UN teams are racing to protect families in Gaza from the coming rainy season, but restricted access to land and shortages of critical supplies are hampering the effort, UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said on Wednesday.

What if the world tackled inequality with the same kind of scientific firepower it has brought to the climate crisis?

Children have been killed and injured in fresh fighting in Baidoa, in Somalia’s South West State, where families were already facing severe hunger and other overlapping crises.

Homicide rates are falling across much of the world, but organised crime is on the rise in many regions as criminal networks diversify into trafficking, migrant smuggling, and the exploitation of natural resources, a new UN report launched on Wednesday revealed. 

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has voiced concern over Malaysia’s decision to return 1,476 people to Myanmar amid an ongoing civil war and a dire human rights and humanitarian situation.

Four in five households in Lebanon struggle to afford basic necessities today, with children increasingly going without food, missing school and being pushed into work as conflict compounds years of economic crisis. "I wanted to buy clothes for my children, but I could not. I also wanted to enrol them in school, but I could not afford that either," said one father of four, cited on Wednesday by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).

The UN chief on Tuesday strongly condemned an airstrike that reportedly killed at least 50 people at a market in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and called for those responsible to be held to account.