Close to one million Syrians living under siege

In the past six months, the number of people living under siege in Syria has doubled. Today there are almost one million Syrians being “isolated, starved, bombed and denied medical attention and humanitarian assistance.”

The latest figures from the UN come a week after deadly airstrikes by government forces on rebel-held eastern Aleppo resumed. Since then, hundreds of civilians have been killed.

“Month after month I have reported to this Council that the level of depravity inflicted upon the Syrian people cannot sink lower, only to return the following month with hideous and, with shocking disbelief, new reports of ever-worsening human suffering,” the UN’s under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator Stephen O’Brien said.

A year ago, the number of people living under siege was 393,700. Six months ago that figure had increased to 486,700 but today the UN estimates that the total is 974,080.

The UN believes there to be 275,000 people under siege in eastern Aleppo alone. In Aleppo, humanitarian aid deliveries were last made in July and O’Brien said the remains of those rations were handed out on November 13. He also warned that without food, fuel and access to medicine, the people in eastern Aleppo will “face a harsh winter without heating or the bare essentials for life.”

[Vice]

Disasters are even more disastrous than we think

The devastation in floods, earthquakes or droughts is generally measured by how much stuff or assets people lose–say the number of wrecked houses and the dollar amount it would take to rebuild them. In the course of a year, that adds up to a lot of money: $300 billion by some accounts.

But a new report from a research group at the World Bank says the toll could be a lot more if it were to look beyond stuff that’s lost and see how livelihoods are affected, particularly for a country’s poorest people. Those losses could add up to an additional $200 billion a year, says Stephane Hallegatte, an economic analyst at the World Bank Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery group and lead author on the report.

“If magically, next year, we could prevent all disasters, 26 million people would be out of poverty,” he says. Either because natural disasters destroy their wealth and push them down, or the shock prevents them from climbing out of poverty.

When you looked at how much people lost in natural disasters, poor people were losing way more than rich people. When they are hit by disaster, all of their assets and wealth are in material form that can be destroyed. In villages, people have livestock that can die in a drought or flood. And people who are poor are twice more likely to live in fragile buildings that are completely destroyed when flooded or stormed, and they lose everything.

One scary finding from a study in Mexico is that when kids are removed from school because of a shock, 30 percent will not go back. We also have evidence that parents have to cut food intake on the family after a disaster. When this happens to children between 0 and 2, this has permanent impacts on their physical development and the income this person will make for the rest of their life.

[NPR]

Might a humanitarian airport in Gaza fit in a Trump Administration’s foreign policy?

Ahmed Alkhatib is the founder and director of Project Unified Assistance (PUA), a San Francisco-based 501c(3) nonprofit organization, which has revived and developed the idea of an internationally-managed humanitarian airport in the Gaza strip, and brought it to the attention of major regional stakeholders, including the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas and senior Israeli policymakers.

The idea is ambitious. Some have called it unlikely.

Nevertheless, Alkhatib has received kudos from a number of senior U.S. and international policy professionals for his analysis of the security and development concerns of all concerned parties, and there are growing indications the major stakeholders may be willing to endorse this concept or something similar.

[Read Forbes interview]

UN relief agencies deploy emergency humanitarian aid to Mosul

A UNICEF-led multi-agency humanitarian convoy with emergency supplies was the first to enter the Iraqi city of Mosul, while the International Organization for Migration (IOM) continues tracking displaced population movement and constructing emergency sites.

“UNICEF has entered Mosul city for the first time in over two years,” stated UNICEF Iraq Deputy Representative Hamida Ramadhani, adding that the teams, which entered the city this past Sunday, are moving quickly to provide immediate support to communities affected by the fighting.

According to UNICEF, 14 vehicles filled with enough emergency supplies to last 15,000 children and families – a total of 30,000 people – for a month, arrived to the Gogachly neighborhood in eastern Mosul.

Despite a hostile and dangerous environment, the distribution of supplies was completed in six hours.

