Interviews United Nations

Sabreen al-Sakani: one name among the more than 34,000 people killed in Gaza since 7 October. Sabreen was 30 weeks pregnant when she died after sustaining terrible head injuries in an Israeli airstrike in the south of the enclave. 
Thankfully, her baby daughter lived after being delivered by emergency Caesarean section, at a hospital in Rafah last weekend. With more on this story - and the latest on the war in Gaza that was sparked by Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel – UN News’s Daniel Johnson spoke to Dominic Allen, from the UN sexual and reproductive health agency, UNFPA.

Sudan’s food security crisis is a matter of deep concern with a very real risk there could be famine there, the Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Office of Emergencies and Resilience has told UN News.
Rein Paulsen has been in the war-ravaged country with an interagency team planning how best to scale up the aid response to the food security crisis.
FAO is supporting vulnerable farms to boost crop production and is implementing famine prevention strategies, including vaccinating animals.
“We have a window of opportunity and that window as right now,” he told UN News’s Ezzat El-Ferri from the coastal aid hub of Port Sudan.

Millions of women and girls saw no progress in their reproductive rights simply because of who they are or where they were born, according to the new 2024 State of World Population report, released on Wednesday by UNFPA, the UN sexual and reproductive health agency.
Agency chief Dr. Natalia Kanem spoke in depth to UN News about her main priorities, noting that women and girls are often the most vulnerable in conflict zones such as Gaza and Ukraine.
She told Nathalie Minard that “the ability of human society to prosper really depends on looking at who's vulnerable. When you fix that, you fix the issue for so many others.”

The gangs which now control up to 90 per cent of Haiti’s capital must be persuaded to end their campaign of violence which has left the children of the Port-au-Prince region without safety, schooling and sufficient food to eat, the UN’s top envoy for Children and Armed Conflict has told UN News.  
“One of my biggest fears is that the youngest of the young in Haiti might also become victims of trafficking, particularly girls, for sexual purposes,” Special Representative Victoria Gamba, said, telling Cristina Silveiro that she is determined to visit the crisis-wracked nation “at the first opportunity” and confront the gang leaders face to face.

Even before the war erupted in Sudan on 15 April last year, the country’s economy was already faltering, heavily reliant on international aid. 
Now, the situation is rapidly deteriorating. Over 25 million Sudanese are in dire need, the healthcare system is in ruins, schools work in only one state, famine is looming. 
Justin Brady, head of the UN aid coordination office OCHA in Sudan, told Anton Uspensky of UN News, how his team was continuing to keep aid flowing to around 14 million people amid military action, disrupted transportation routes, looted warehouses, communication blackouts and “negligible” funding.

Technological advances have transformed space exploration, making it more accessible but also more commercially driven, a senior official with the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) has been telling UN News, ahead of the international day that marks the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin in 1961. 
Thanks to private capital, missions to study the Moon have surged, accompanied by a significant rise in space launches over the past decade. 
But these developments raise questions about the regulations governing space, increasing space pollution and diversity within space agencies, UNOOSA Director Aarti Holla-Maini, tells Anton Uspensky.