Shehbaz Sharif has become Pakistan’s prime minister for a second time nearly a month after an inconclusive general election marred by delays and widespread allegations of vote-rigging.

No party secured a majority in the February 8 poll. Candidates affiliated with the PTI party of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan were forced to run as independents, but still secured most seats, with 102.

The Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz party (PMLN), headed by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who is also the older brother of Shehbaz Sharif, came in second with 73 seats, and their long-term rivals the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) won 54 seats.

After winning his brother’s backing, Shehbaz Sharif returns to a role he held until parliament was dissolved last year, and will lead a coalition government with the PMLN.

Following the vote in the lower house of parliament, opposition party members began chanting at Sharif as he addressed parliamentarians, calling him a thief.

Under the coalition, the PPP’s Asif Ali Zardari takes the presidency. Zaradari is the widower of the assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whose family dominates the party.

Shehbaz Sharif was first sworn in as Pakistan’s prime minister in April 2022, after Imran Khan was dramatically ousted from power in a parliamentary no-confidence vote.

Khan has since been jailed and sentenced to at least 14 years in prison on multiple charges, including corruption and revealing state secrets.

In February, Khan and his wife were sentenced to a further seven years in prison after a district court ruled their 2018 marriage violated the law. Khan has rejected the charges as politically motivated.

Pakistan’s new government is already facing clear challenges, including mounting discontent over the country’s worsening poverty. Sharif will be tasked with starting further talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a deal to secure Pakistan’s economy.

Loyal supporters of Khan who have continued to rally against authorities are also likely to pose an issue for Sharif.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Texas is no stranger to winter wildfires, but the ferocity of the Smokehouse Creek fire — the state’s largest on record after burning through more than 1 million acres — caught even the experts off guard.

Its severity was due to a perfect storm of environmental factors: highly flammable grasses and strong winds combined with record-high temperatures and dry conditions — the kind of extreme weather often exacerbated by climate change.

This fire adds to an ever-lengthening list of rapidly spreading, destructive wildfires in the US and elsewhere. As humans continue to heat up the world with fossil fuel pollution, scientists warn these kinds of fires will only become more common.

The past several years have brought some of the United States’ most devastating fires. The fire that ripped through Maui in August, whipped up by a combination of heat, drought and strong winds, killed at least 100 people and was the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century.

In California, 80% of the state’s largest wildfires have occurred in the last decade, including the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise.

But it’s not just the US grappling with alarming new fire behavior. Canada experienced its worst wildfire season on record in 2023, with flames scorching more than 18 million hectares (44.5 million acres) — more than double the previous record.

In Greece, winds and record temperatures led to deadly fires last summer, the largest ever recorded in the European Union. And in early February, wildfires tore through parts of Chile, killing more than 130 people.

“We have certainly seen plenty of extreme and catastrophic fires and fire seasons across the globe in the past decade,” said John Abatzoglou, a climate professor at the University of California, Merced.

In many cases, climate change is playing a role, he added, “enabling more active fire seasons and very large fire events.”

Why did the Texas fires grow so explosively?

Then, a hard freeze late in the fall meant all that grass went dormant. Sapped of moisture, they were highly flammable. It only took a short period of warm, dry weather for them to dry out further, providing a carpet for the fire to spread.

Temperatures were unseasonably hot the day the fires started, climbing to more than 85 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the panhandle, Kanclerz said.

Strong winds helped the fire pick up, and the passage of a windy cold front whipped it up further, causing the fire to shift direction and expand.

The region’s geography compounded the situation. The fire was able to rage across the open landscape with little to stop it, making firefighting efforts extremely challenging. The fire grew explosively, engulfing up to 150 football fields of land every minute in the first few days.

Kanclerz said it was clear before the fires broke out that wind, temperature and humidity indicators added up to critical fire conditions.

“But the magnitude of the fire exceeded our expectations,” he said.

It’s hard to witness, he added. Huge fires in these parts of Texas are “not unheard of,” he said, “but we hate to see the frequency of them.”

A shifting climate

Wildfires are fueled by a knot of factors, both natural and human-caused, but scientists say that global warming is loading the dice in favor of more intense and severe blazes.

Hotter temperatures are the clearest climate change-fueled contributor to wildfires. Heat sucks the moisture from vegetation making it much more combustible. “Drier fuels are a critical part of fire, the drier the fuel the easier it is to start a fire,” said Mike Flannigan, professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta.

As well as drying out vegetation, heat could also change the vegetation. In Hawaii, hotter summers have made it easier for fast-growing and more combustible invasive species to take hold, displacing native vegetation such as shady forests.

