Around 890 children have been injured in the past year in Lebanon, according to the country’s Ministry of Public Health, with 75 per cent of those injuries occurring in the last month. As the conflict escalates, the number of child casualties has risen rapidly.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is working to assist children across various affected areas, including Tyre, Rmaich, Marjaaoun, Beirut, and the Bekaa Valley. Their efforts include providing shelter, medical supplies, mental health support, and access to education and essential goods.

Tess Ingram, Communications Manager for UNICEF Middle East and North Africa, told Nancy Sarkis of UN News: “Above everything else, the children of Lebanon need peace.”

From women activists feeding thousands of vulnerable families amid the brutal war in Sudan, to young Bangladeshis working to stamp out child marriage, human rights defenders worldwide are helping to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In fact, they are integral to ensuring that the 17 Goals – which include ending poverty, reducing inequality and protecting the environment – become reality, said Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders.

She was recently in New York to present her latest report to the UN General Assembly.  She spoke to UN News’s Dianne Penn about her mandate and the need to advocate for human rights defenders, hundreds of whom are killed each year over issues such as land rights. 

With just days to go until world leaders, scientists, and climate action advocates convene for the UN Climate Change Conference in Baku, COP29, the host country Azerbaijan is fully prepared to welcome the key annual summit - despite having only ten months to prepare.

That’s according to UN Resident Coordinator Vladanka Andreeva who has been speaking to UN News’s Liudmila Blagonravova about the preparations and objectives for the COP, including the role played by the UN’s country team in Azerbaijan, consisting of 18 different agencies.

Ms. Andreeva emphasized that the host nation is leading by example, setting itself the target of achieving over 30 percent renewable energy production, as well as a 35 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, despite being a country rich in oil and gas reserves.

There are now 1.2 million internally displaced people in Lebanon because of the Hezbollah-Israel conflict which has created a new humanitarian crisis that UN aid agencies are responding to as best they can.

One immediate problem is that there’s not enough room for everyone in collective shelters, so many people are sleeping out in the open.

Keeping sickness at bay is another challenge, after a first case of cholera was confirmed in northern Lebanon this week. Other diseases are also spreading, such as rabies.

To find out more about the situation on the ground, UN News’s Nancy Sarkis has been speaking to the UN refugee agency’s Representative in Lebanon, Ivo Freijsen in Beirut. 

As crises mount, Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has told UN News there needs to be greater openness and accountability, warning that the world faces a critical turning point in the fight for human rights.

While human rights mechanisms have played a crucial role in preventing conflicts and atrocities, he expressed deep concern over the speed of escalation, emphasising that it is not rights themselves that are in crisis, but a lack of political leadership to enforce them.

In an interview with UN News’s Nargiz Shekinskaya at UN Headquarters in New York, Mr. Türk discussed the impact of current crises, including the erosion of international law, the role of technology and rising authoritarianism.

The recent series of incidents targeting the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, alongside daily bombing in the region, is a major threat to the safety and security of the peacekeepers deployed there.

Despite the difficulties the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, is committed to remaining along the “Blue Line” of separation with Israel, in keeping with its UN Security Council mandate, UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti said, speaking to UN News’s Vibhu Mishra.

From Beirut, he described the operational challenges the “Blue Helmets” are facing and how they have been dealing with the attacks on UN positions along the line of separation in recent days. 

Augustina Tufuor is a healthy snacks entrepreneur from Ghana who’s on a mission to help rural food producers make a better living and it’s working a treat.

Her business is thriving now, but it wasn’t like that at all when she was starting out, a) because she’s a woman and b) because farming is seen as a big risk by lenders, she says.

Thankfully, the Food and Agriculture Organization has tailor-made projects and training programmes to help businesses like Augustina’s overcome these systemic barriers so they can grow – as Lauren Phillips, FAO’s Deputy Director of the Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division, explains to Daniel Johnson.

Across Southern Africa, one of the worst droughts in living memory has left millions facing hunger.

According to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), nearly six and a half million people are starving there. A staggering 21 million children are malnourished, after crops failed and livestock perished, amid last year’s El Niño climate phenomenon.

A record five countries have declared a national disaster because of the drought and requested international assistance – Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe – but Angola and Mozambique have been hit hard, too.

But this is just the start of the emergency, because October marks the beginning of the lean season, as WFP’s Tomson Phiri tells UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

UN agencies and partners have launched the second phase of a mass campaign to vaccinate some 540,000 young children in Gaza against polio.

Teams have all the necessary supplies to carry out the campaign, including cold chain storage for the vaccine doses and finger markers to indicate a child has been inoculated, said Hamish Young, Senior Emergency Coordinator for Gaza with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). 

However, what they need most is access, he said, particularly when the campaign heads to northern Gaza next week, given the new evacuation orders issued by Israel and the escalation in hostilities. 

Mr. Young spoke to UN News’s Khaled Mohammed about some of the surprises from the first day, the challenges that lie ahead, and why Israel must adhere to its commitment to ensure teams can safely vaccinate all children amid the ongoing war. 

Despite deadly new devastating strikes on public shelters in Gaza, UN aid teams confirmed that the second and final round of a mass polio vaccination campaign got off to a successful start on Monday.

Just hours into the operation, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA, said that thousands of children under 10 in the centre of the enclave had already been given another dose of the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2); the first oral shot was administered last month.

The success of the campaign is bittersweet, though, after an UNRWA school in Nuseirat that was due to be used as a vaccination base was hit by a deadly strike on Sunday night that left 22 dead.

Elsewhere, a pre-dawn strike at Al Aqsa hospital courtyard in Deir Al Balah set tented shelters ablaze and rescue workers searching for survivors among charred and mangled metal frames, as UNRWA spokesperson Louise Wateridge explains to UN News’s Daniel Johnson.