The Situation Report

TL;DR

Ebola has now passed 1,200 suspected cases. The IRC is calling it the fastest-spreading outbreak on record and warning it could become the deadliest without urgent action. Uganda closed its border with DRC yesterday. In Gaza, a family of three including a six-month-old was killed in their apartment in Nuseirat while they slept, as 904 Palestinians have now been killed since the October ceasefire took effect. Russia struck the Chornobyl museum in Kyiv overnight Wednesday, a building that houses one of the most significant archives of nuclear disaster documentation in the world. A Haftar-aligned Libyan force detained members of a land convoy trying to bring aid into Gaza through Libya. And today, as Eid al-Adha begins, Palestinians in Gaza mark it for the third year without the ability to gather, travel, or mourn their dead.

Five stories below. If any of this matters to you week to week, you can subscribe here and get it in your inbox every morning.

1. Ebola: 1,205 suspected cases, Uganda closes its border, IRC warns of worst-ever outbreak

The numbers as of 27 May, per WHO and the DRC Ministry of Health: 1,205 suspected and confirmed cases, at least 264 deaths. Uganda confirmed seven cases including one death, five of them linked to the first two DRC-linked cases in Kampala, all among healthcare workers at a private hospital. On 27 May, Uganda closed its border with DRC for at least four weeks.

The IRC issued a statement this week describing the outbreak as spreading faster than the response, and warning it could become the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record without urgent international action. That's a significant statement. The deadliest on record is the 2014-16 West Africa outbreak, which killed more than 11,000 people across Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The IRC's framing is not hyperbole — it is a direct consequence of the Bundibugyo strain's late detection, the conflict-driven inaccessibility of Ituri province, and the absence of any approved vaccine or treatment. Community resistance, including the burning of treatment tents I flagged earlier this week, is compounding the response challenge.

The US finalised plans on Wednesday to allocate an additional $80 million in bilateral assistance to partners on the ground, bringing total US Ebola response funding this cycle to over $100 million. The EU committed €15 million earlier in the week. The international response architecture is moving. The question is whether it's moving fast enough. Rwanda has introduced mandatory quarantine for returning travellers from DRC. Somalia issued a nationwide public health warning. Tanzania has tightened border checks. Hong Kong set up a quarantine facility on 19 May. Ten countries are now in the risk perimeter, per Africa CDC. The 2000 Bundibugyo outbreak in Uganda was contained at 149 cases in a rural district. This one is in three provinces, a capital city, and counting.

ECDC outbreak page | IRC statement | US State Dept, 28 May | Wikipedia outbreak tracker

2. Gaza: 904 killed since October ceasefire, a family asleep in Nuseirat

On Sunday 24 May, an Israeli strike hit an apartment in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. No warning. Mohammad Abu Mallouh, his wife Alaa Zaqlan, and their six-month-old son Osama were asleep. All three were killed. Around ten others in nearby buildings were wounded. Osama's uncle described finding them. The family had not been evacuated. They were at home. Gaza's Health Ministry says 904 Palestinians have been killed since the October 2025 ceasefire took effect.

Nine hundred and four since the ceasefire. The framing of a ceasefire as the baseline against which to count deaths is one of the more dispiriting features of this conflict's coverage. Overnight strikes on Nuseirat and Bureij camps on 23 May left residential areas in rubble and injured dozens, per Al Jazeera's footage from the scene. On 26 May, five Palestinians were killed in a strike on a refugee camp in central Gaza. Al Jazeera footage from the camp showed rescuers working through the debris of what had been a residential building.

The wider access and public health picture hasn't improved. Generators, engine oil, and spare parts remain restricted at crossings, driving system failures in health and sanitation. Only about 10% of the 2026 humanitarian funding requirement for the occupied Palestinian territory has been secured. Two NGO workers were killed in separate incidents in April, creating a staffing chilling effect on local partners. And today is Eid al-Adha. As millions of Muslims around the world gather to celebrate, Palestinians in Gaza mark it in displacement sites, without the ability to travel to family, buy food, or bury their dead with the rituals the occasion demands.

WAFA, 24 May | Al Jazeera overnight strikes | OCHA OPT

3. Libya: Haftar forces detain Gaza aid convoy

A brief item that deserves attention. Forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar, the Libyan National Army commander who controls eastern Libya, detained members of a land convoy attempting to bring aid to Gaza through Libya earlier this week. Al Jazeera reported the detention on 26 May. The convoy was part of a broader effort to use overland routes into Gaza as maritime and aerial routes remain blocked or contested.

The Libya dimension is worth holding. Haftar-aligned forces control most of eastern Libya and the Cyrenaica coast, which is one of the potential overland corridors for aid bound for Egypt and onward to Gaza. The detention of aid convoy members by a non-state armed group (and Haftar's LNA, whatever its formal relationship with Tripoli, operates as one in practice) adds another layer of obstruction to an already near-impossible supply chain. No further details on the status of the detained convoy members were available as of this morning.

It sits inside a wider pattern. The flotilla was intercepted in international waters. Crossing access from Egypt remains at 50-70% offloading rates. The UNRWA ban restricts agency operations. Now an overland route is being contested by a Libyan armed faction. The geography of the blockade keeps expanding.

Al Jazeera, 26 May

4. Ukraine: Chornobyl museum struck, Kyiv takes another night of missiles

Russia struck Kyiv's Chornobyl Museum overnight on Wednesday. The museum, which houses one of the most significant archives of documentation from the 1986 nuclear disaster, sustained damage. No casualties were reported inside the building at the time. The strike follows last week's attack on the UNHCR-contracted warehouse in Dnipro, in which two workers were killed and significant pre-positioned humanitarian aid was destroyed.

The wider overnight picture from Wednesday into Thursday: Russian missiles and drones across multiple Ukrainian regions. The pattern this week has been the continuation of the large-scale aerial assault that began over the previous weekend, which OCHA described as one of the largest sustained attacks of the war. Civilian casualties have accumulated across Sumy, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kyiv oblasts throughout the week.

The Chornobyl museum strike is worth flagging on its own terms beyond the humanitarian angle. The museum is not a military installation. It is a cultural memory institution for one of the defining industrial disasters of the twentieth century, housing materials that document what happens when nuclear infrastructure fails and when governments conceal information from the people affected. That it was struck, whether deliberately or incidentally, in the context of a war that has repeatedly threatened the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, carries its own signal.

Al Jazeera, 25 May | OCHA Ukraine

5. The week in numbers: what the system is carrying

Worth closing the week with the frame rather than another country story.

This has been one of the heavier weeks since we started the brief. Ebola declared a PHEIC eleven days ago and is now the third-largest outbreak on record. Somalia's WFP funding runs out in nine weeks. Sudan's appeal is 16% funded as the lean season begins. Gaza's humanitarian funding is at 10% of what's needed. Syria's bread subsidy, which fed four million people a day, is gone. Lebanon's death toll under a nominal ceasefire is approaching 3,000. The UNHCR warehouse in Dnipro was struck and two workers killed. A Gaza aid convoy was detained in Libya.

None of these are new crises. Most of them have been on this list since we launched. What's different this week is the accumulation: the sense that multiple files are moving in the wrong direction simultaneously, faster than the funding and the political will can catch up. The IRC's warning that the Ebola outbreak could be the worst on record isn't an outlier statement. It's a description of what happens when a global health emergency hits a conflict-affected province with no vaccine, no approved treatment, and a response architecture that's been running on reduced budgets for three years.

