any other terrorist organization”.

But Aghabekian Shahin said it’s up to Palestinians to decide who should govern them.

“The one that has the legal and the political authority on Gaza today is the PLO,” she said, referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“If Gaza wants to come back to the core, which is the entirety of the Palestinian land, then it has to become under the control and governance of the Palestinian Authority, the PLO.”

Aghabekian Shahin also condemned the international community for failing to act as Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have faced a surge in Israeli military and settler attacks in the shadow of the country’s war on Gaza.

“It is the inaction that has emboldened the Israelis, including the settlers, to do whatever they are doing for the last six decades, since day one of the 1967 occupation,” she said.

“The times are very dangerous now, and it’s important that the international community shoulders its responsibility. The impunity with which Israel was happily moving should stop.”

Each year, the world produces about 400 million tonnes of plastic waste – more than the combined weight of all the people on Earth.

Just 9 percent of it is recycled, and one study predicts that global emissions from plastic production could triple by 2050.

Since 2022, the United Nations has been trying to broker a global treaty to deal with plastic waste. But talks keep collapsing, particularly on the issue of introducing a cap on plastic production.

Campaigners blame petrostates whose economies depend on oil – the raw ingredient for plastics – for blocking the treaty negotiations.

This week, the UN is meeting in Switzerland in the latest attempt to reach an agreement. But, even if the delegates find a way to cut the amount of plastic the world makes, it could take years to have a meaningful effect.

In the meantime, institutions like the World Bank are turning to the markets for alternative solutions. One of these is plastic offsetting.

So what is plastic offsetting? Does it work? And what do programmes like this mean for vulnerable communities who depend on plastic waste to make a living?

What is plastic offsetting, and how do credits work?

Plastic credits are based on a similar idea to carbon credits.

With carbon credits, companies that emit greenhouse gases can pay a carbon credit company to have their emissions “cancelled out” by funding reforestation programmes or other projects to help “sink” their carbon output.

For each tonne of CO2 they cancel out, the company gets a carbon credit. This is how an airline can tell customers that their flight is “carbon neutral”.

Plastic credits work on a similar model. The world’s biggest plastic polluters can pay a plastic credit company to collect and re-purpose plastic.

If a polluter pays for one tonne of plastic to be collected, it gets one plastic credit.

If the polluter buys the number of plastic credits equivalent to its annual plastic output, it might be awarded “plastic neutral” or “plastic net zero” status.

Does plastic offsetting work?

Like carbon credits, plastic credits are controversial.

Carbon markets are already worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, with their value set to grow to billions.

But in 2023, SourceMaterial, a nonprofit newsroom, revealed that only a fraction of nearly 100 million carbon credits result in real emissions reductions.

“Companies are making false claims and then they’re convincing customers that they can fly guilt-free or buy carbon-neutral products when they aren’t in any way carbon-neutral,” Barbara Haya, a US carbon trading expert, said at the time.

The same thing could happen with plastics. Analysis by SourceMaterial of the world’s first plastic credit registry, Plastic Credit Exchange (PCX) in the Philippines, found that only 14 percent of PCX credits went towards recycling.

While companies that had bought credits with PCX were getting “plastic neutral” status, most of the plastic was burned as fuel in cement factories, in a method known as “co-processing” that releases thousands of tonnes of CO2 and toxins linked to cancer.

A spokesperson for PCX said at the time that co-processing “reduces reliance on fossil fuels, and is conducted under controlled conditions to minimise emissions”.

Now, the World Bank is also pointing to plastic credits as a solution.

In January last year, the World Bank launched a $100m bond that “provides investors with a financial return” linked to the plastic credits projects backed by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, an industry initiative that supports plastic credit projects, in Ghana and Indonesia.

At the UN talks in December last year, a senior environmental specialist from the World Bank said plastic credits were an “emerging result-based financing tool” which can fund projects that “reduce plastic pollution”.

What do companies think of plastic credits?

Manufacturers, petrostates and the operators of credit projects have all lobbied for market solutions, including plastic credits, at the UN.

Oil giant ExxonMobil and petrochemicals companies LyondellBasell and Dow Chemical are all members of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste in Ghana and Indonesia – both epicentres of plastic pollution that produce plastic domestically and import waste from overseas.

