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.
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.
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.
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.
You can subscribe to receive Sitrep directly in your inbox every morning.