Tom Fletcher's line from the GHO launch is worth ending the week with: "If the world can spend $2.7 trillion on defence last year, surely it can spend just over one percent of that on helping the most vulnerable?" The $23 billion ask. One percent. The week's coverage is, in one way or another, a series of case studies in what happens when that one percent doesn't materialise.

OCHA GHO 2026 | IRC Ebola statement

That's the week. The Ebola file is the one to watch most closely over the weekend. Uganda's border closure and the IRC's warning suggest the next few days of case reporting will be decisive. Back Tuesday with the weekly round-up.

Have a good weekend.

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TL;DR

Tuesday. The Ebola file moved sharply over the weekend, and we need to lead with it. The DRC outbreak is now over 900 suspected cases, has spread to a third province, and reports have come in of citizens burning down treatment tents at a hospital, which is exactly the dynamic that turned the 2018-20 outbreak into the second-deadliest in history. Russia struck a UNHCR-contracted warehouse in Dnipro overnight last week, destroying significant amounts of pre-positioned aid and killing two warehouse workers. UNRWA's Situation Report 223 covers a renewed military escalation in Gaza, with shelter-in-place orders now affecting two UNRWA installations. The OCHA Pacific Office flagged a major rainfall alert for the Horn of Africa. And UNHCR launched a $710 million appeal for the Rohingya yesterday.

Five stories below. If you're not already receiving these, you can subscribe here and get them in your inbox every morning.

1. Ebola: 904 suspected cases, hospital tents burned, third province now affected

The numbers WHO and Africa CDC are working with as of 24 May, reported by the Ministry of Health on 25 May: over 904 suspected cases in DRC, 119 suspected deaths, 101 confirmed cases. The outbreak has now spread to a third province, confirmed cases in Ituri, Nord-Kivu, and Sud-Kivu, with five travel-linked cases in Kampala, Uganda. One Ugandan death confirmed. Five of the Ugandan cases are healthcare workers from a private hospital in Kampala. Two were direct contacts of the first case (a driver and a healthcare worker), three were travel-related.

The detail that should worry everyone in the response: on 22 May, citizens in DRC burned two tents that were part of a hospital section treating Ebola patients. This is the dynamic that destabilised the 2018-20 North Kivu outbreak. Community distrust of the response, in a conflict-affected region with active armed groups, creates the conditions in which treatment centres get attacked, contact tracing breaks down, and the virus moves faster than the response can keep up. CNN reported yesterday from inside the epicentre and described health workers fighting both the disease and active public resistance to masks and protective measures. NPR's headline yesterday put it bluntly: Africa is now racing to contain a fast-spreading outbreak threatening ten countries.

The international response architecture has activated. The US extended its travel ban to additional countries on Monday and continues to limit entry from affected regions. South Korea expands its health alert on 26 May. France, Belgium, and Austria have all activated advisories. The DR Congo national football team was placed in isolation in Belgium on 23 May at US request. The 2026 Ituri Province Ebola epidemic now has its own Wikipedia entry, which is a strange but consistent signal that something is genuinely consolidating in the global consciousness. Worth flagging again that the Bundibugyo strain has no approved vaccine or treatment. The experimental candidate has only ever been tested on monkeys.

ECDC outbreak page | CDC situation summary | NPR | CNN from the epicentre

2. Ukraine: UNHCR warehouse struck in Dnipro, two staff killed

A development worth flagging from last week that hasn't received proportionate attention. On the evening of 19 May, Russian missile and drone strikes hit Dnipro. Among the buildings struck was a UNHCR-contracted warehouse. At least two civilians were killed in the wider attack, including the two warehouse workers themselves. Significant amounts of pre-positioned aid and shelter materials were destroyed.

Bernadette Castel-Hollingsworth, UNHCR's representative in Ukraine, condemned what she described as a "horrific attack" and extended condolences to the families of the workers killed. The strike on the UNHCR warehouse comes two weeks after the OCHA-led convoy in Kherson was struck by two drones on the same mission, which I covered in the 15 May dispatch. The pattern is becoming hard to ignore: deconflicted humanitarian infrastructure, marked as such, is being hit with increasing regularity. The institutional response from the building has been condemnation. The institutional response from the parties responsible has been to keep doing it.

This sits inside the larger ICRC Humanitarian Outlook 2026 frame I keep coming back to. 338 attacks on humanitarian workers in 2024. 600+ attacks on health facilities and personnel across 2023 and 2024. The Dnipro strike is one more data point. The trend line is uniform across theatres: the protections that have underwritten humanitarian access for seventy years are being treated as advisory rather than binding. The Council, the General Assembly, and the various special procedures are working through their statements. None of them have answers about what comes after the norm if the norm finishes eroding.

UN News

3. Gaza: renewed military escalation, two UNRWA installations under shelter-in-place

UNRWA's Situation Report 223, covering 20-25 May, documents a renewed military escalation in Gaza over the past two weeks. Israeli forces have issued multiple evacuation orders and shelter-in-place orders affecting areas west of the Israeli-militarised Yellow Line zone, including in Gaza City, Deir al Balah, Maghazi, Bureij, and Nuseirat. Two UNRWA installations are now under shelter-in-place orders, including a school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat that is currently hosting displaced families.

The medical surveillance picture continues to deteriorate. UNRWA medical teams are reporting increases in ectoparasitic infections (scabies, lice), rodent bites, chickenpox cases, and acute watery diarrhoea, both in children under five and in older age groups. The combination of overcrowding, near-collapse of waste management, and shortages of antiparasitic medications and rodenticides is producing exactly the kind of compounding public health crisis that humanitarians have been warning about for months. The cumulative death toll in Gaza, per the Ministry of Health and OCHA, sits above 72,600.

The funding picture for Gaza response is also worth flagging. As of 4 May, just over 10% of the funding required for critical humanitarian operations in the occupied Palestinian territory in 2026 had been secured. The Flash Appeal is severely underfunded, restrictions on the entry of generators, engine oil, and spare parts are driving widespread system failures, and the killing of NGO workers (two were killed in separate incidents in April) is creating a chilling effect on local partner staffing. The Board of Peace briefed the Council last week on a 70% increase in aid since the ceasefire, which is technically accurate, but it's a 70% increase from a near-zero floor. The actual operational reality is that the system is barely holding.

UNRWA Situation Report 223 | OCHA OPT | OCHA Situation Report, 1 May

4. Horn of Africa: rainfall alert, and a window that may not be welcome

WFP and FAO issued a rainfall alert for the Horn of Africa yesterday. The framing matters here. Heavier-than-expected short rains in some parts of the region could partially relieve drought conditions, but they bring their own cascade of risks: flash flooding, landslides, the destruction of standing crops, and the spread of water-borne disease in displacement camps already short on sanitation.

The Somalia picture I covered last week sits inside this rainfall context. Three consecutive failed rainy seasons have already pushed six million Somalis (one in three) into crisis-level hunger. A heavy short-rains season could break the meteorological pattern. It could also wash out marginal cropland, displace more people from low-lying areas, and accelerate cholera transmission in IDP sites. WFP and FAO are pre-positioning for both scenarios, but the funding constraints I've been flagging make pre-positioning difficult.

The wider point. Climate variability in the Horn is increasingly bimodal (either too much rain or none) and the humanitarian system's ability to respond to either is being eroded by funding cuts. The 2022 Horn of Africa drought response, which arguably averted famine, cost roughly $2.4 billion. The 2026 equivalent ambition is not on the table because the money is not on the table. Worth tracking through the JJA season, when the picture will resolve one way or the other.