But those companies are also members of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a lobby group that has warned the UN it does “not support production caps or bans”, given the “benefits of plastics”.

What do critics and affected local communities say?

Critics like Anil Verma, a professor of human resource management at the University of Toronto who has studied waste pickers in Brazil, call plastic offsetting a “game of greenwashing”.

Verma argues that offsetting lets polluters claim they are tackling the waste problem without having to cut production – or profit.

Patrick O’Hare, an academic at St Andrews University in Scotland, who has attended all rounds of the UN plastic treaty negotiations, said he has “noticed with concern the increasing prominence given to plastics credits”.

Plastic credits are being promoted in some quarters “despite the lack of proven success stories to date” and “the evident problems with the carbon credit model on which it is based”, he added.

Even some of the world’s biggest companies have distanced themselves from plastic credits.

Nestle, which had previously bought plastic credits, said last year that it does not believe in their effectiveness in their current form.

Coca-Cola and Unilever are also “not convinced”, according to reports, and like Nestle, they back government-mandated “extended producer responsibility” schemes.

Yet the World Bank has plans to expand its support for plastic offsetting, calling it a “win-win with the local communities and ecosystems that benefit from less pollution”.

Some of the poorest people in Ghana eke out a living by collecting plastic waste for recycling.

Johnson Doe, head of a refuse collectors’ group in the capital, Accra, says funds for offsetting would be better spent supporting local waste pickers.

Doe wants his association to be officially recognised and funded, instead of watching investment flow into plastic credits. They’re a “false solution”, he says.

This story was produced in partnership with SourceMaterial 

READ MORE: Ghana’s waste pickers brave mountains of plastic – and big industry

‘It’s important work’

Back at the waste yard, business has died down for the day.

Bamfo and her youngest children, Nkunim, 10, and Josephine, 6, are emptying the last few bottles. She will be in bed by 8pm, rising at midnight for her Bible studies before starting work again at dawn.

Bamfo never thought she would become a waste picker.

She was 19 when she finally gained her school certificate, and by selling oranges, she scraped together enough money for a secretarial course. But she couldn’t afford a typewriter.

While the other girls tapped away at their machines, she drew the keyboard on her exercise book and practiced on that, pressing her fingers into the paper.

Soon, the money ran out. Instead of the office job she dreamed of, she found work breaking stones on a building site.

“At that moment, I see myself – I’m a big loser, and there’s nothing,” says Bamfo, leaning forward on her office chair to keep a watch for any final delivery tricycles. “I see the world is against me.”

Then one morning she woke to find the building site had disappeared overnight, replaced by a dump: Truckloads of water sachets, drinks bottles and nylon wigs.

Her five children lay sleeping. Her husband, as usual, had not come home. To buy cassava to make banku – dumpling stew – she needed money urgently.

A friend had told her that factories in the city would buy plastic waste for a few cedis a kilogramme. It was one of the lowliest jobs there were, involving not only backbreaking labour but stigma and shame.

“If you are a woman doing this waste picking, people think you have no family to care for you,” she says. “They think you are bad. They think you are a witch.”

She came home one day to find her husband had abandoned her. But not before he had called her father to tell him his daughter had become a “vulture”.

Estrangement from her father only compounded the shame. To escape her neighbours’ taunts, Bamfo moved with her children to the other side of the city.

There, she took over her small yard, buying waste from pickers and selling it on to factories and recycling plants. Bit by bit, she built a wooden house. Eventually, she plucked up the courage to phone her father.

“I said, ‘Come and see the work I do. See that it is not something to feel bad about.’”

When he saw the yard and the tricycle teams that had become Bamfo’s business, Nkosoo Waste Management (“nkosoo” is Twi for “progress”), he couldn’t help but be impressed.

“You are not a woman, you are a man,” she recalls him telling her once, half admiring and half accusing. “The heart that you have – even your brother doesn’t have that heart.”

Now she hopes to pass on some of her resilience. King, her supervisor at the yard, slept on a nearby dumpsite as a small child and says Bamfo and her waste business saved him. “I cannot say a bad thing about her. She is my mother.”

As night settles on Accra, the polluting plastic tide has crept a little higher. But Bamfo has, she says, found dignity in the fight to keep it at bay.

