Category World News

Gaza’s children and elderly are bearing the brunt of the devastation inflicted by Israel’s war on the enclave, as the United Nations warns of a sharp rise in amputations, long-term disabilities and severe hunger.

More than 40,000 children have been injured since the conflict began, and nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been displaced, often multiple times.

Amid worsening conditions, aid workers are also reporting a sharp rise in malnutrition among children, and growing hardship for elderly people, who are even less able to access food, care and essential medical support than the general population.

One in 10 Gaza children tested in UNRWA clinics malnourished

On Tuesday, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said: “One in 10 children screened in UNRWA medical facilities is malnourished.” He warned that child malnutrition is rising rapidly in Gaza amid severe shortages of food and medical supplies.

“Salam, a seven-month-old baby, died of malnutrition last week,” he added, addressing the growing urgency of the crisis.

He added that more than 870 Palestinians have been killed while trying to access food from aid distribution points set up by the highly criticised GHF, a private contractor backed by Israel and the United States.

Before the war began on October 7, 2023, about 500 trucks of humanitarian aid entered Gaza every single day.

That number collapsed following Israel’s assault on the besieged enclave, dropping to fewer than 80 trucks per day.

In March, Israel imposed a nearly three-month blockade, halting aid deliveries altogether.

On May 27, the GHF assumed control of aid operations, replacing 400 local distribution points with just four “mega-sites”.

These locations have become scenes of deadly violence, as Israeli forces have reportedly opened fire on Palestinians gathering for food, many of whom must walk several kilometres to reach the sites.

The more than 870 people who have been killed trying to collect aid from GHF points include at least 94 children and 11 elderly people. Despite mounting criticism, GHF remains the sole provider of food in the Gaza Strip.

Since January 2024, UNRWA has screened more than 240,000 boys and girls under the age of five in its clinics, adding that before the war, acute malnutrition was rare in Gaza.

“As malnutrition among children spreads across the war-torn enclave, UNRWA has over 6,000 trucks of food, hygiene supplies, medicine, medical supplies outside of Gaza. They are all waiting to go in,” UNRWA’s communications director, Juliette Touma, said in a press statement on Monday.

More than 139,000 people injured, including at least 40,500 children

As of July 1, 2025, more than 139,000 Palestinians have been injured in Gaza since the war began, and more than 40,500 of them are children, according to the Global Protection Clusters July report.

At least 58,479 people have been confirmed killed since the start of the war in October 2023, with an estimated 11,000 more buried under rubble, their bodies unrecovered due to restrictions on rescue teams or because it is simply impossible to reach them.

Roughly one in four of the injured are expected to require long-term rehabilitation care.

Children are especially vulnerable: 10 children lose one or both limbs each day, and 15 children per day are left with potentially life-altering disabilities.

By the end of 2024, more than 5,200 children were known to require significant rehabilitation, and at least 7,000 were living with permanent disabilities. The true number is believed to be far higher due to the collapse of Gaza’s health system.

Children with disabilities are among those most at risk in Gaza’s child protection caseload.

Of the 5,160 cases registered, 849 (16.5 percent) involve children with physical, sensory, intellectual or psychosocial disabilities.

Nearly half of these cases (49 percent) are children aged seven to 12, with a slight majority being boys (53 percent). These children face increased risks of violence, neglect, exclusion from essential services and deep social isolation in the current crisis.

Conditions like loss of hearing and vision are also on the rise. Based on screenings conducted between 2023 and this year by the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children, UNRWA said about 35,000 people are at risk of temporary or permanent hearing loss due to constant bombardment and explosions.

The war has also severely affected older adults in Gaza. Of 111,500 people aged 60 and above, 97 percent report health problems, 96 percent have chronic illnesses and 86 percent live with disabilities – conditions made worse by medicine shortages, deteriorating hygiene and the destruction of health facilities.

At least 3,839 older people have been killed since the war began.

90 percent of the population of Gaza displaced

Across Gaza, 90 percent of the total population has been forcibly displaced – many of them multiple times; some 10 times or more. Since mid-March 2025, more than 665,000 people have been uprooted, often finding themselves with little or no access to food, water, shelter, healthcare or any basic life necessities.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 86 percent of Gaza’s territory is either within an Israeli-imposed no-go zone or under active forced evacuation orders.