UN News World News in Brief

5. Rohingya: $710 million appeal launched, refugee population still in limbo

UNHCR launched a $710 million Joint Response Plan appeal yesterday for the Rohingya refugee response, covering Bangladesh and the wider region. The figure reflects what would be required to maintain basic services and protection for roughly one million Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar and Bhasan Char, alongside support for new arrivals and the small but growing populations in Malaysia, Indonesia, and India.

The context is grim. Funding for the Rohingya response has been declining year on year since 2022, and the 2025 plan closed badly underfunded. WFP food rations in Cox's Bazar have been cut multiple times, with the cumulative effect that the refugee population is now chronically under-nourished. Conditions in Rakhine State, on the Myanmar side, have deteriorated through 2025 and into 2026, with renewed violence between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army displacing additional populations. Return remains impossible. Resettlement remains negligible. The refugee population is, in practical terms, in long-term limbo with declining humanitarian support.

The $710 million ask is the floor, not the ceiling. Whether it gets met will say a lot about whether the international community is prepared to sustain protection for one of the most well-documented mass atrocity refugee populations of the past decade. Eight years after the August 2017 events that pushed roughly 750,000 Rohingya across the border, the answer to that question is getting harder to predict.

UN News World News in Brief

Ebola is the file to watch most closely today and through the rest of the week. The Council is likely to take it up later this week, and Tedros is expected to brief again.

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The flotilla story has moved fast overnight: all 430 activists are out, deported via Turkey, but the political fallout is escalating. Ireland's Taoiseach is in Paris today asking Macron to put the EU-Israel Association Agreement on the summit agenda. The Ebola picture is now officially the third-largest outbreak on record, five days after being declared. Lebanon's death toll since March has crossed 2,896 with no meaningful ceasefire in practice. Somalia's WFP funding clock is ticking toward July. And the EU activated its civil protection mechanism this week for a Hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship that's worth flagging before the weekend.

Five stories. If any of this matters to you week to week, you can subscribe here and get it in your inbox every morning.

1. Flotilla: 430 activists out, but the political wave is just starting

All 430 activists detained by Israeli naval forces after the Global Sumud Flotilla interception have been deported, routed through Ramon airport near Eilat and flown to Istanbul. Among them, fourteen Irish citizens including Margaret Connolly, sister of President Catherine Connolly. They arrived in Turkey yesterday afternoon. Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee confirmed the Irish nationals were met by embassy representatives on arrival.

What tipped the release, at least partly, was footage. Israel's far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video on social media showing detained activists kneeling on the deck of a military vessel, hands bound behind their backs, foreheads to the ground, the Israeli national anthem playing in the background. Ben-Gvir can be heard taunting them. The footage went everywhere. Netanyahu subsequently said Ben-Gvir's conduct was "not in line with Israel's values and norms," which is a remarkable thing to say about your own cabinet minister. It didn't stop him defending the interception itself as action against "provocative flotillas of Hamas terrorist supporters."

Ireland's Taoiseach Micheál Martin is in Paris today meeting Macron. He has written to European Council President António Costa asking for the EU-Israel Association Agreement to be put on the agenda at the upcoming EU summit. Tánaiste Simon Harris called the detention "despicable and cannot be consequence-free." Whether Europe follows through is a different question. But the political cost of the interception is measurably higher than Israel appears to have anticipated, and the 54-boat flotilla was carrying civilians from dozens of countries including several EU member states. That is not a story that closes quietly.

Irish Times | Irish Central | RTÉ

2. Ebola: third-largest outbreak on record, five days in

Wednesday's WHO press briefing contained a line that stopped the room: this outbreak is already the third-largest Ebola outbreak on record. Five days after the PHEIC declaration. WHO Director-General Tedros confirmed at the briefing that there are now almost 600 suspected cases and 139 suspected deaths. Fifty-one confirmed cases spread across 11 health zones in Ituri and Nord-Kivu, including the city of Goma. Two confirmed cases in Kampala, one of them fatal. An American medical missionary transferred to Germany for treatment.

The reason the numbers are so high so fast is that the virus was circulating undetected for months. WHO believes the first suspected death was on 20 April, nearly a month before the outbreak was officially declared. The Bundibugyo strain doesn't respond well to standard field tests, which are calibrated for the Zaire strain responsible for most of DRC's previous outbreaks. By the time positive results came back from specialist labs, the virus had already seeded itself across multiple health zones and into an urban centre. Tedros said plainly: "We expect those numbers to keep increasing, given the amount of time the virus was circulating before the outbreak was detected."

The US has committed funding for up to 50 treatment clinics across affected regions. Uganda postponed Martyrs' Day celebrations, which draw up to two million people. The response is real. The challenge is that it's chasing a virus in conflict-affected Ituri, a province where insecurity already limits movement for response teams and patients alike. The 2000 Bundibugyo outbreak was contained at 149 cases in a rural Ugandan district. This one started there and moved to Goma before it was even detected.

WHO DG briefing, 20 May | Al Jazeera | NPR

3. Lebanon: 2,896 dead, ceasefire a formality

OCHA's latest Lebanon figures: 2,896 killed and 8,824 injured since the escalation of hostilities began on 2 March. More than one million people (one in five Lebanese) displaced. That's the cumulative picture. The week-by-week picture is that strikes have continued daily under a ceasefire that was technically extended for 45 days on 17 April. The Lebanese Health Ministry said 22 people were killed in Israeli attacks in the 24 hours following the extension announcement alone. Over the past weekend, 87 people were killed and more than 100 strikes were recorded in a single day.

This week added another healthcare incident: two paramedics affiliated with the Islamic Health Committee were killed in airstrikes targeting health-related sites in the towns of Qalaway and Tibnin in southern Lebanon. OCHA has now documented 158 attacks on healthcare facilities and personnel since the March escalation, resulting in 108 deaths and 249 injuries. That's an attack on a health facility or health worker roughly every twelve hours over eleven weeks.

One detail that hasn't received enough attention: at least nine bridges along the Litani River and its tributary were struck by Israel between 12 March and 8 April. As of now, the Qasmieh Bridge is the only crossing connecting southern Lebanon with the rest of the country. For the tens of thousands of residents still south of the Litani (and for the humanitarian convoys trying to reach them), there is one road left. OCHA has been flagging this for weeks. It hasn't changed.

OCHA Lebanon | HRW, April 10 | Security Council Report

4. Somalia: ten weeks to July, and WFP needs $131 million

We've covered the Somalia picture several times this week, but Friday is a good moment to consolidate the numbers before the weekend, because the clock is real.

WFP requires $131 million to continue supporting the most vulnerable people in Somalia through October 2026. Without it, operations could halt by July. WFP is the largest humanitarian organisation in Somalia and manages roughly 90% of the food security response. It has already reduced the number of people it can reach from two million to 500,000. The six million people now facing acute hunger (one in three Somalis, including two million at emergency levels) are not an abstraction. They are people making the calculation, right now, of whether to sell the last goat, whether to pull the children out of school, whether to move toward a city that may or may not have a camp with space.

The 2022 comparison keeps coming up, and it's the right one. In 2022, Somalia was on the brink, and an emergency donor mobilisation (which reached 8 million people at its peak) held the line. The warning signs today are the same. The difference, as WFP's Somalia country director Hameed Nuru put it: "This time there's no help available." That's not rhetoric. The systems are in place, the people are registered, the infrastructure exists. The $131 million is a concrete ask with a concrete deadline. Whether it gets answered in the next few weeks will determine whether the July cutoff becomes a famine.

WFP Somalia | UN News | WFP story, 7 May

5. Hantavirus: WHO tracing eight cases after three cruise ship deaths

Worth flagging before the weekend because this one is still developing and hasn't been well covered in humanitarian circles.