“It is important work we do,” she says. “Sometimes I feel very sad and bad about not getting the education I wanted. But we clean the city. I think of that.”

This story was produced in partnership with SourceMaterial

Hiroshima’s mayor, Kazumi Matsui, warns of the dangers of rising global militarism.

Thousands of people have gathered in Hiroshima to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the world’s first wartime use of a nuclear bomb – as survivors, officials and representatives from 120 countries and territories marked the milestone with renewed calls for disarmament.

The western Japanese city was flattened on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped a uranium bomb, codenamed Little Boy. Roughly 78,000 people were killed instantly. Tens of thousands more would die by the end of the year due to burns and radiation exposure.

The attack on Hiroshima, followed three days later by a plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, led to Japan’s surrender on August 15 and the end of the second world war. Hiroshima had been chosen as a target partly because its surrounding mountains were believed by US planners to amplify the bomb’s force.

At Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park on Wednesday, where the bomb detonated almost directly overhead eight decades ago, delegates from a record number of international countries and regions attended the annual memorial.

Reporting from the park, Al Jazeera’s Fadi Salameh said the ceremony unfolded in a similar sequence to those of previous years.

“The ceremony procedure is almost the same throughout the years I’ve been covering it,” Salameh said. “It starts at eight o’clock with the children and people offering flowers and then water to represent helping the victims who survived the atomic bombing at that time.

“Then at exactly 8:15… a moment of silence. After that, the mayor of Hiroshima reads out the declaration of peace in which they call for the abolition of nuclear weapons around the world,” he added.

Schoolchildren from across Japan participated in the “Promise of Peace” – reading statements of hope and remembrance. This year’s ceremony also included a message from the representative of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, urging global peace.

Hiroshima’s mayor, Kazumi Matsui, warned of the dangers of rising global militarism, criticising world leaders who argue that nuclear weapons are necessary for national security.

“Among the world’s political leaders, there is a growing belief that possessing nuclear weapons is unavoidable in order to protect their own countries,” he said, noting that the United States and Russia still hold 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads.

“This situation not only nullifies the lessons the international community has learned from the tragic history of the past, but also seriously undermines the frameworks that have been built for peace-building,” he said.

“To all the leaders around the world: please visit Hiroshima and witness for yourselves the reality of the atomic bombing.”

Many attendees echoed that call. “It feels more and more like history is repeating itself,” 71-year-old Yoshikazu Horie told the Reuters news agency. “Terrible things are happening in Europe … Even in Japan, in Asia, it’s going the same way – it’s very scary. I’ve got grandchildren and I want peace so they can live their lives happily.”

Survivors of the bombings – known as hibakusha – once faced discrimination over unfounded fears of disease and genetic effects. Their numbers have fallen below 100,000 for the first time this year.

Japan maintains a stated commitment to nuclear disarmament, but remains outside the UN treaty banning nuclear weapons.

Gaza faces a grave risk of famine, with one in three people going days without food, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has warned.

UNICEF on Friday urged the international community to act swiftly as conditions continue to deteriorate due to Israel’s genocidal war.

“Today, more than 320,000 young children are at risk of acute malnutrition,” Ted Chaiban, UNICEF’s deputy executive director for humanitarian action and supply operations, said in a statement on Friday following a recent trip to Israel, Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

He said the malnutrition indicator in Gaza has “exceeded the famine threshold”.

“Today, I want to keep the focus on Gaza, because it’s in Gaza where the suffering is most acute and where children are dying at an unprecedented rate,” he said.

“We are at a crossroads, and the choices made now will determine whether tens of thousands of children live or die.”

On Saturday, Atef Abu Khater, a 17-year-old Palestinian, died of malnutrition, a medical source at al-Shifa Hospital told Al Jazeera.

Earlier this week, Khater, who had been in good health before the war in Gaza, was hospitalised in intensive care, according to media reports, which quoted his father as saying he was no longer responding to treatment.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 60,000 Palestinians, more than 18,000 of them children. Many more remain buried under the rubble, most presumed dead.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, the number of deaths from starvation in the territory stands at 162, including 92 children.

‘Engineered Israeli genocidal chaos’

Ahmed al-Najjar, a journalist and resident of Gaza who is sheltering in Khan Younis, says Palestinians in the besieged territory are faced with “tragedy and torment” amid Israeli bombardment, forced starvation and a complete feeling of insecurity.

