The United Nations Children’s Fund is providing emergency relief in Bangladesh to people stranded by recent floods — including 1.6 million children — and is dispatching, among other things, 400,000 water purification tablets for 80,000 households and emergency medical supplies for district health facilities.

The Houthis movement — also known as Ansar Allah — have signed an action plan with the United Nations to end and prevent the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict, the killing and maiming of boys and girls, attacks on schools and hospitals and other grave violations.  Virginia Gamba, Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, signed the action plan as a witness in New York.

The United Nations Palestinian Rights Committee will organize a virtual event on the margins of the sixty-sixth session of the Commission on the Status of Women on “Impact of forced displacement on Palestinian women” on 23 March from 10 a.m. to noon, via WebEx.

In a Security Council meeting on the Middle East peace process today, delegates urged Israel to scrap its plan to evict Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem, arguing that it would undercut prospects for a two-State solution.

In Nigeria, the humanitarian community and the Government today launched the 2022 humanitarian response plan for the north-eastern part of the country.  The plan seeks $1.1 billion to provide critical aid and services to 5.5 million people impacted by the conflict in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.

Intensified efforts are urgently needed to resolve the Israel-Palestine situation with a view to reaching the overall goal of two States living side by side in peace and security, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said today at the first formal meeting of the Palestinian Rights Committee in 2022.

Following are UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks to the opening meeting of the 2022 session of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, in New York today:

Eight months after a fragile ceasefire ended full-scale fighting in the Gaza Strip, the senior United Nations official for the Middle East peace process told the Security Council that the situation is once again characterized by daily clashes and rising tensions, as he warned delegates against piecemeal approaches and diplomatic “half measures” that will only let the conflict fester further.

Briefing the Security Council today, the High Commissioner for Human Rights said that the situation that now faces women human rights defenders, and prospects for women’s full participation in shaping and building peace, are vastly worse than they were before the pandemic got under way.

Expressing concern over a fragile and deteriorating security situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the special coordinator for the region, in his briefing to the Security Council today, stressed that rising levels of violence should be a clear warning to the international community to take action in order to prevent further bloodshed.