Three passengers aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship died from Hantavirus earlier this month, prompting Spain to activate the EU Civil Protection Mechanism on 6 May. WHO is currently tracing eight cases linked to the vessel. Hantavirus, unlike Ebola, is not transmitted person-to-person, it spreads through contact with infected rodents or their droppings. That limits the outbreak risk significantly. But three deaths on a cruise ship from a rodent-borne hemorrhagic fever, traced back to port stops in specific locations, raises questions about where and how the exposures occurred that have not yet been publicly answered.

The EU Emergency Response Coordination Centre coordinated the evacuation of people aboard the vessel. A handful of outlets drew comparisons to COVID-19, which is almost certainly overblown, the transmission dynamics are entirely different. But the WHO is treating it with enough seriousness to run active contact tracing across multiple countries, and the EU civil protection apparatus being activated for a shipborne infectious disease is unusual enough to log. Coming on the same week as the Ebola PHEIC, it's a reminder that the global health security architecture is being asked to run several parallel responses simultaneously with budgets that have been under pressure since 2025.

EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid

That's the week. The Ebola trajectory and the Somalia funding deadline are the two files to watch most closely over the weekend. The flotilla political fallout will develop through the EU summit conversation. Back Monday with the weekend round-up.

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The Ebola picture has shifted overnight in ways that change the calculus. The outbreak is no longer just Ituri, confirmed cases are now in Goma. The Board of Peace briefs the Security Council this morning on its six-month Gaza progress report, and HRW published yesterday what is essentially a dissenting annex. Sudan's malnutrition figures have crossed a threshold that warrants flagging separately from the famine coverage we've been running. And two stories worth holding from yesterday's wires: a Hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship that activated the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, and a quiet but significant shift in the refugee self-reliance debate that The New Humanitarian flagged yesterday.

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1. Ebola: Goma. This changes things.

Yesterday's WHO Director-General briefing was the one to read. As of 20 May, confirmed cases in DRC have reached 51, spread across 11 health zones in Ituri and (and this is new) Nord-Kivu Province, including the city of Goma. Tedros said: "We know the scale of the epidemic in DRC is much larger." The suspected case count stands at 336, with 88 deaths in DRC and one confirmed death in Uganda.

Goma is not Bunia. Goma is a city of over two million people on the Rwandan border, with an international airport, a large humanitarian presence, and displacement camps that have been absorbing hundreds of thousands of people from eastern DRC's ongoing conflicts. It is one of the most connected and transit-heavy cities in central Africa. The confirmation of Bundibugyo virus cases there is a different kind of problem than cases in a conflict-affected rural province.

The US response has escalated accordingly. The State Department issued Level 4 travel advisories for DRC, Uganda, and (notably) South Sudan. $23 million in bilateral foreign assistance was mobilised over the weekend. Yesterday, the US announced funding for up to 50 treatment clinics in affected regions. Asymptomatic American citizens with high-risk exposures are being moved to Germany and the Czech Republic. Uganda has postponed its annual Martyrs' Day celebrations, which typically draw up to two million people. That last one is worth registering: a head of state cancelling a major national event because of an Ebola outbreak is a serious signal about how Kampala is reading the risk.

WHO DG briefing, 20 May | CDC situation summary | US State Department update

2. Gaza: the Board of Peace briefs the Council today, and HRW has notes

The Board of Peace, established under Security Council Resolution 2803 to assess parties' compliance with the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, briefs the Council this morning on its six-month progress report. The headline from the Board's 15 May report: aid distributed by UN agencies and partners increased by over 70% during the reporting period compared to pre-ceasefire levels, and "basic food needs have been stabilized for the first time since 2023."

Human Rights Watch published a response yesterday that is worth reading alongside the Board's figures. The 70% increase, HRW notes, leaves out that aid volumes have fallen since early 2026, have not recovered to pre-February levels since Israeli-US military operations against Iran began on 28 February, and have never reached the minimum the UN says is needed. Since that date, Israeli authorities re-imposed severe restrictions on aid flows. Continuing Israeli attacks since the October ceasefire have killed at least 856 Palestinians and wounded 2,463 others, per the Gaza Health Ministry. Four UN agencies warned in December 2025 that famine, pushed back through the ceasefire, could rapidly return without sustained access. WCK, one of the largest food relief operations in Gaza right now, says it is returning to the meal volumes it was delivering before the ceasefire, which is a careful way of saying things have deteriorated.

Adam Coogle, HRW's Middle East deputy director, put it plainly: "Palestinians in Gaza are still hungry, still cannot reach medical care, and civilians are still being killed. Whatever the Board of Peace tells the Security Council, that is what life looks like six months in." The Council briefing is at 10 a.m.

HRW report, 19 May | OCHA six-month ceasefire review

3. Sudan: 4.2 million malnutrition cases expected in 2026

We've been covering the famine in El Fasher and Kadugli for weeks, but a figure from the IPC's February alert deserves a standalone mention because it puts the malnutrition picture in national scale.

Across Sudan, nearly 4.2 million cases of acute malnutrition are now projected for 2026, including more than 800,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition. Both figures represent a sharp increase on 2025 levels. The Famine Review Committee has confirmed famine (IPC Phase 5) in El Fasher and Kadugli, towns largely cut off from commercial supply and humanitarian access. Conditions in Dilling, South Kordofan, are likely similar to Kadugli, but cannot be formally classified due to insufficient data, which is itself a consequence of restricted access and ongoing hostilities. In at least 20 other areas across Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan, famine risk is classified as high under plausible conflict scenarios.

The IPC note that conditions are too volatile to project outcomes for around 841,000 people in the hardest-hit areas. It's a description of a situation where even the measurement of suffering has broken down. The 2026 humanitarian appeal for Sudan is 16% funded. The RSF continues to operate near Kadugli. The lean season starts in a matter of weeks.

IPC Sudan analysis | WFP Sudan | UN News on Sudan malnutrition

4. Hantavirus: EU activates civil protection mechanism over cruise ship outbreak

A different kind of health emergency, and one that has received almost no coverage in humanitarian circles despite being genuinely significant.

On 6 May, Spain activated the EU Civil Protection Mechanism after a Hantavirus outbreak was confirmed aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship operating in a European maritime zone. The EU's Emergency Response Coordination Centre has been coordinating the safe evacuation of people on board. Hantavirus is not transmitted person-to-person (it is typically spread through contact with infected rodents or their droppings) but an outbreak on a closed vessel with a large number of passengers creates serious containment challenges. The EU's civil protection apparatus, which normally deals with wildfires, floods, and earthquakes, being activated for a shipborne infectious disease outbreak is unusual enough to flag.

The comparison to COVID-19 is being drawn in some quarters, which is almost certainly premature. But the EU Civil Protection Mechanism's involvement signals that at least some governments are treating this with more seriousness than the news coverage suggests. We'll follow this one.

EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid

5. Refugees: the self-reliance question nobody has answered

The New Humanitarian published a piece yesterday that is worth twenty minutes of your time if you haven't read it. The question it raises: can refugee self-reliance genuinely exist in an economy marked by desperate scarcity?

It's a question that sits under a lot of the policy conversation in the building right now, particularly as the funding collapse forces humanitarian systems toward exit strategies that assume host-country integration can substitute for sustained assistance. The logic is appealing: build livelihoods, reduce dependency, hand over to development actors. The problem is that it assumes a functioning economy for refugees to be self-reliant within. In most of the contexts where this conversation is happening (South Sudan, DRC, Sudan, Somalia) the host communities themselves are in IPC Phase 3 or above. Asking a refugee family to achieve self-reliance in a host district where one in three people is food insecure is a policy position, but it is not a protection outcome.