Older people and those with disabilities face extreme hardship as a result of displacement. Many cannot flee at all due to mobility challenges, illness or the loss of assistive devices – with more than 83 percent reporting that their wheelchairs, walkers, hearing aids or prosthetics have been lost or destroyed.

The terrain has become highly dangerous and inaccessible: Israeli forces have built sand mounds at checkpoints, making movement nearly impossible for families with someone who has a mobility impairment. At the same time, high levels of unexploded ordnance contaminate many of Gaza’s roads and disproportionately endanger those with physical, sensory or cognitive disabilities.

A ceasefire in Suwayda in Syria has collapsed, as fighting between Druze groups and Syrian forces continues. Israel, which says it wants to protect the Druze, has carried out more air strikes on Syrian troops.

United States President Donald Trump threatened to impose “very severe tariffs” on Russia on Monday if a peace agreement to end the Ukraine war is not reached in the next 50 days.

Trump has also unveiled a new agreement to supply Ukraine with more weapons.

On the campaign trail ahead of last year’s presidential election, Trump boasted that he would end the war in Ukraine within his first 24 hours in office.

However, after at least six phone conversations between Trump and his Russian counterpart, President Vladimir Putin, as well as several meetings between US officials and officials from Russia and Ukraine, no ceasefire deal has been reached.

In May, Putin refused to travel to Istanbul to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for peace talks. The two countries sent delegations instead, resulting in prisoner exchange agreements, only.

So, will Trump’s latest threat convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to change his stance on Ukraine?

What did Trump say about Russia and Ukraine this week?

Weapons for Ukraine

At a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said he was “disappointed” in Putin and that Ukraine would receive billions of dollars’ worth of US weapons.

“We’re going to make top-of-the-line weapons, and they’ll be sent to NATO,” Trump said, adding that NATO would pay for them. He added that this would include the Patriot air defence missiles that Ukraine has sought urgently.

“We have one country that has 17 Patriots getting ready to be shipped … We’re going to work a deal where the 17 will go, or a big portion of the 17 will go to the war site,” Trump said.

New tariffs for Russian goods

Trump said if Putin fails to sign a peace deal with Ukraine within 50 days of Monday this week, he will impose “very severe” trade tariffs on Russia, as well as secondary tariffs on other countries.

“We’re going to be doing secondary tariffs,” Trump said. “If we don’t have a deal in 50 days, it’s very simple, and they’ll be at 100 percent.”

Since the start of the Ukraine war, the US and its allies have imposed at least 21,692 separate sanctions on Russian individuals, media organisations and institutions, targeting sectors including the military, energy, aviation, shipbuilding and telecommunications.

While the trade relationship between US and Russia might be relatively marginal, “secondary tariffs” – first threatened by Trump in March but not implemented – would affect countries such as India and China purchasing Russian oil.

In 2024, Russian oil made up 35 percent of India’s total crude imports and 19 percent of China’s oil imports. Turkiye also relies heavily on Russian oil, sourcing up to 58 percent of its refined petroleum imports from Russia in 2023.

Some Western countries could also be hit by secondary tariffs. In 2024, European countries spent more than $700m on Russian uranium products, according to an analysis by the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, which used data from the European Union’s statistical office, Eurostat.

How has Russia responded to Trump’s latest threats?

Putin has not responded personally.

However, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday: “The US president’s statements are very serious. Some of them are addressed personally to President Putin. We certainly need time to analyse what was said in Washington.”

Peskov stated, however, that decisions made in Washington and other NATO countries were “perceived by the Ukrainian side not as a signal for peace, but as a signal to continue the war”.

Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and current deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, wrote in an X post on Tuesday that Russia did not care about Trump’s “theatrical ultimatum”.

Trump issued a theatrical ultimatum to the Kremlin.
The world shuddered, expecting the consequences.
Belligerent Europe was disappointed.
Russia didn’t care.

Sergei Ryabkov, a senior Russian diplomat, said on Tuesday: “We first and foremost note that any attempts to make demands – especially ultimatums – are unacceptable for us,” Russia’s TASS news agency reported.

