The Situation Report

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.

TL;DR

The US announced an additional $1.8 billion for the UN humanitarian system, bringing the total recent US contribution to $3.8 billion. A clearly marked UN convoy was struck by two drones in Kherson during an aid delivery, and OCHA's man in Ukraine is not mincing words about it. Russia and Ukraine reached a tentative deal that could see more than 1,600 conflict-related detainees released. Cuba's energy collapse is now firmly a humanitarian situation, and the UN team there is moving. And on the slow-burn beat, OCHA's noon briefing flagged 56 attacks on humanitarian workers in just the first four months of 2026. Five stories below.

1. Washington: $1.8 billion, and a sentence worth holding onto

The US announced an additional $1.8 billion for UN-coordinated humanitarian operations on Wednesday, with the actual briefing happening Thursday. Tom Fletcher, the Emergency Relief Coordinator, did a joint press conference with Ambassador Mike Waltz and the State Department's Jeremy Lewin. The total US humanitarian contribution channelled through the UN system this cycle now stands at $3.8 billion, following the earlier $2 billion announced in December.

The number that's actually useful is buried in Fletcher's remarks. The first $2 billion tranche has already reached 14.4 million people in the first four months of 2026. Six of the eighteen crises it was directed at had started the year with zero pooled funding. As of this week, $1.71 billion of that tranche is under implementation. So this isn't theoretical money, it's operational, and the impact is measurable.

One sentence from Lewin's part of the briefing, picked up by Devex, is worth holding onto: the State Department's foreign assistance head said the US would continue funding OCHA "year after year." That's the kind of statement that would have been unremarkable in 2019 and that nobody in the building took for granted six months ago. Whether it holds is a different question. But yesterday it was on the record.

UN News on the announcement | Devex coverage

2. Kherson: a UN convoy hit by drones, twice

OCHA released video and a statement yesterday about an incident on Wednesday that deserves more attention than it's getting. Andrea De Domenico, who heads OCHA's Ukraine operation, was on a convoy delivering food and solar lamps to Ostriv, a hard-to-reach area in Kherson that hadn't received assistance in months. The mission had been pre-coordinated. Both Ukrainian and Russian sides had been notified, per the usual deconfliction procedures.

Immediately after crossing the bridge into the area, a drone struck one of the convoy's clearly marked UN vehicles. Nobody was hurt. The team continued, delivered the assistance, and while they were doing so, a second drone struck another vehicle. They were evacuated by local authorities.

De Domenico's line, on camera: "Civilians and humanitarian workers should never be targets. These constant attacks on civilians and on humanitarians are simply unacceptable. Member States of the United Nations should respect the rules and the flag of the United Nations." He went out of his way to say he doesn't know who launched the drones. The point isn't attribution. The point is that a deconflicted UN convoy carrying a UN flag was struck twice in the same mission, and this is becoming routine. OCHA flagged in the same briefing that 56 incidents of violence against humanitarians have been recorded from January to April alone.

OCHA media centre

3. Ukraine-Russia: 1,600 detainees, a breakthrough that needs caveats

The Secretary-General welcomed what was described as a major breakthrough in efforts to secure the release of more than 1,600 conflict-related detainees between Russia and Ukraine. The framework was announced Thursday. Implementation is staged, with the first exchange of 205 prisoners on each side, expected over the weekend.

Some context. Russia and Ukraine have done dozens of exchanges since 2022. The channel between the two human rights commissioners, Tatiana Moskalkova on the Russian side and Dmytro Lubinets on the Ukrainian, has stayed open even when nothing else has. So an exchange is not unusual. What's unusual is the scale, and the framing as part of a larger 1,000-for-1,000 agreement that Zelensky has now confirmed publicly.

The caveats matter. The May 9-11 ceasefire that this deal grew out of collapsed almost immediately. Russia launched what's been described as the largest sustained aerial assault of the war hours after the truce ended, firing more than 1,600 drones and missiles and killing at least 30 people in Kyiv and other cities. The OCHA noon briefing yesterday confirmed at least 15 dead and 127 injured, including six children, across Ukraine in the past 24 hours. So the detainee deal is real, but it's happening against a backdrop of escalation, not de-escalation. Worth watching whether the exchange actually proceeds this weekend.

UN noon briefing, 14 May

4. Cuba: a humanitarian crisis nobody quite calls one

The UN team in Cuba, led by Resident Coordinator Francisco Pichón, is now openly framing the energy collapse as a humanitarian situation. Fuel reserves are largely exhausted. No new imports are expected in the immediate term. Prolonged blackouts. Severe disruptions to water, transport, healthcare, food distribution.

The UN Action Plan responding to Hurricane Melissa and the energy shock has mobilised $32 million so far, which has paid for 48 containers of water, sanitation, health, shelter, and protection supplies, mostly destined for eastern Cuba where Melissa hit hardest last autumn. The framing matters here. Cuba is a complicated case for the humanitarian system because of the political overlay, and the US sanctions regime, and the question of who pays. But the situation on the ground has now deteriorated past the point where those questions can hold up the response.

Reuters and AP picked up the Secretary of State's comments on Cuba from earlier this week, where Marco Rubio was pressed by NBC's Tom Llamas on a $100-million US aid package being floated for the island. The politics are going to be ugly. The humanitarian arithmetic is straightforward.

UN noon briefing on Cuba

5. The slow-burn beat: 56 attacks on humanitarians in four months

This is the system-level story this morning. OCHA flagged in yesterday's noon briefing that 56 incidents of violence against humanitarians have been recorded from January through April 2026. That's roughly one every two days.

Stack it against the ICRC's Humanitarian Outlook 2026 figures from January, which logged 338 attacks on humanitarian workers in 2024, and the trend line is clear and bad. The Kherson convoy is one data point. The MSF security guard hit by a stray bullet in Cité Soleil last weekend is another. UNRWA's losses in Gaza (391 staff killed since October 2023) are a third. The pattern is not separate incidents in separate theatres. It's a general loosening of the norm that humanitarian workers and marked humanitarian vehicles are off-limits.

The institutional concern, which I've heard surface in several conversations this week, is that the deconfliction mechanisms that have underwritten access for the last several decades are starting to deteriorate. They worked when belligerents wanted them to work. They're being tested now by parties who either don't care or have decided the cost of being seen to hit humanitarian targets is acceptable. Nobody quite knows what replaces deconfliction if deconfliction breaks. I don't think there's an answer to that question right now, and I'm not sure anyone is seriously working on one.

ICRC, Humanitarian Outlook 2026 | UN noon briefing, 14 May

That's the brief for Friday. Watching the detainee exchange over the weekend, the Cuba file, and whether the US funding announcement gets backed up by appropriations in the coming weeks. You can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails from the HDB team.