This tension is going to shape the humanitarian-development nexus debate for the next several years, as donor governments push for graduation from humanitarian assistance and the evidence base for what graduation actually delivers remains thin. Worth tracking, and worth having a view on before the next pledging cycle.

The New Humanitarian, 19 May

The Ebola-in-Goma development is the file to watch most closely today. The Security Council briefing on Gaza this morning will also generate reactions worth following. Back tomorrow.

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TL;DR

Ebola case counts from Ituri are climbing and the cross-border picture in Uganda is getting more complicated. Somalia's window is narrowing faster than the funding conversation is moving. Gaza's aid access numbers, buried in last week's OCHA situation report, deserve more attention than they've been getting — only one in two trucks from Egypt is actually offloading. In the West Bank, demolition rates have hit a seventeen-year high. And a piece worth reading this morning from the broader system: what "hyper-prioritisation" (the phrase the humanitarian system uses to describe how it's coping with funding collapse) actually looks like when you're on the receiving end of it.

Five stories below.

1. Ebola: case counts climbing, Uganda picture more complicated than first reported

Seventy-two hours since the PHEIC declaration and the Ituri numbers are moving in the wrong direction. The 336 suspected cases and 10 confirmed cases from Sunday's WHO figures are almost certainly already out of date — field reporting from conflict-affected provinces runs days behind real-time, and the positivity rate on initial samples (eight out of thirteen) suggests detection is lagging transmission. MSF teams on the ground in Ituri describe communities that were already struggling to access healthcare before the outbreak, in areas where insecurity limits movement for both patients and response teams.

Uganda is the part of this that warrants watching most closely today. The two confirmed cases in Kampala both involved people who had travelled from DRC. Ugandan health authorities have now traced contacts and placed a number of people under observation in the capital, but Kampala is a city of three million and the Bundibugyo strain (only identified twice before in history, with no approved vaccine or treatment) is not well understood in terms of its transmission dynamics in urban settings. The 2000 Bundibugyo outbreak in Uganda was contained at 149 cases and 37 deaths, but it was contained in a rural district, not a capital city with international air connections.

Africa CDC and WHO are coordinating the response. CDC has more than thirty staff in-country. The US has limited entry from the affected region. What nobody has yet said publicly, but what the PHEIC declaration implies, is that the window for containment is probably weeks, not months. The next set of case figures out of Ituri will say a lot.

WHO PHEIC declaration | NPR

2. Somalia: WFP may stop food assistance by July

The joint FAO-OCHA-UNICEF-WFP statement from last week put the headline number at six million people in acute hunger. The number underneath it, from WFP's country director Hameed Nuru, is the one that should be driving urgent action: WFP is currently reaching one in ten people in urgent need. Last year it reached more than two million. If funding doesn't arrive, emergency food assistance stops altogether in July. July is ten weeks away.

Three consecutive failed rainy seasons. The lowest seasonal crop harvest in thirty years. Food prices up 70% in some areas, driven partly by supply chain disruption from the Middle East conflict. Fuel up 150%. 1.9 million children acutely malnourished, 493,000 of them severely so, at twelve times the mortality risk of a well-nourished child. The IRC's Somalia team noted this week that famine risk in Bay and Bakool regions is now credible if the Gu rains continue to underperform. The IPC classification for those regions, if conditions deteriorate further, would be Phase 5 — Catastrophe. Somalia was there in 2011. A quarter of a million people died.

WFP says it has 1.7 million biometrically registered people who could receive emergency cash immediately if the funding came in. The infrastructure exists. The people are registered. The money isn't there. Matthew Hollingworth, WFP's Assistant Executive Director, put it plainly last week: "Hunger is rising. Coping strategies are collapsing. And the window is starting to close."

UN News | WFP Somalia

3. Gaza: one in two trucks from Egypt not offloading

OCHA's humanitarian situation report from 15 May contains a figure that hasn't received the attention it deserves. Between 1 and 11 May, only one in every two aid trucks arriving from Egypt was actually offloading at Israeli-controlled crossings along Gaza's perimeter. The Logistics Cluster puts the offloading rate at 78% in that period, with the Egyptian corridor specifically at 69%. Fourteen percent of supplies manifested for entry were turned back entirely, returned to their points of origin after receiving initial approval.

In April, the total volume of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza increased by 4% compared to March, from around 47,500 to 49,500 offloaded pallets. That sounds like progress until you place it against the scale of need. Forty-three thousand people in Gaza have sustained life-changing injuries, per WHO's latest estimate. Rehabilitation services are overstretched to the point of dysfunction. The UNRWA ban on operations inside Israel and the occupied territory, in effect since January, continues to restrict access in ways that no other mechanism has replaced.

In the West Bank, the demolition picture is its own emergency. Between 5 and 11 May, nearly 90% of the 45 Palestinian-owned structures demolished were used for agricultural, livelihood, water, or sanitation purposes, not residential buildings, but the infrastructure that keeps farming communities viable. OCHA's longer-term data is stark: 2026 has already recorded the highest monthly average of people displaced due to demolitions in over seventeen years of UN records. And in Khashem ad Daraj in the Hebron governorate, a family had their residential tent confiscated and their animal shelter demolished. It was their second displacement this year. The first was in February.

OCHA Humanitarian Situation Report, 15 May

4. West Bank: settler attacks averaging six incidents per day

Worth pulling this out as a separate story because the cumulative picture is one that tends to get buried beneath the Gaza figures and doesn't receive proportionate attention.

From January to April 2026, OCHA documented over 800 settler attacks that caused casualties or property damage, spread across 220 communities. That's an average of six incidents per day, sustained over four months. The attacks are not evenly distributed: between 21 and 27 April, 26 Palestinians including three children were injured in two attacks in Beit Imrin and Jalud, both in Nablus governorate. Seven houses and four vehicles were damaged in those two incidents alone. Al Mughayyir village has seen eleven Palestinians killed since 2017, four of them in 2025 and 2026. Settler attacks on schools and education infrastructure are, per OCHA, now generating sufficient pressure on rural families that some are leaving their communities permanently.

There's a protection dimension here that goes beyond the violence itself. Many of the communities affected are in Area C, where Palestinian construction is tightly restricted and where the demolition of agricultural and livelihood structures is ongoing. When a family loses a water cistern, a sheep pen, a greenhouse, and then faces a credible threat of violence from neighbouring settlers, the calculation about whether to stay becomes very difficult. Population transfer through cumulative pressure is not a new phenomenon in the West Bank, but the pace has accelerated in 2026. The UN's Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process flagged this pattern in his last briefing to the Council. It's worth asking what the Council intends to do about it.

OCHA Humanitarian Situation Report, 15 May | OCHA OPT

5. The system: what hyper-prioritisation actually looks like

A word that's been circulating in the corridors here since Tom Fletcher launched it in the GHO: hyper-prioritisation. It's a bureaucratic phrase for something that happens to real people, so it's worth unpacking.

The GHO estimates 239 million people in need globally. The system is targeting 135 million. Within that, a hyper-prioritised core of 87 million (those with the most acute, immediately life-threatening needs) is the realistic ambition given the funding environment. The 2025 GHO closed at 27.8% funded. The concern is that 2026 follows the same path.

