UN Interviews

Emirati Hospital in southern Gaza is one of last functioning maternity facilities in all of Gaza where “there aren’t enough staff and not enough medicine” for women about to give birth, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned on Friday.

Amid ongoing active conflict that has killed tens of thousands, UNICEF is doing its utmost to help, by delivering essential relief supplies to health teams, formula milk, clothes and food for women too weak to breastfeed. 

But much more needs to be done to save lives - and ensure greater aid access to the enclave – said UNICEF’s Tess Ingram, who’s just back from a heartbreaking humanitarian mission to Rafah and Khan Younis.

Here she is speaking to UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

Nine months ago, UN teams in Sudan were forced to evacuate from their headquarters in Khartoum, as heavy fighting between government and rebel forces raged in the capital.

The impact on the civilian population has been catastrophic, with half of the population in need of aid and more than seven million people forced to flee their homes. The security situation is so bad that humanitarian workers have been unable to bring aid to the areas worst hit by fighting.

Peter Kioy, the head of the UN migration agency, IOM, in Sudan, told Conor Lennon from UN News about his team’s perilous evacuation under fire, his fears of the fighting moving closer to the UN temporary bases and his frustration at being unable to reach those in desperate need of help.

With only ‘one door’ open on Gaza’s southern border at Rafah, for aid to reach more than two million Gazans who need lifesaving aid, Israel must provide greater and more reasonable access, said the veteran humanitarian official who is the interim Resident Coordinator for the enclave, in an exclusive interview with UN News.

Jamie McGoldrick, who’s also serving as Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, told Ezzat El-Ferri on Saturday that better shelter, more food supplies, and repairs to water health and sanitation systems, are essential if famine and disease are to be kept at bay.

Read the interview here.

Houthi rebel attacks on ships using the Red Sea trade route off the coast of Yemen, are bad for global business and consumers everywhere but have also exposed a chronic shortage of vessels in the supply chain.

That’s according to Jan Hoffman, chief of the trade logistics branch at the UN trade and development body UNCTAD.

He’s been talking to UN News’s Daniel Johnson about the impact of the action taken by the Houthis in protest at Israel’s continuing offensive in Gaza, the repercussions of protracted attacks on shipping for trade overall, and what the UN can do to help de-escalate the situation.  

The enormous potential of GPT4 caught the popular imagination in 2023, with its ability to generate texts in a range of styles, in response to written prompts.

But many expressed concern about the jobs that might be lost, the ease with which bad actors could produce highly convincing misinformation and, in a coming year full of elections, the risks AI could pose to democracy itself.

Conor Lennon from UN News asks Carme Artigas, Spain’s first-ever Secretary of State for Digitalization and AI, and co-chair of the UN’s AI Advisory Body, if 2023 was the year the world finally woke up to the need to regulate the technology, and the potential threats it poses to democracy next year, when millions will go to the polls.  

Earlier in December, the UN Department of Global Communications hosted Knowledge, History and Power, an event featuring noted journalists Nikole Hannah-Jones and Laura Trevelyan. The event was organized by the Department of Global Communications Outreach Programme on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery in collaboration with the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium.

Pauline Batista from UN News talked to both award-winning journalists about the challenges, hopes and dreams for “the future of reparations,” in the United States and globally.

Humanitarian workers visiting the frontline in Ukraine are showing solidarity with the people affected by the almost two-year-long conflict as “war does not stop on Christmas Day”, according to the UN’s most senior humanitarian representative in the country.

Denise Brown, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator led a convoy of aid to Kupiansk in the east of the country.

Saviano Abreu began by asking her what support the UN is providing on the frontline and elsewhere. 

UN humanitarians carried out an emergency fact-finding mission to central Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital on Christmas Day, in response to fears of mass casualties after reports that three refugee camps were hit by Israeli airstrikes.

Doctors at the hospital, which was already at full capacity, reported seeing “100-plus patients” brought in with serious injuries in just the first 30 minutes, with around the same number of dead bodies.

With ever decreasing space in the Strip to treat men, women and children needing urgent lifesaving care, many more will die, warned Sean Casey from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Mr. Casey is the UN health agency’s Emergency Medical Teams coordinator who took part in that mission to central Gaza. Here he is now talking to UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

Since the military incursion into Gaza, which followed deadly attacks by Hamas on Israel on the seventh of October, 135 staff members of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, are known to have been killed, the most ever in one incident.

Despite the danger and extremely difficult working conditions, UNRWA is continuing to assist those caught up in the fighting through no fault of their own. And the task is monumental. Nearly two million people have been displaced across the Strip, many forced to move repeatedly in search of safety.

Juliette Touma, the Director of Communications at UNRWA, is a veteran of high profile conflicts, including Libya, Syria, and Iraq. Conor Lennon from UN News asked her to compare the situation in Gaza with her experience in other countries.

Cemeteries in Gaza are being raided for wood as people affected by the ongoing bombardments look for ways to cook food and feed themselves; that’s according to the World Food Programme’s Samer Abdel Jaber who has just visited the south of the enclave. 

The conflict in Gaza began after the October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel which left at least 1200 people dead.

Khaled Mohamed of UN News asked Samer Abdel Jaber what he witnessed on his visit.