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 The 336 suspected cases and 10 confirmed cases from Sunday's WHO figures are almost certainly already out of date — field reporting from conflict-affected provinces runs days behind real-time, and the positivity rate on initial samples (eight out of thirteen) suggests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.
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."
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.