What does de-prioritisation look like in practice? Yemen: funding cuts forced the closure of 377 outpatient therapeutic programme sites and 2,376 supplementary feeding sites, cutting planned nutrition targeting from 7.8 million to two million. Somalia: WFP has shrunk from reaching more than two million people to one in ten, and has stopped emergency food in thirty districts for lack of funds — including Maxamed's village, per WFP's own reporting, where a family is watching their options run out. Afghanistan: 440 clinics closed or scaled back in a single year, and the share of the population unable to access healthcare jumped from 16% to 23%. Gaza: supplies manifested and approved for entry are being turned back at the crossing.

The OCHA framing, in the GHO launch, is worth keeping: "Hyper-prioritisation is a symptom of underfunding, not a solution to it." The phrase was designed to be honest about what the system is doing. The honest follow-up is that the people who fall outside the hyper-prioritised core don't disappear. They just become invisible to the response, and more vulnerable to the next shock.

OCHA GHO 2026 | Concern USA on the GHO

Ebola and Somalia are the two files moving fastest this week. Expect follow-up on both before Friday. The West Bank demolition data is worth a deeper look, may return to it Thursday. You can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails.

TL;DR

The Ebola PHEIC is 48 hours old and the case count is already moving. Somalia's famine warning, which has been building for weeks, landed in full force yesterday with a joint statement from FAO, OCHA, UNICEF, and WFP: six million people, one in three Somalis, in acute hunger. Sudan keeps producing the same terrible headlines: civilian vehicles struck, electricity infrastructure hit, thousands displaced in a single day. There's a follow-up worth flagging on the Gaza flotilla interception. And this morning, the Secretary-General opens the CERF pledging conference in the ECOSOC Chamber downstairs; and the timing, given everything else on this list, is not lost on anyone in the building.

Five stories below.

1. Ebola: 336 suspected cases, no vaccine, and it's already crossed into Uganda

Forty-eight hours since WHO declared the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, and the numbers are not moving in the right direction. As of Sunday, CDC had recorded 10 confirmed cases and 336 suspected cases, with more than 100 suspected deaths. Two confirmed cases in Kampala, Uganda's capital, both from people who had travelled from DRC's Ituri province. The WHO determination cited a positivity rate of eight positive samples out of 13 collected across different areas, which, if it holds, suggests the outbreak is considerably larger than what's being detected and reported.

The strain is the problem: Bundibugyo virus has only been reported twice before in history. There are no approved vaccines or treatments. The experimental candidate that exists was tested on monkeys at around 50% efficacy and has never been assessed in humans. That's the situation: a potentially fast-moving outbreak, in one of DRC's most conflict-affected and under-served provinces, with no medical countermeasures. MSF's emergency programme manager, Trish Newport, said on Saturday that in Ituri many people already struggle to access healthcare and live with ongoing insecurity, making rapid action critical. She said this before the PHEIC was even declared.

The US invoked a public health law yesterday limiting entry from the affected region. More than 30 CDC staff are in-country. Africa CDC is leading the regional response. The Secretary-General's office has not yet issued a specific statement on the outbreak beyond welcoming the WHO declaration. Watch the next 72 hours of case reporting from Ituri closely, that's where the trajectory becomes clearer.

WHO PHEIC declaration | CNN

2. Somalia: one in three Somalis in acute hunger, WFP reaching one in ten

The joint statement from FAO, OCHA, UNICEF, and WFP, released Friday and flagged again yesterday, puts the number at six million people (31% of Somalia's population) in crisis levels of food insecurity or worse. Nearly two million of them are already at IPC Phase 4, emergency conditions, one step below famine. That figure has tripled in less than a year. 1.9 million children are acutely malnourished, and of those, 493,000 have severe acute malnutrition, which carries a mortality risk twelve times higher than a well-nourished child.

WFP's Matthew Hollingworth, who returned from Somalia last week, gave one number that cuts through everything else. WFP is currently reaching one in ten people in urgent need of food assistance. Last year it was reaching more than two million. The agency warns that without immediate funding, it risks halting emergency assistance altogether by July. Hameed Nuru, WFP's country director, put it plainly: "Entire families have had to once again make the toughest choices. Sell the little assets they had, reduce or completely cut meals, and leave everything behind to find help, but this time there's no help available."

The drivers include three consecutive failed rainy seasons (the lowest seasonal crop harvest in thirty years) and the global price shock from the Middle East conflict. Food prices have risen 70% in some areas of Somalia. Fuel is up 150%. Both make delivering aid harder and more expensive at exactly the moment when funding has collapsed. The 2022 famine was averted by an unprecedented scale-up. That scale-up is not happening this time, because the money isn't there.

UN News | IRC press release

3. Sudan: civilian vehicles hit, electricity cut, thousands flee Blue Nile

Another bad weekend in Sudan, though by now that phrase barely covers it. On Saturday, more than 17 people were killed when a civilian truck travelling from Khumi village toward Abu Zabad in West Kordofan State was struck. Drone strikes were reported across North and South Darfur, including near the Adré border crossing where a fire destroyed parts of Adikong market and a neighbouring village, a critical humanitarian and commercial supply route, now damaged. In Blue Nile State, a strike on a major electricity station knocked out power across Damazin, the capital, disrupting water and health services.

IOM reported that heightened insecurity in Blue Nile State displaced more than 4,600 people from Al Kurmuk locality on Thursday alone. Meanwhile, in El Fasher, insecurity is continuing to push people from surrounding villages into the city, where acute shortages of food, water, and essential services make surviving each week harder. Nearly 15,000 people have arrived in Tawila in recent weeks, overwhelming communities that were already stretched. In Northern State, thousands of people escaping the violence in Darfur and Kordofan are arriving in Ad Dabbah, where partners are scaling up at Al Afad camp (currently hosting around 11,000 people) though critical gaps remain because of funding shortfalls.

Nearly 19.5 million people now face crisis levels of hunger in Sudan. The RSF is twenty kilometres from Kadugli. The 2026 humanitarian appeal is 16% funded.

OCHA Sudan | UN Press Briefing

4. Gaza: flotilla fallout, and the Israeli Cabinet approves a new military compound at UNRWA's former HQ

A bit more detail on Sunday's flotilla interception, which is still developing. The Global Sumud Flotilla, carrying 17 vessels and dozens of activists from multiple countries, was intercepted by Israeli military vessels in international waters off Cyprus. Organizers say contact was lost with nearly two dozen boats in the eastern Mediterranean. The flotilla was attempting to breach the maritime blockade to deliver humanitarian aid. As of this morning, Israeli authorities have not provided a full account of the operation or the status of those on board. Several governments whose nationals were on the vessels have requested consular access.

The Israeli Cabinet also approved plans over the weekend to build a military compound at the former UNRWA headquarters site in Gaza. The decision follows Israel's ban on UNRWA operations inside Israel and the occupied territory, which came into effect in January and has severely restricted humanitarian access. UNRWA's Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini called the plans an attempt to dismantle UNRWA's operational capacity permanently and called on member states to intervene. The compound plan and the flotilla interception will both likely be raised at the Council this week.

On the wider Gaza picture, the cumulative death toll per the Ministry of Health stands at more than 72,600 as of last week. Stocks of food, medicine, and fuel inside the Strip remain critically low. The northern Gaza ceasefire, declared in October, has held in some areas and not in others. The regional ceasefire agreed in April is technically in effect and practically meaningless.

Democracy Now / Havana Times

5. CERF pledging conference: the Secretary-General is downstairs, making the ask

This morning at 10 a.m., in the ECOSOC Chamber, the Secretary-General opens the annual CERF high-level pledging event, co-hosted this year by Ireland and the Philippines. The ask is not complicated. CERF is the UN's emergency fund, the money that moves fast when a crisis breaks, before bilateral donor decisions catch up. It's what allowed the system to respond to Sudan in the first weeks of the war in 2023 and to Gaza in October of that year.

