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Our editors’ weekly take on humanitarian news, trends, and developments from around the globe.
On our radar
UN finds genocide in Sudan, warns of new atrocities
The UN fact-finding mission for Sudan has produced a follow-up to its February investigation into RSF atrocities in El Fasher, finding at least three of the material crimes of genocide “overwhelmingly present”. After a prolonged siege, the UAE-backed group launched an October 2025 assault on El Fasher, which was the last major Darfur city where the Sudanese army and allied forces were active. Since the February publication, the mission said it has received new information, especially on the abduction and mass rape of women and girls. It says survivors were raped by RSF forces in the presence of corpses, including family members, and were targeted along ethnic lines. The mission also received new information on the high number of people – it says up to tens of thousands – who remain missing or unaccounted for, and describes the involvement of senior RSF members, including Deputy Commander Abdelrahim Hamdan Dagalo, during the takeover. With the RSF planning a new assault on the North Kordofan capital, El Obeid, the mission said the same patterns are repeating and called for the lessons of El Fasher not to be ignored.
Iran-US ceasefire collapses amid renewed strikes
The 60-day interim ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran is “over”, President Donald Trump announced on 8 July as an exchange of strikes between the two sides resumed. The US said it struck 170 targets in 48 hours, including near a nuclear reactor and around the Strait of Hormuz. Iran said 14 people have been killed since 7 July. Over the next two days, Iran attacked US military sites and related targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan. Regional mediators, including Qatar and Pakistan, have sought to revive negotiations and prevent further escalation. As of 10 July, US officials said there had been no new strikes for several hours, and technical discussions were continuing, despite the ceasefire being suspended. The fresh hostilities coincided with the six-day funeral for Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed within hours of the first attacks by the US and Israel in late February.
Latest flare-up threatens cautious Lebanon returns
Some 400,000 people have begun returning to south Lebanon following the latest Israel-Hezbollah truce, but the newest US-Iran flare-up, concerns over the terms of the Israel-Lebanon deal, and ongoing Israel attacks – a drone killed 4 people, including three women on 6 July – continue to prevent any sense of sustained calm. Rights groups have said the framework deal signed between Israeli and Lebanese officials on 26 June appears to prevent victims of international crimes from seeking justice and seems “to acquiesce to the prolonged and indefinite forced displacement of tens of thousands of residents of vast swathes of southern Lebanon occupied by Israeli forces”. Among the potential war crimes in months of fighting are three March 2026 Israeli airstrikes that killed 24 civilians. Amnesty International said on 9 July that its investigations show that these attacks, which wiped out entire families, violated several tenets of international humanitarian law, including “failing to distinguish between civilians and military objectives”.
Two Israeli killings in Gaza, as Hamas dissolves its government
Mohamed al-Wahidi, an aid worker who organised widely attended World Cup football screenings across Gaza, was killed in an Israeli missile strike on a car he was travelling in shortly before the Egypt-Argentina game on 7 July. Fari and Hamza al-Deri, eight- and 10-year-old brothers who were on their way home from playing football, were also killed in the strike, which took place in Gaza City, along with another man. In a separate incident, an Israeli soldier killed Palestinian truck driver Ahmad Esleem, who was bringing food into Gaza for the World Central Kitchen (WCK). The convoy Esleem was travelling in, which was fully coordinated with Israeli authorities through the World Food Programme and WCK, stopped on a military road in southern Gaza when one of the trucks broke down. Israeli soldiers ordered the drivers to get out of their trucks, and one of the soldiers shot Esleem in the head while his hands were raised, according to another truck driver. Meanwhile, Hamas announced it is dissolving its government in Gaza and handing power to a technocratic committee operating under the US-backed Board of Peace. It is unclear what effect the move will have on the ground. For more on what’s happening on the ground, read: How we are trying to reclaim life amid rubble and fear in Gaza.
AI for good, bad, and a darkened road ahead
A week of artificial intelligence summits in Geneva set out to nudge the globe to get a grip on AI governance. It left some observers wondering if decision-makers are meeting the urgency of the moment. The Global Dialogue on AI Governance closed with member states looking towards the next get-together in May 2027. But as a UN scientific panel warned ahead of the meeting, agentic AI abilities are doubling every few months, and humans are nearing a “loss of control”. Some core themes have a spotlight – tech divides, corporate incentives, trust and information integrity, international law, and human oversight, for example. But it’s hard to balance the frequent existential warnings with the rush of techno-positivity that runs through the splashier AI for Good summit. On one stage, an AI scholar warns that the world is on a darkened highway with a dodgy car, no headlights, and no directions. On others, a driverless aid truck is trialled, and humanitarians are nudged to innovate and experiment (sometimes with beneficiary data).
The end of the AU’s mission in Somalia?
The blocking by the US of UN funding to African Union (AU) forces in Somalia from next year is a body blow to a mission that has long been on financial life-support. The UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS) provides the logistical backing critical to the functioning of the AU mission. Without that underpinning, it’s hard to see how the AU’s 11,800-strong force can continue. That became evident when Washington vetoed the application to Somalia of UN Resolution 2719 on peacekeeping cost-sharing. The AU’s near two-decade intervention has done significant work. Despite heavy casualties, it succeeded in ousting al-Shabab from Mogadishu – a mission the UN and the rest of the international system was unwilling to take on – and continued to protect Somalia’s fractious political elite from the jihadist insurgency. But the inability of Somalia to grow and deploy its own security forces to consolidate territorial gains secured by the AU resulted in deadly mission creep and effectively tore up any putative exit plan. Instead, the AU has soldiered on in the absence of a workable political strategy, and with ever-shrinking sources of financing.
Weekend Read
Ebola moving faster than the response, head of Africa CDC warns
Conflict, displacement, and overstretched health services complicate the response to a crisis that is still yet to peak.
And finally…
Who deserves to be counted as a journalist?
The Committee to Protect Journalists is facing threats of defunding and accusations of “complicity in genocide” after it removed from its Gaza casualty database the names of eight people it said had participated in combat. The decisions were based on combatant obituaries published by the resistance groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Pro-Israel groups claimed vindication, while Palestinian journalists and press-freedom advocates warned that the deletions risked reinforcing Israeli efforts to portray Palestinian reporters as militants. Debate inside CPJ then shifted to its broader definition of journalism, particularly for workers at state-backed, political, or armed-group-affiliated outlets. Drop Site News publisher Nika Soon-Shiong announced on 29 June that she was no longer on CPJ’s board because of her push to recognise and protect journalists with these affiliations. CPJ’s board ultimately voted to retain its existing definition and denied that it planned to exclude groups of journalists. New Lines Magazine, which has documented the dispute, said it calls into question “whether a decades-old institution built to document violence against journalists can withstand political pressure at a moment when reporters are being killed in unprecedented numbers”.