“With the cats away, the mice will play – except that it’s not just a mouse, but an engineered Israeli genocidal chaos,” he told Al Jazeera, stressing that safety is “nowhere to be found” in Gaza.

“We are not just referring to the fact of constant fear of the Israeli bombs being dropped on our heads, but the fact that there is a total security and power vacuum that leaves us here unsure and uncertain of our own safety,” al-Najjar said.

He described that even walking in the street and going to buy a bag of flour or some other basic necessity makes people feel uncertain whether they will be able to return home safely.

“There is not any sort of presence of police or security forces in the streets; we’ve been seeing the continuous and systematic targeting of the police forces inside these ‘safe zones’ here.”

In March, Israel blocked food aid from entering Gaza. It eased the blockade in late May, after which the controversial Israel- and United States-backed GHF took over aid distribution in Gaza.

But GHF has been accused of grave rights violations and the targeting of civilians. The UN says more than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed trying to get food from the GHF’s aid hubs.

Many have been purposefully shot by Israeli soldiers or US security contractors hired by GHF, according to testimonies from whistleblowers published in the media.

With starvation across the Strip spreading, international outcry over images of emaciated children and increasing reports of hunger-related deaths pressured Israel to let more aid into the Gaza Strip earlier this week.

The Israeli military last week began a daily “tactical pause” of its military operations in parts of Gaza and established new aid corridors.

US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, also travelled to Gaza on Friday to inspect the GHF aid distribution site, together with Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel.

The diplomats “spent over five hours inside Gaza”, Witkoff said in a post on X, accompanied by a photo of himself wearing a protective vest and meeting staff at a distribution site.

He added that the purpose of the trip was to “help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza”.

Meanwhile, several Western and Arab governments began carrying out aid airdrops in Gaza earlier this week, to feed more than two million inhabitants. But aid agencies have said they are deeply sceptical that airdrops could deliver enough food safely to tackle a deepening hunger crisis in Gaza.

“Look, at this stage, every modality needs to be used, every gate, every route, every modality, but airdrops cannot replace the volume and the scale that convoys by road can achieve,” Chaiban said, adding that allowing about 500 humanitarian and commercial aid trucks into Gaza is important.

He also noted that what is happening on the ground is “inhumane” and stressed that “what children in Gaza need from all communities is a sustained ceasefire and a political way forward.”

Cameron Mofid has visited every UN-recognised country and territory on Earth, but two destinations in particular stand out as his top favourites

An audacious explorer who has set foot in every country on Earth before his 26th birthday has shared two surprising favourites from his travels. Cameron Mofid, hailing from San Diego, California, embarked on a daring mission to visit all UN-recognised countries and territories across the globe – a staggering 195 in total – while grappling with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) during the pandemic.

The resolute traveller achieved his remarkable feat in April when he and his travel mates arrived in the enigmatic nation of North Korea, which recently completed the construction of a sprawling new coastal resort.

With nearly 200 countries under his belt, picking out the best might seem a daunting task. Yet, two nations particularly stole Cameron’s affection, despite both being subject to severe travel warnings by the Foreign Office (FCDO). It comes after a warning to Brit tourists planning all-inclusive holidays to Spain.

READ MORE: American tourist slams pretty European town that was nothing like pictures suggestedREAD MORE: ‘I stayed up until 2am to see iconic attraction but it was still horribly busy’

Algeria stood out as his initial top pick, which he described as “unbelievable”. In an interview with CNN, he disclosed: “It’s one of my favourite countries in the whole world. The countries that receive the least amount of tourism are often the ones where you have the best experience, because you feel totally immersed in their culture.”

Cameron also expressed his fondness for Yemen, having ventured through the Middle Eastern country in February 2023. He remarked on the sensation of stepping back in time while meandering its streets, reports the Express.

He elaborated: “To see people dress the same way that they were hundreds if not thousands of years ago. To see people living in mud houses, to see people still using flip phones.”

Algeria, positioned in northern Africa, is largely dominated by the Sahara Desert apart from its northern coastline where most of its population lives. It stands as Africa’s biggest nation.

The nation possesses a diverse historical heritage, having been governed by numerous Arab and Berber ruling families from the 8th to 15th centuries before establishing ties with the Ottoman Empire and later being incorporated into France in 1848.