The GHO makes the frame clear. The 2026 global humanitarian appeal needs $23 billion to reach 87 million people. CERF is not $23 billion, it's a fraction of that, typically around $700-800 million a year when fully subscribed. But it's the flexible, fast-moving fraction that makes everything else work. It's also, notably, the part of the system that the US has historically supported even when bilateral aid has been cut. Whether that continues is one of the questions today's event will answer, at least partially.

Tom Fletcher, in the GHO launch remarks, put the broader funding ask in a sentence that has been circulating: "If the world can spend $2.7 trillion on defence last year, surely it can spend just over one percent of that on helping the most vulnerable?" The CERF event is, in one sense, a smaller version of that argument, made in a room of people who already agree with it. The question is whether agreement translates into pledges, and whether pledges translate into disbursements, before July, when WFP says it may have to stop food assistance in Somalia altogether.

CERF pledging event | OCHA GHO 2026

Watch for outcomes from the CERF pledging event later today. The Somalia and Ebola trajectories are the two files moving fastest right now, both will likely require follow-up dispatches before the week is out. You can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails.

TL;DR

WHO declared the Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern on Sunday, the highest alert it can issue short of a pandemic declaration. Israeli forces intercepted the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla in international waters Sunday morning. Lebanon's ceasefire, technically extended by 45 days on Friday, was violated within hours, with three paramedics among the dead. Russia launched its largest aerial assault of the war on Ukraine over the weekend, killing dozens of civilians. And in Sudan, drone strikes hit civilian trucks and electricity infrastructure while thousands more were displaced from Blue Nile State.

Five stories below.

1. DRC/Uganda: WHO calls Ebola a global health emergency

On Sunday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the Ebola outbreak in DRC's Ituri province and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern. The figures as of Sunday: more than 300 suspected cases and 88 deaths. Ten confirmed. Two confirmed cases in Kampala, Uganda's capital, both involving people who had travelled from DRC, confirmed within 24 hours of each other on 15 and 16 May.

The strain matters. This is the Bundibugyo virus, only the third time it has been reported in history. There are no approved vaccines or treatments for it. The experimental candidate that exists has only been tested on monkeys, with around 50% efficacy, and hasn't been assessed in humans. The WHO statement is explicit: the high positivity rate of initial samples (eight positives among 13 collected across different areas), the spread across multiple health zones, the cross-border transmission, and the deaths among healthcare workers all suggest the outbreak is considerably larger than what's currently being detected. Ituri is also one of the DRC provinces already running a conflict-driven humanitarian crisis, with high population mobility, poor healthcare infrastructure, and ongoing insecurity. The 2018-19 North Kivu and Ituri Ebola outbreak, caused by a different strain, infected more than 3,400 people and killed over 2,200. Nobody is saying we're heading there. But that's the context people in the building are carrying around.

Over 30 CDC staff are already in DRC. The US invoked a public health law this morning limiting entry from the affected region. Africa CDC is leading the regional response. MSF's emergency programme manager said on Saturday that in Ituri many people already struggle to access healthcare and live with ongoing insecurity, making rapid action critical.

WHO PHEIC declaration | CNN explainer | NPR

2. Gaza: the flotilla intercepted, the blockade holds

Israeli military vessels intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters off the coast of Cyprus on Sunday. Seventeen boats stopped, contact lost with close to two dozen vessels in the eastern Mediterranean. The flotilla was attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza and breach the maritime blockade that has been in place since October 2023.

One of the activists on board, Martina Comparelli, got a message out before contact was lost. "We are being intercepted in broad daylight. The occupation forces have no shame whatsoever. They're doing it in front of the whole world, because they know that everything they did in the past has been met with full impunity." That's the kind of line that's going to circulate.

The weekend also brought word that the Israeli Cabinet approved plans to build a military compound at the former UNRWA headquarters site in Gaza. And on Friday, Israeli forces assassinated Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the head of Hamas's military wing, in a strike on a residential building in Gaza City. The ceasefire that was announced in early April is effectively dead as a practical matter, whatever its technical status. More on the Lebanon angle below.

Democracy Now / Havana Times

3. Lebanon: 670 dead since April ceasefire, paramedics killed Friday

The US State Department announced on Friday that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to extend the ceasefire by 45 days. Hours later, Israeli forces killed at least six people in southern Lebanon, including three paramedics who were responding to an earlier incident in the towns of Qalaway and Tibnin when they were struck. The strikes continued through the weekend, killing at least five more people and injuring over a dozen.

Since the ceasefire first came into effect in mid-April, more than 670 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon. The number killed since the escalation began in early March is approaching 3,000. WHO has recorded 158 attacks on healthcare facilities and personnel since March, resulting in 108 deaths and 249 injuries. More than 1 million people, roughly one in five Lebanese, have been displaced. Over the weekend, renewed displacement orders were issued for multiple towns and villages in southern Lebanon and the Nabatieh governorate, pushing more families into already-strained collective shelters.

OCHA notes that displaced people (particularly pregnant women) face limited access to adequate food, which is compounding health risks. Partners have managed to deliver: more than 585 hospital admissions supported, 18,000 vaccine doses administered, 4,300 prenatal care consultations, 8.4 million meals distributed. The response is real, so is the gap between what's being delivered and what's needed.

OCHA/GlobalSecurity briefing | Havana Times

4. Sudan: civilian trucks hit, 4,600 displaced in a single day

Three stories from the Sudan file over the weekend, none of them good.

On Saturday, more than 17 people were killed when a civilian truck travelling from Khumi village toward Abu Zabad in West Kordofan State was struck. Drone strikes were reported in both North and South Darfur States, including near the border crossing at Al Tina and in Nyala. And in Blue Nile State (where El Fasher's fate is being watched as a possible preview) an airstrike on a major electricity station caused widespread blackouts across the capital Damazin, cutting water and health services. IOM reports that heightened insecurity in Blue Nile State displaced more than 4,600 people from villages in Al Kurmuk locality on Thursday alone.

In El Fasher itself, insecurity continues to push people from surrounding villages into the city, while those already there face acute shortages of food, water, and essential services. Nearly 15,000 people have arrived in Tawila in recent weeks, overwhelming host communities that were already stretched before this latest wave.

OCHA's line (that attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure are clear violations of IHL and must stop immediately) is accurate and has been said many times. What follows from it, in terms of any enforcement mechanism, remains the question that nobody in the Council has answered.

UN Press Briefing | OCHA top news

5. Ukraine: largest aerial assault of the war, prisoner exchange holds

Russia launched what officials and analysts are describing as the largest sustained aerial assault of the war between Friday and Sunday: more than 1,600 drones and missiles directed at Kyiv and other cities. At least 30 people were killed. OCHA's weekend reporting confirmed over 100 civilian casualties between Friday and Sunday morning, including nearly 20 deaths and two children killed. The regions of Sumy, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Zaporizhzhia were hit hardest. Ukraine's Energy Ministry reported fresh attacks on critical facilities in at least eight regions.

The one thing that held: the prisoner exchange. Russia and Ukraine each released 205 prisoners of war over the weekend, the first stage of a larger 1,000-for-1,000 agreement that Zelensky confirmed publicly. Many of the freed Ukrainian troops had been captured during the siege of Mariupol in 2022. Kyiv's human rights commissioner described it as a continuation of recent exchanges. It is one of the very few things the two sides have managed to do together while the war escalates everywhere else.

