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Our editors’ weekly take on humanitarian news, trends, and developments from around the globe.
On our radar
Israel’s systematic sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners
On 11 May, the New York Times published a harrowing report by columnist Nicholas Kristof detailing a pattern of widespread sexual violence – including rape – perpetrated by Israeli soldiers, interrogators, prison guards, and settlers against Palestinians. Kristof’s article is far from the first time the abuses have come to light. A UN report last year found Israel’s use of sexual violence against Palestinian to be “systematic”. The abuses are often carried out against detainees held in Israeli prisons that the Israeli human rights group B’tselem has described as “a network of torture camps”. Around 9,000 Palestinians are currently in Israeli detention, many of them held without charge. Kristof’s article also highlights a pattern of Israeli settlers using threats of sexual violence to force Palestinian from their land in the West Bank. The sexual violence has been met with impunity by Israeli authorities. In one high-profile case, all charges against nine Israeli reservist soldiers who were filmed sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee in July 2024 were dropped in March this year, and the military approved their return to duty last month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar are threatening to sue the New York Times over Kristof’s article.
Counting the humanitarian cost of Mali offensive
The UN’s aid coordination agency, OCHA, has taken stock of the damage caused by al-Qaeda-linked JNIM fighters and the separatist FLA during nationwide attacks in Mali in late April. While the offensives did not trigger large-scale displacement, they had significant local impacts. In the central Mopti region, at least five schools were damaged, leading to the suspension of classes across the area. Further north, in Gao and Kidal, attacks disrupted access to health services, and telecommunications infrastructure was hit in several places. JNIM has also stepped up attacks on civilians in central Mali in the past week, according to media reports, killing dozens of people in places that rejected agreements recognising its authority. A newly imposed JNIM blockade around Bamako has, meanwhile, restricted movement in and out of the capital, and led to shortages of some basic goods. Still, patrols by the Malian army and its Russian partners in the Africa Corps do appear to be breaching the blockade in places, keeping food on shelves and fuel stations supplied, at least for now.
Identifying the victims of the US boat strikes
Nearly 200 people have been killed since the US started bombing boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific last September – and the figure keeps rising. The strikes have caused an international outcry over the violation of international human rights law, but there has been little information about the victims themselves. A months-long cross-border investigation coordinated by the Latin American Centre for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) has now managed to piece together the details of over 20 of the young men believed to have been killed, plus three survivors. They were overwhelmingly poor fishermen and small boat transporters without criminal records. They came from economically vulnerable coastal communities, including in Colombia, Ecuador, Saint Lucia, Trinidad & Tobago, and Venezuela. The investigation also identified each of the boats targeted and noted their home governments have failed so far to investigate the attacks. CLIP examined the impact of the strikes on the overall flow of drugs, and concluded that conventional and internationally coordinated anti-narcotics operations that cause no deaths are more efficient than the boat strikes.
Israel-Lebanon talks resume as bombing continues
Israel and Lebanon sat down for a new round of US-mediated talks at the end of this week, as Israel scaled up its bombing – one month into a soon-to-expire Israel-Hezbollah truce that many have called a ceasefire in name only. Israel has reportedly killed nearly 600 people in Lebanon in the month since the ceasefire came into force, including civilians, children, and healthcare workers. Airstrikes killed 22 people on 13 May alone, and Israel continues to issue mass evacuation orders with more than a million people still displaced, unable to return to homes that have been destroyed, are occupied by Israeli forces, or are just not safe to live in. Diplomats hope this week’s talks will lead to higher-level negotiations between Lebanon and Israel, although the eventual outcome is likely to be related, at least in some part, to the stalled US-Iran talks, with US President Donald Trump saying that he’s losing patience with Iran.