Other UN agencies, such as IOM are also carrying out relief operations in Mosul, targeting newly displaced people who have fled to more stable areas.  IOM Iraq’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), used by the Government and humanitarian agencies to guide the humanitarian response, currently indicates that close to 98 per cent of all those leaving Mosul are displaced within Ninewa governorate in northern Iraq, where IOM continues to add capacity in shelter and other inputs in anticipation of growing numbers of displaced families.

[UN News Centre]

Humanitarian insights to the Gaza Strip

• In June 2007, following the takeover of Gaza by Hamas, Israel imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the Gaza Strip, which intensified earlier access restrictions.
• The unemployment rate by mid-2016 was almost 42%, among the global highs, while among youth it stood at 60% and among females at over 65%.
• 47% of households in Gaza suffer from moderate or severe food insecurity.
• More than 70% of Gaza’s population receives some form of international aid, the bulk of which is food assistance.

[UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs]

Citizens of Aleppo face starvation

The last of stockpiled rations were distributed Thursday in east Aleppo, and widespread starvation is expected to set in as winter arrives if no progress is made in negotiations to deliver food and medical aid, the United Nations said.

“It is terrible as we speak; it could get much worse,” U.N. relief envoy Jan Egeland said in Geneva. “I do not think anybody wants a quarter of a million people to be starving. . . . I cannot see anyone wishing to see so many civilians bleed to death . . . because of indiscriminate war.”

Egeland said that “tremendous ground fighting” between the two sides has stopped repeated plans to deliver aid to civilians and evacuate the wounded.

He pleaded with Russia and the United States to continue trying to negotiate some form of cease-fire. “It is only when these two . . . have been leading that we have made progress, when we have not been completely stalled,” Egeland said.

Planned humanitarian convoys have yet to deliver aid, he said, because of the danger and the inability to obtain simultaneous security guarantees from all sides.

“Syria is the worst war, the worst humanitarian crisis, the worst displacement crisis, the worst refu­gee crisis in a generation” Egeland said.

[Washington Post]

Russia considers next humanitarian pauses in Aleppo

Russian Defense Ministry is ready to consider the possibility of new humanitarian pauses in Aleppo as soon as representatives of the UN humanitarian mission in Syria officially confirm their preparedness to deliver humanitarian aid to the city and evacuate injured and sick civilians, the ministry’s official spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Saturday.

“The experience of previous humanitarian pauses showed that assurances of UN representatives about ‘preliminary’ agreements with militants in Aleppo are just words,” Konashenkov said.

He added that “all attempts of any vehicles with humanitarian aid for Aleppo to even approach humanitarian corridors always end in shelling by militants, an impossibility to go through because of mines in the roads and streets.”

The last humanitarian pause in Aleppo was in force for 10 hours on November 4.

[Tass]

Trump win sends shock waves to development community

The election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president is sure to send shock waves throughout the global development community as worries rise about his aid policy and stated position on climate change.

Little is known about exactly what a Trump presidency means for foreign aid, in part because in this election development issues have been largely overshadowed by debates over national security, immigration and a myriad of highly personalized attacks.

Yet development is a key issue, especially for people beyond the U.S. borders. Some 65 million people around the globe — more than ever before — are currently displaced from their homes and seeking development assistance to help restore a sense of normalcy in their lives.

The few answers Trump has given on foreign aid policy, mostly in an April town hall, have largely been vague: He would try to help humanitarian efforts, but not if it cost too much. What is clear is that Trump has run on an agenda that rejects American international engagement and that he would not invite Syrian refugees fleeing the crisis into the U.S.

Some worry that his aid policies turn out to be extreme. It’s not impossible to imagine Trump proposing to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development altogether, to end funding to Muslim countries, or to demand countries refund the foreign assistance they’ve received. It could also mean an end to the recent era of bipartisan cooperation on issues of foreign aid.

[Read full article at Devex]