The OHCHR's February report is worth keeping in mind as the prisoner file develops. More than 1,700 Ukrainians remain arbitrarily detained and held in Russian prisons, many in critical health and denied medical care. Over 92% of released civilian detainees interviewed between 2023 and 2025 reported being tortured during captivity. The exchange is welcome. The broader picture is not.

Graphic News / Reuters | OCHA Ukraine

That's the weekend round-up. The Ebola PHEIC declaration is the story to watch most closely this week: the next 72 hours of case reporting from Ituri will tell us a lot about whether the containment effort is working. The flotilla interception will land at the Council. Sudan's Blue Nile trajectory is one to keep an eye on. You can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails.

TL;DR

A new Al Jazeera investigation on El Fasher came out Thursday. UNDP's Afghanistan review dropped midweek and is grim in a quiet way. MSF evacuated its hospital in Cité Soleil after the worst weekend Port-au-Prince has had in months. UNRWA's latest sitrep flags that the Yellow Line moved again, and five UNRWA installations are now caught up in it. And the ICRC's 2026 Outlook, which has been sitting on my desk for weeks, has quietly become the document people are citing in closed meetings. Five stories below.

1. El Fasher: the evidence keeps stacking up

Al Jazeera's Fault Lines published a long-form reconstruction of the El Fasher siege and massacre on Thursday, done jointly with Lighthouse Reports and the Sudan War Monitor. Survivor testimony, satellite imagery, RSF commanders' own statements. People shot on the roads out of the city. Bodies left where they fell. An earth barrier the RSF threw up around what's left of El Fasher to stop anyone else from getting out.

None of this is new, exactly. The February Fact-Finding Mission report found the hallmarks of genocide. The April OHCHR follow-up documented 6,000 killings in the three days after the city fell, and said the real number is almost certainly much higher. Minni Minnawi, the Darfur governor (and himself a Zaghawa, who lost family members in the massacre), has put the figure at 27,000 in the first three days. Kholood Khair at Confluence Advisory has said 100,000. Nobody really knows because there is no governance left to count.

What's different now is that the evidence has consolidated past the point where any serious actor can claim uncertainty. The ICC has already reported to the Council. The Fact-Finding Mission's findings are on the public record. The Council file on Sudan has been open all spring. The RSF is now twenty kilometres from Kadugli, where famine has been confirmed and where Volker Türk warned in January, in person, that El Fasher must not be repeated. We will see whether that warning means anything by the end of the month.

Al Jazeera, No Exit From El Fasher | UN News on the Fact-Finding Mission

2. Afghanistan: 440 clinics gone

The most useful thing in UNDP's Afghanistan Socioeconomic Review, out Wednesday, is one number. 440 clinics closed or scaled back services in 2025 because of funding shortages. The share of Afghans who can't access healthcare went from 16% to 23% in a single year. If you've been wondering what donor cuts actually look like at ground level, that's it.

The rest of the picture rhymes. Three in four Afghans can't meet basic needs. Roughly 28 million people are living in poverty. The economy grew 1.9% last year, which sounds positive until you notice the population grew 6.5% (mostly from the 2.9 million Afghans returned from Iran and Pakistan during 2025), and GDP per capita actually dropped by 2.1%. The returns alone pushed an extra 1.4 million people into hardship.

Stephen Rodriques, the UNDP RR, said the right thing in his statement: short-term relief isn't enough, what's needed is a pathway. He's not wrong, and he's also probably not going to get one. The architecture for what he's describing doesn't exist right now, and the donors who would have to build it are the same ones currently cutting. Afghanistan will be one of the largest humanitarian crises in 2026 by need, and one of the most underfunded by response, and those two facts have been true together for so long they almost feel like a single fact.

UN News on the UNDP review

3. Haiti: MSF pulls out of Cité Soleil

Rough weekend in Port-au-Prince. Fighting between rival gangs erupted Friday night across the northern neighbourhoods of the capital and pushed hundreds of families onto the road to the airport. AP spoke to Monique Verdieux, who is 56, who watched armed men burn houses on her street and ended up sleeping in the road, not knowing where her family had scattered to. "I am now sleeping in the street," she said. "It was unsafe to return."

MSF evacuated its Cité Soleil hospital on Sunday. In the preceding twelve hours the team had treated more than 40 gunshot victims and was sheltering 800 people who'd run to the hospital for safety. A security guard on the hospital grounds was hit by a stray bullet. He's stable. Davina Hayles, MSF's head of mission, said it was unthinkable that their teams and civilians should become victims of these clashes. Which, fine, but it stopped being unthinkable a while ago.

The Multinational Security Support mission authorised by the Council in September is supposed to be 5,550 people. The first foreign troops, from Chad, arrived in April. The rest are not yet on the ground. 1.4 million Haitians are displaced. Around 200,000 live in sites in the capital that are crowded and underfunded and not really sites so much as places where people are trying to survive. The Council is going to have to look at the mandate and the timeline again, and probably soon.

AP via Washington Times | Al Jazeera

4. Gaza: the Yellow Line moves, and the rats arrive

UNRWA's SitRep 221, covering 6 to 12 May, flags that the Yellow Line was extended eastward again, in both Gaza City and Khan Younis. Israeli tanks advanced. Five UNRWA installations are now either inside the militarised zone or right up against it, including two schools that are still being used as shelters. The expansion is going to make humanitarian work in those areas harder, and the people living around them more squeezed. That's the kind of sentence we keep writing month after month, with the noun "militarised zone" getting slightly larger each time.

The numbers OHCHR is working with: in April alone, at least 111 Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli forces, including 18 children and 7 women. The cumulative figures per the Ministry of Health, as reported by OCHA: 72,619 killed and 172,484 injured as of 6 May. Since March 2025 UNRWA has been blocked from bringing humanitarian personnel or pre-positioned aid into Gaza. Food, flour, shelter supplies for hundreds of thousands of people are sitting outside the Strip.

And then there are the rodents. UNRWA's Director of Health called it a clear sign of the near-collapse of Gaza's health system, which it is, but the language sanitises what's actually happening. People are being bitten in their tents. Skin infections from fleas are spreading. Shelters are infested. This is in the third year of the war, in a population that's been displaced an average of nine or ten times. In the West Bank, 45 Palestinians have been killed since the start of 2026. Israeli forces ran an operation in Kalandia Camp on 11 May that disrupted UNRWA services for several days.

UNRWA Situation Report #221

5. ICRC's Outlook is the document people are actually citing

Not breaking news. But worth flagging.

The ICRC's Humanitarian Outlook 2026, published alongside its global appeals in January, has slowly become the document people are quoting in closed-door meetings around the building. The reason is one sentence: "If what we are seeing in Gaza, eastern Congo, Sudan and Ukraine is the future of war, we should all be extremely concerned, as this would shake the very foundations of our humanity." That's a striking line for an ICRC document. They don't usually write that way. They write that way now because they think the situation warrants it.

The numbers underneath are bad. 338 attacks on humanitarian workers in 2024. Over 600 attacks on health facilities and personnel across 2023 and 2024. 25 Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers and staff killed in 2025. The Outlook tracks four converging trends, but the throughline is simple. International humanitarian law is being treated by a growing number of belligerents as advisory rather than binding, and the consequences are becoming visible at the speed of evening news.

I keep coming back to it because the institutional question it raises is the one nobody wants to ask out loud. If IHL keeps eroding at this pace, the work in front of the next SG isn't enforcing it harder. It's keeping it from becoming dead text. Worth a read this weekend if you haven't yet.

ICRC, Humanitarian Outlook 2026

That's the brief. Weekend's rarely quiet, so expect an update Monday if anything moves on Kadugli, Port-au-Prince, or the Sudan file at the Council. You can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails.