Middle East

The United Nations continues to mobilize emergency teams and relief operations in response to the earthquake that hit Türkiye and Syria. A Disaster Assessment and Coordination Team is supporting the coordination of the International Urban Search and Rescue Operations and assisting with situational and humanitarian needs analysis.

​​​​​​​Following is the text of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ video message to the High-Level Conference on Supporting the City of Jerusalem and its Population, in Cairo today:

The following statement was issued today by the Bureau of the General Assembly’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) today released its newest survey on opium cultivation. The agency estimates that poppy cultivation in Myanmar has increased by 33 per cent in the first season since the military takeover.

Marking peacekeeping’s seventy-fifth anniversary, the Peacekeeping Department is launching a campaign, Peace Begins with Me, which promotes understanding of challenges faced by communities in conflict, demonstrates peacekeeping’s impact and calls for a global movement for peace.

In the Central African Republic, the United Nations peacekeeping mission there launched a countrywide campaign on 16 January to promote efforts to protect civilians and to build confidence between the internal security forces and the population.

The international community’s immediate priority in the Occupied Palestinian Territory must be reversing the trends that marked 2022 as one of the deadliest years in recent history, the United Nations senior official working to end the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict told the Security Council today as it held its regular open debate on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian Question.

A new report issued today by the International Labour Organization (ILO) shows that the COVID-19 crisis measures yielded powerful new evidence that giving workers more flexibility in how, where and when they work can be positive for both them and for businesses.

Today, two inter-agency convoys, facilitated by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, delivered medicine, emergency shelter kits, blankets, sleeping bags, hygiene kits and solar lamps to 5,000 residents in two towns in the southern Khersonska oblast that had been heavily impacted by fighting.

Leaders on all sides of the Palestinian question must help lower the flames of tension and maintain the status quo of Jerusalem’s holy sites, the Organization’s senior peace official appealed during his address to the Security Council today.