Regarding travel to Algeria, the FCDO has designated most of the country in green on its platform, suggesting visitors should “see our travel advice before travelling”. Nevertheless, the frontier areas are highlighted with amber and red alerts.

In particular, the FCDO advises against all journeys within a 30km zone of Algeria’s frontiers with Libya, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and certain parts of Tunisia. Additionally, it suggests avoiding all non-essential travel within 30km of the remaining Tunisian frontier.

Meanwhile, Yemen, a comparatively young state positioned at the southern edge of the Arabian Peninsula in Western Asia, borders the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, situated below Saudi Arabia.

From 2011 onwards, Yemen has been consumed by political turmoil and is presently enduring a catastrophic civil conflict that has resulted in more than 150,000 deaths and triggered a humanitarian catastrophe, with 23 million individuals requiring aid.

The Foreign Office has issued a stark warning regarding travel to Yemen, urging against all trips to the nation and pressing those currently there to leave “immediately” in light of the precarious security conditions.

Their report cautions that terrorist attacks are highly likely in Yemen, with a “very high and constant threat” of kidnapping. It underscores that propaganda from Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has explicitly encouraged the kidnapping of Westerners.

Fighting between the armies of Uganda and neighbouring South Sudan, which are longtime allies, erupted this week over demarcations in disputed border regions, leading to the death of at least four soldiers, according to official reports from both sides.

Thousands of civilians have since been displaced in affected areas as people fled to safety amid the rare outbreak of violence.

A gunfight began on Monday and comes as South Sudan, one of the world’s youngest countries, is facing renewed violence due to fracturing within the government of President Salva Kiir that has led to fighting between South Sudanese troops and a rebel armed group.

Uganda has been pivotal in keeping that issue contained by deploying troops to assist Kiir’s forces. However, the latest conflict between the two countries’ armies is raising questions regarding the state of that alliance.

What has happened?

There are conflicting accounts of the events that began at about 4:25pm local time (13:25 GMT) on Monday, making it hard to pinpoint which side struck first.

The two agree on where the fighting took place, but each claims the site as being in its own territory.

Ugandan military spokesperson Major-General Felix Kulayigye told reporters on Wednesday that the fighting broke out when South Sudanese soldiers crossed into Ugandan territory in the state of West Nile and set up camp there. The South Sudanese soldiers refused to leave after being told to do so, Kulayigye said, resulting in the Ugandan side having “to apply force”.

A Ugandan soldier was killed in the skirmish that ensued, Kulayigye added, after which the Ugandan side retaliated and opened fire, killing three South Sudanese soldiers.

However, South Sudan military spokesperson Major-General Lul Ruai Koang said in a Facebook post earlier on Tuesday that armies of the “two sisterly republics” had exchanged fire on the South Sudanese side, in the Kajo Keji County of Central Equatoria state. Both sides suffered casualties, he said, without giving more details.

Wani Jackson Mule, a local leader in Kajo-Keji County, backed up this account in a Facebook post on Wednesday and added that Ugandan forces had launched a “surprise attack” on South Sudanese territory. Mule said local officials had counted the bodies of five South Sudanese officers.

Kajo-Keji County army commander Brigadier General Henry Buri, in the same statement as Mule, said the Ugandan forces had been “heavily armed with tanks and artillery”, and that they had targeted a joint security force unit stationed to protect civilians, who are often attacked by criminal groups in the area. The army general identified the deceased men as two South Sudanese soldiers, two police officers and one prison officer.

The fighting affected border villages and caused panic as people fled from the area, packing their belongings hurriedly on their backs, according to residents speaking to the media. Children were lost in the chaos. Photos on social media showed crowds gathered as local priests supervised the collection and transport of remains.

What is the border conflict about?

Uganda and South Sudan have previously clashed over demarcations along their joint border, although those events have been few and far between. As with the Monday clash, the fighting is often characterised by tension and violence. However, heavy artillery fighting, which occurred on Monday, is rare.

Problems at the border date back to the demarcations made during the British colonial era between Sudan, which South Sudan was once a part of, and Uganda. Despite setting up a joint demarcation committee (unknown when), the two countries have failed to agree on border points.

