#humanitarian-crisis

#humanitarian-crisis

South African authorities are facing heavy criticism after they held more than 150 Palestinians, including a woman who was nine months pregnant, on a plane for about 12 hours because of problems with their travel documents. A pastor who was allowed to meet the passengers while they were stuck on the plane said it was extremely hot and that children were screaming and crying.

When Omar*, a 29-year-old bricklayer from rural Gambia, crossed the border into Mauritania in March, he came in search of the better pay he'd heard he could find. He settled in Nouadhibou, Mauritania's second-largest city, where he shared a one-room shack with four friends, and found work as a casual labourer on construction sites, earning two to three times more than he had back home.

"The sick and injured were executed in cold blood," the Sudanese Coordination of Resistance Committees, a nongovernmental organization, stated two days after the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized control of the city of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, Sudan. According to the NGO, RSF fighters had either killed everyone or left them to die in the city's Al Saudi Hospital.

The German government is determined to reach a deal with Damascus to accelerate the repatriation of Syrian war refugees, despite concerns about the humanitarian situation in a country where violence continues and the economy and infrastructure have been devastated. In late September, Germany Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told the Rheinische Post newspaper that he intended to "reach an agreement with Syria this year and then initially deport criminals and later people without residence permits." But that might be easier said than done, for both legal and humanitarian reasons. "Syria is at its limit; its capacity to take in refugees has already been exhausted," Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, director of the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) in Syria, told the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper last week.

In both Israel and among its Western allies, the Gaza ceasefire deal is seen as an opportunity to move on from the accusations of genocide against it, and to restore close relations weakened as a result of public anger. Over two years of its unrelenting war on Gaza, Israel has killed more than 67,900 Palestinians and injured more than 170,000. It has destroyed or damaged 92 percent of the enclave's residential housing and its actions in blockading Gaza have led to a famine being declared.