The Russian stock market appeared untroubled by Trump’s threat, rising 2.7 percent on Monday, according to the Moscow Stock Exchange.

The Russian rouble initially lost value against the US dollar but then recovered after Trump threatened new tariffs on Russia. According to data from financial analysis group LSEG, the rouble was just 0.2 percent weaker at the end of the day, trading at 78.10 to the US dollar after weakening to 78.75 earlier in the day.

The rouble gained 0.9 percent to 10.87 against the Chinese yuan, the most traded foreign currency in Russia. This was after it had weakened by more than 1 percent on Friday.

Will US weapons help Ukraine significantly?

Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher at the defence studies department at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that the Patriot missile systems that Trump has pledged to sell to Ukraine are long-range air defences best suited for shooting down ballistic missiles such as Russia’s Iskander M.

“But Ukraine will need short- to medium-range systems as well as multiple rocket launchers in order to defend itself. So it’s more of a political move for Trump rather than anything else,” Miron said.

She added that the significance of these weapons depends on several factors, including whether Ukraine will get 17 systems as allegedly promised, and where the systems would be placed.

How has Trump changed his stance on aiding Ukraine?

A month into his presidential term, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, blaming Zelenskyy for continuing the war with Russia and saying the Ukrainian president “talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start”.

The US has sent Ukraine about $134bn in aid so far – not $350bn – according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) base has also been critical of US funding for Ukraine.

In early July, the Trump administration announced a decision to “pause” arms deliveries to Kyiv, but reversed this a week later. When Trump announced the reversal on July 8, his supporters voiced criticism.

Derrick Evans, one of Trump’s supporters who was among the throng which stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and who was later arrested but then pardoned by Trump in January this year, wrote on X: “I did not vote for this.” Conservative social media duo Keith and Kevin Hodge posted on X: “Who in the hell is telling Trump that we need to send more weapons to Ukraine?”

Trump appears to be attempting to address these criticisms by saying that instead of supplying weapons to Ukraine, he will sell them to NATO.

Furthermore, Miron said, the US is not losing anything by selling weapons, since NATO will be paying for them. “There are not enough systems being provided to make a substantial difference,” she said.

Could Trump’s latest threats force Putin to change his policy?

While Putin has repeatedly voiced his determination to achieve his war aims, he has not specifically stated what they are. Broadly, he has sought territorial gains within Ukraine and has opposed Ukraine’s membership in NATO – these have not changed and are unlikely to do so, according to observers.

“If you were to describe Russia’s approach, it’s ‘keep calm and carry on,’” Miron said, referring to the fact that most Russian officials have not responded to Trump’s threat.

“So they are not going for this informational trap,” she said.

Has Putin changed his stance at all since Russia invaded Ukraine?

Miron said Putin has expanded his goals since Ukraine’s major cross-border incursion to the Kursk region in August last year. Ukraine’s push into Kursk, which took the Kremlin by surprise, marked the most significant Ukrainian attack inside Russian territory since the war began.

In May this year, Russian troops were tasked with establishing a buffer zone stretching up to 10km (6 miles) into Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, according to Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, in an interview with Bloomberg published on July 11.

“I have already said that a decision was made to create the necessary security buffer zone along the border. Our armed forces are currently solving this problem. Enemy firing points are being actively suppressed, the work is under way,” Putin said back then.

On July 3, The New York Times published a report scrutinising a 2009 college application submitted to Columbia University by Zohran Mamdani, the winner of the Democratic party primary for mayor of New York City. The document was leaked by a hacker and showed that in a question about race and ethnicity, the applicant identified as Asian and African American. The source of the information was later revealed to be the eugenicist Jordan Lasker.

Although the journalistic ethics of the article were widely questioned, it was immediately picked up by opponents in an attempt to discredit Mamdani.

Did Mamdani really try to “exploit” an African American identity to get into college, as opponents have claimed?

It’s worth noting that the two boxes he checked did not assist him to get into Columbia, where his father, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, is teaching African studies.

Was he wrong to tick the “African American” box?

There are several issues that should be brought up when considering the answer to this question.

First, Mamdani was born in Uganda to a Ugandan father of Asian origin and an Indian American mother. He lived in Africa for seven years before moving to the United States. He had only a Ugandan passport until he was naturalised as a US citizen in 2018.