OCHA cements itself as US funding go-between
The US has announced $1.8 billion more in humanitarian cash, to be pushed through pooled funds run by the UN’s emergency aid coordination arm, OCHA. The money is on top of the $2 billion announced in December, and given mainly to big aid agencies. In announcing the new funding on 14 May in New York, Jeremy Lewin, senior official in the US State Department office now overseeing humanitarian assistance, said the money would be “focused on the places where we have a foreign policy interest”, and where it aligns with US President Donald Trump’s interests. Most of the money from the first $2 billion went to UN agencies, and it largely excluded local organisations. UN relief chief Tom Fletcher’s push to funnel donor money – including from other governments – to OCHA-run pooled funds has rankled other humanitarian leaders, though big aid groups like Save the Children have jostled for the money when it’s available. The US, still the world’s largest humanitarian donor despite massive 2025 cuts, appears to be happy with the arrangement. “It’s something that’s going to be here to stay for us,” Lewin said.
Upcoming summits on reshaping global cooperation
A pair of upcoming high-level shindigs aim to tweak global humanitarian and health cooperation. In London, the country that oversaw the deepest aid cuts is staging a “global partnerships conference” meant to position itself as a leader in reshaping responses to crises. Some aid sector attendees may be sceptical of the aims, but still see the conference as a small window to influence a government that remains a significant if depleted player in international cooperation. Geneva, meanwhile, will host the World Health Assembly – the ministerial meetings of the World Health Organization where member states can (in theory) set the global health agenda for the coming year. As usual, a core through-line is financial sustainability. Action on long-term global health reform, however, may be underwhelming. A proposal on reforming the global health architecture (including emergency health response) won’t propose “revisions to organisational mandates nor specific mergers or consolidations”. WHO leadership of the global health architecture “has been set up to fail”, the Center for Global Development said.
Philippines Senate mayhem
The Philippines Senate was thrown into mayhem on 13 May as a senator and former top aide of former president Rodrigo Duterte tried to evade an ICC arrest warrant by taking refuge in the legislature. At the centre of the controversy is Ronald dela Rosa, a 64-year-old former police chief and the alleged main enforcer for Duterte’s bloody, years-long war on drugs. Duterte, who served as president from 2016 to 2022, was sent to the Hague last March. On 11 May dela Rosa taped an appeal from his Senate office, where he has been seeking refuge, urging his backers to “not allow another Filipino to be brought to The Hague.” On the evening of 13 May the sound of gunshots was heard from inside the Senate building as investigators sought to apprehend dela Rosa after an earlier failed attempt. Duterte’s war on drugs led to at least 8,663 deaths, according to the UN.
Weekend read
Pushing back against erasure: The Gaza flotilla is more important now than ever
“We don’t expect the ships to arrive. We expect the ships to exist.”
Gaza is no longer seen as an “event” requiring a reaction or a solution. It has been reclassified as a “condition” to be managed.
And finally…
Macron’s “Pan-Africanist” faux pas
In April 2023, Kenyan president William Ruto declared that “It is not intelligent for 54 African presidents to go and sit before one president from another country for a summit.” This week, it was not exactly 54 presidents – more like 30 – who assembled in Nairobi for the Africa Forward Summit to sit before – and be shushed by – French president Emmanuel Macron. Meant to showcase France’s new approach to Africa, after being kicked out of the Sahel, in many ways the summit achieved the opposite. Where Macron had on the first day declared that the continent was no longer France’s private backyard, in the same breath he went on to suggest that France was actually Africa’s defender (protectorate anyone?) and to berate the countries, such as Mali, that had rejected French intervention. He also pronounced himself a “true pan-Africanist”, a spectacularly ignorant take on French history in Africa, as was promptly pointed out by Togolese activist and writer Farida Bemba Nabourema. French lawmaker, Danièle Obono, was scathing: “It’s stronger than him: as soon as [Macron] sets foot on the African continent, he can’t help but behave like a coloniser”. It is all reminiscent of Macron’s remarks at the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, when he declared Africa’s problems to be “civilisational” and partly stemming from its women having too many babies.