 This Week @UN: Guns at Afghan women’s heads; an obscure UN election; Yahya Sinwar’s gone. Plus: Hunger in Gaza; Yemen peace?; displaced Sudanese; women in combat; Lebanon hell.
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• Our #1 story this week: An Important UN Election You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, op-ed by Katja Hemmerich
• #1 story this month: Special Report: Can the UN Pact for the Future Save Us Now?, by Maria Luisa Gambale
From PassBlue this week:
• Afghan Women Still Have Guns to Their Heads, Says Malala Yousafzai, by Damilola Banjo
• An Important UN Election You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, op-ed by Katja Hemmerich
• The UN Is Unsure If Hamas Leader’s Death Will Mean a Ceasefire in Gaza, by Damilola Banjo
• Racing to Help African Migrants in Lebanon: Private charities and individuals are raising money to provide basic help for African migrants stuck amid the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, as the winter approaches. Safina Virani, a Ugandan activist who has raised about $12,000 to assist the migrants, said that some women in her care face homelessness after the landlord of their temporarily rented apartment plans to evict them. (PassBlue reported last week on efforts by local Lebanese women to help Sierra Leonean migrants.)
“Just when I thought I had everyone settled with a secure roof over their heads, the landlord for one of the apartments came at 9 p.m. demanding they leave. Now, I have 24 African women in Lebanon at risk of being homeless again,” Virani posted on X. She said some UN agencies have contacted her to provide the shelter she runs with mattresses and water.
Dea Hage-Chahine, a Lebanese activist who campaigns against racism in the country, has raised $76,918 to offer shelter and other essentials for the 150 Sierra Leonean workers and their children in her care. She hopes to evacuate them back to their own country. “We are aiming to raise $135,000 to repatriate an initial group of Sierra Leonean women and babies,” reads the GoFundMe description of her campaign.
Four years ago, Hage-Chahine raised $35,000 to repatriate Kenyan women and children stranded after the Beirut port blast. Since October 2023, the GoFundMe fundraising platform reports that a total of $250 million has been given for Mideast crisis relief. “More than $250 million has been donated through nearly 6 million contributions to GoFundMe fundraisers related to the Middle East crisis since October 7, 2023,” a spokesperson told PassBlue. “There have been over 80,000 fundraisers for humanitarian relief efforts, including medical care, food, and evacuations.”
Virani has used social media to raise money for renting apartments, providing food and other essentials in the Beirut area for more than 40 African women. Many more migrant women remain on the street. “The hardest thing for me this week has been turning away women I can’t help in Lebanon because I’m at full capacity,” she said. “Their employers abandoned them, their governments abandoned them, and now I feel like I’m doing the same.”
Weeks after the escalation in Lebanon, Sierra Leonean domestic workers say they have yet to hear from their government about evacuation plans. The Sierra Leone mission to the UN did not respond to PassBlue’s request for comment. — DAMILOLA BANJOÂ
Monday, Oct. 14
• Spokesperson’s briefing: Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the “ large number of civilian casualties in northern Gaza […] including at schools sheltering displacing Palestinians civilians,” as Israel intensified its attacks in the area. Dujarric said humanitarian assistance into Gaza “is at the lowest level in months” as Guterres underscored that parties to the war must ensure that aid be delivered “to those in need, at the level of which they need it.”
• The second round of the polio vaccination campaign, run by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the World Health Organization (WHO) and Unicef, is starting in central Gaza, aiming to vaccinate 590,000 children under 10 years old with a second dose of the novel oral polio vaccination Type 2, Dujarric said. The first round, done about four weeks ago, reached 559,000 children, or an estimated 95 percent of eligible children, according to “independently conducted post-campaign monitoring,” he added. The effort moves to northern Gaza next and then south Gaza.
Relatedly, on Oct. 16, Amar Bendjama, Algeria’s envoy to the UN, said in a Security Council meeting on Gaza: “So, how is it possible, how is it possible, that we can vaccinate these children, yet we cannot feed them? How can we secure trucks transporting vaccines but not those trucks carrying essential food? The inevitable conclusion is that this is not, this is not, a collateral damage but a deliberate, calculated Israeli policy of starvation of the Palestinian people.”
Tuesday, Oct. 15
• Spokesperson’s briefing: Hans Grundberg, the UN’s special envoy for Yemen, told the Security Council that although “Yemen and its people are already feeling the impact” of the “intensifying” military escalation in the Mideast, there are “commitments made by the parties towards the establishment of a roadmap, including a nationwide ceasefire.” Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Joyce Msuya said that the food security sector in Yemen “quickly needs an additional $870 million” to avoid nine million people without emergency food aid and that long-term health consequences include cholera.
On Monday, Dujarric also referred to a statement by numerous heads of UN entities and nongovernmental organizations regarding arbitrarily detained personnel in Yemen. The statement noted that they are reportedly facing what the Houthi authorities call “criminal prosecution.” A “significant number” of the detained includes personnel from Unesco and the UN Human Rights Office, Dujarric added.
Wednesday, Oct. 16
• Spokesperson’s briefing: Dujarric said the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is “deeply concerned” about the amount of people displaced by the civil war in Sudan. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) noted that intensifying battles in the Darfur region have forced almost 25,000 people to flee to eastern Chad in the first week of October, the highest number of new arrivals in 2024 in a single week. Although Sudanese people are also fleeing to the Central African Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, South Sudan and Uganda, the UN reported “a surge of families arriving in Chad exhausted, many having walked for days through conflict zones.”
Thursday, Oct. 17
• Spokesperson’s briefing: A new report by the UN Office of Rule of Law and Security Institutions (OROLSI) examining the “advancements, barriers, and future opportunities for women’s participation in the defense sectors” finds that although there has been some progress, gender equality in the sector remains elusive. Although more women are joining the defense sector — the proportion of women in armed forces increased by more than a quarter from 2016 to 2022 — they still rarely fill leadership or combat roles, partly due to pervasive obstacles such as sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination.
Friday, Oct. 18
• Spokesperson’s briefing: UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said Israeli fire continued to hit UNIFIL area of operations on Oct. 18, as fighting between Israel and Hezbollah go on in Lebanon and northern Israel, with “fatalities reported on each side.” OCHA said 1.2 million people are displaced or otherwise directly affected by the crisis in Lebanon, and the International Organization for Migration is reporting that 780,000 people have been forced out of their homes, with more than 190,000 of them staying in over 1,000 shelters, mostly in Mount Lebanon governorate and Beirut.
ICYMI: UN spokesperson’s statement on the latest report about the investigation into the death of the former Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, a Swede.
Arthur Bassas is a researcher and writer who graduated from St. Andrews in Scotland, majoring in international relations and terrorism. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and speaks English and French.