In November 2010, just months before an anticipated South Sudanese referendum on independence from Sudan, clashes erupted after the Ugandan government accused the Sudanese army of attacking Dengolo village in the West Nile district of Moyo on the Ugandan side in multiple raids, and of arresting Ugandan villagers who were accused of crossing the border to cut down timber.

A South Sudanese army spokesperson denied the allegations and suggested that the assailants could have been from the forestry commission. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and South Sudan’s Kiir met a few days later and pledged to finalise the border issue, but that did not happen.

Little was reported on the matter for several years after that, but in October 2020, two Ugandan soldiers and two South Sudanese soldiers were killed when the two sides attacked each other in Pogee, Magwi County of South Sudan, which connects to Gulu district of northern Uganda. The area includes disputed territory. Some reports claimed that three South Sudanese were killed. Each side blamed the other for starting the fight.

In September 2024, the Ugandan parliament urged the government to expedite the demarcation process, adding that the lack of clear borders was fuelling insecurity in parts of rural Uganda, and Ugandan forces could not effectively pursue criminal cattle rustling groups operating in the border area as a result.

Following the latest flare-up of violence this week, the countries have pledged to form a new joint committee to investigate the clashes, South Sudan military spokesperson, General Koang, said in a statement on Tuesday. The committee will also investigate any recurring issues along the border in a bid to resolve them, the statement read.

Why does Uganda provide military support to South Sudan’s President Kiir?

Uganda’s Museveni has been a staunch ally of South Sudan’s independence leader, Kiir, and his Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) party for many years.

Museveni supported South Sudan’s liberation war against Sudan, especially following alleged collusion between the former Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group originally formed in Uganda but which regularly attacks both Ugandan and South Sudanese locations in its efforts to overthrow the Ugandan government.

South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in January 2011. In 2013, Uganda sent troops to support Kiir after a civil war broke out in the new country.

Fighting had erupted between forces loyal to Kiir and those loyal to his longtime rival, Riek Machar, who was also Kiir’s deputy president pre and post independence, over allegations that Machar was planning a coup.

Ethnic differences between the two (Kiir is Dinka while Machar is Nuer) also added to the tensions. Machar fled the capital, Juba, to form his own Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO).

The SPLM and SPLM-IO fought for five years before reaching a peace agreement in August 2018. About 400,000 people were killed in the war. Uganda deployed troops to fight alongside Kiir’s SPLM, while the United Nations peacekeeping mission (UNMISS), which was in place following independence, worked to protect civilians.

This year, a power-sharing deal has unravelled, however, and fighting has again broken out between South Sudanese forces and the White Army, a Nuer armed group which the government alleges is backed by Machar, in Nasir County, in the northeast of the country.

In March, Uganda again deployed special forces to fight alongside Kiir’s forces as fears of another civil war mounted. Kiir ordered Machar to be placed under house arrest and also detained several of his allies in the government.

Are there concerns about Uganda’s influence in South Sudan?

Some South Sudanese who support Vice President Machar, who is still under house arrest, are opposed to Uganda’s deployment of troops in the country, and say Kampala is overreaching.

Since the Monday skirmish with Ugandan troops, some South Sudanese have taken to Facebook to rail against the army for not condemning alleged territorial violations by Ugandan soldiers, and mocked the spokesman, Koang, for describing the nations as “sisterly”.

“I wish the escalation would continue,” one poster wrote. “The reason why South Sudan is not peaceful is because of Uganda’s interference in our country’s affairs.”

“What did South Sudan expect when they cheaply sold their sovereignty to Uganda?” another commenter added.

Since joining forces to fight the rebel White Army, South Sudanese forces and the Ugandan Army have been accused by Machar and local authorities in Nasir State of using chemical weapons, namely barrel bombs containing a flammable liquid that they say has burned and killed civilians. Nicholas Haysom, head of the UN mission in South Sudan, confirmed that air strikes had been conducted with the bombs. However, Uganda has denied these allegations. The South Sudan army has not commented.

Forces local to Machar, including the White Army, have also been accused of targeting civilians. Dozens have died, and at least 100,000 have been displaced across northeastern South Sudan since March.

In May, Amnesty International said Uganda’s deployment and supply of arms to South Sudan violated a UN arms embargo on the country, which was part of the 2018 peace deal, and called on the UN Security Council to enforce the clause.