On the Columbia University application form, like with many US universities, there is a section for voluntary self-identification of race and ethnicity. It asks if you are Hispanic or Latino (regardless of race) and then lists five other options to select one’s “race”: “American Indian or Alaskan Native”, “Asian”, “Black or African American”, “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander” or “white”. There is a further section for “additional optional information”.

These categories are arbitrary and reductionist and cannot capture the full complexity of identity that many people around the world have, including Mamdani and myself.

As a British Zambian of Asian origin whose family have lived in Zambia for three generations, I feel anxiety and frustration when having to select ethnicity checkboxes. I am regularly interrogated about my identity, which cannot be squeezed into one box on a form, or even two or three.

As Mamdani himself told The New York Times: “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.” He also explained that he wrote “Ugandan” in the application, which allowed students to provide “more specific information where relevant”.

The second issue we need to keep in mind is that the history of Asian Africans – and how we fit into African societies – is complex. Between the 1860s and 1890s, the British Empire brought thousands of indentured labourers from its colony in the subcontinent to its colonies in Southern and East Africa.

In the following decades, many other South Asians followed as merchants. And then, as the British partitioned the subcontinent along religious lines in the 1940s, thousands more fled the impending chaos to Africa.

Once on the continent, the Asian population largely occupied a kind of middle position in which they were both victims and agents of colonial racism. In East Africa, many functioned as a subordinate ruling class, employed by the colonial police and administrators as part of a divide-and-rule strategy. In many countries, Asians enjoyed success in business during the colonial period and gained significant control of the economy.

This, alongside a lack of integration, contributed to widespread anti-Asian sentiment in East Africa, seen most prominently by the expulsion of Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin in 1972.

In apartheid South Africa, people of Indian descent, the majority of whom were descendants of indentured labourers forcibly transferred by the British, were also subjected to discrimination. Prominent members of the community, such as Ahmed Kathrada, who was jailed for life in 1964 along with Nelson Mandela, played a key role in the anti-apartheid struggle.

Today, younger generations are still grappling with these complex identities and histories, including Mamdani himself. In his twenties, he was part of a rap duo – Young Cardamon & HAB – with a Ugandan of Nubian descent. They rapped in six languages, including Luganda, Hindi and Nubi, and confronted social issues such as racism and inclusion.

As a mayoral candidate of one of the most diverse cities in the world, Mamdani has much to do to address persistent anti-Blackness among Asian communities. Many Asian Africans, and other Asian communities, have internalised the white supremacy of the colonial era and the belief that being closer to whiteness offers more opportunities and privilege.

Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, is the filmmaker behind Mississippi Masala, one of the first films to address this issue more than 30 years ago, with its rare depiction of an interracial relationship between a Black man and Asian African woman in the US. Her son credits this film for his existence: His mother met his father in Uganda at Makerere University while she was conducting research for the film.

The third issue that needs to be considered is that this hacked information seems aimed at discrediting Mamdani, who secured fewer votes in Black neighbourhoods during the mayoral Democratic primary election.

Pitting communities of colour against each other is a classic divide-and-rule tactic and a cornerstone of colonialism used to fracture alliances and weaken resistance. Its remnants can still be seen today in my country, Zambia, in areas that were historically segregated on the basis of colour.

Opponents attempting to frame Mamdani as a mayor solely for South Asians – or worse, playing into and exacerbating Islamophobic sentiment – are weaponising identity to sow division and fear. Such attempts must be resisted, especially now, when the US and much of the world are facing growing authoritarianism, xenophobia and inequality.

New York City is one of the places where I have some feeling of belonging; it thrives and shines in part due to its diversity and the fusion of so many cultures.

In a city made up of countless stories and backgrounds, perhaps having a mayor who understands what it means to navigate multiple identities, and to live at the crossroads of belonging, might offer the kind of perspective that does not weaken leadership, but strengthens it.

The story of New York has always been about reinvention. Whoever becomes mayor has the chance, and the responsibility, to redefine what progress means in one of the most diverse but unequal cities in the country. Whatever happens next, pitting communities of colour against each other serves no one.