Periods of drought, which are becoming longer and more intense as the world warms, also dry out vegetation and increase the likelihood of fires igniting and spreading rapidly. The Maui fires happened as a third of the island struggled with drought.

But drought isn’t always needed for fires to spread explosively, Abatzoglou said – something evidenced by the fact that as of earlier in the week, there was no drought where the Smokehouse Creek fire ignited and spread to.

In West Texas, shorter periods of dryness can be enough to fuel huge fires when there is a bumper crop of grasses as well as high winds, he said.

Scientists are still working to understand what impact, if any, global warming is having on the winds that whip up wildfires.

Research has found climate change is fueling the rapid intensification of hurricanes, pushing storms to explode at a deadly pace. Hurricane Dora, a Category 4 storm which passed about 700 miles south of Hawaii’s Big Island, enhanced the strong winds that helped drive the Maui fires.

But it’s hard to attribute climate change to the winds that fueled the Texas fires, Abatzoglou said, “any link right now is most likely weak.”

Overall, however, climate projections “paint a future of more extreme fire weather conditions for the general region,” he added.

It’s a picture that extends across the US, according to a recent report from Climate Central, a nonprofit research group, which found wildfire seasons are lengthening and intensifying as climate change increases the likelihood of the kind of extreme weather that favors fires.

West Texas is one of the most affected states, said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior researcher at Climate Central. The Texas High Plains region, for example, experiences 32 additional days of warm, dry, windy conditions compared to the 1970s, she said.

“As long as the climate keeps warming and makes fire weather more common, the risks will only keep rising.”

Hundreds of people have been flocking to the grave of late Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny.

Images from OVD-Info, an independent Russian human rights group that monitors Russian repression, show a long line of people queuing at Navalny’s grave and laying flowers at the Borisovsky Cemetery in Moscow.

“People leave flowers, say goodbye, mourn,” the group reported.

Navalny’s mother Lyudmila was among the mourners on Sunday, visiting her son’s grave for the second day, accompanied by the mother of his widow Yulia, Reuters reported.

Thousands of mourners defied threats of arrest and gathered for Navalny’s funeral on Friday, two weeks after he died aged 47 in an Arctic penal colony.

There was heavy security in place and some in the crowd chanted his name or anti-Putin slogans.

The opposition leader’s death sparked condemnation from world leaders and accusations from his aides that he had been murdered, though the Kremlin has denied any involvement in his death.

At least 103 people were detained across 20 Russian cities on the day of Navalny’s funeral, OVD-Info reported on Sunday. Riot police were present, searching and filming the mourners and making them go through metal detectors, according to the group.

“Some of those who came said that they hid flowers under their coats along the way, fearing arrests along the way,” they said. “That didn’t stop people from coming and saying goodbye.”

He was immediately arrested upon his arrival and spent the rest of his life behind bars on charges he dismissed as politically motivated.

Texas is no stranger to winter wildfires, but the ferocity of the Smokehouse Creek fire — the state’s largest on record after burning through more than 1 million acres — caught even the experts off guard.

Its severity was due to a perfect storm of environmental factors: highly flammable grasses and strong winds combined with record-high temperatures and dry conditions — the kind of extreme weather often exacerbated by climate change.

This fire adds to an ever-lengthening list of rapidly spreading, destructive wildfires in the US and elsewhere. As humans continue to heat up the world with fossil fuel pollution, scientists warn these kinds of fires will only become more common.

The past several years have brought some of the United States’ most devastating fires. The fire that ripped through Maui in August, whipped up by a combination of heat, drought and strong winds, killed at least 100 people and was the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century.

In California, 80% of the state’s largest wildfires have occurred in the last decade, including the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise.

But it’s not just the US grappling with alarming new fire behavior. Canada experienced its worst wildfire season on record in 2023, with flames scorching more than 18 million hectares (44.5 million acres) — more than double the previous record.

In Greece, winds and record temperatures led to deadly fires last summer, the largest ever recorded in the European Union. And in early February, wildfires tore through parts of Chile, killing more than 130 people.

“We have certainly seen plenty of extreme and catastrophic fires and fire seasons across the globe in the past decade,” said John Abatzoglou, a climate professor at the University of California, Merced.

In many cases, climate change is playing a role, he added, “enabling more active fire seasons and very large fire events.”

Why did the Texas fires grow so explosively?

Then, a hard freeze late in the fall meant all that grass went dormant. Sapped of moisture, they were highly flammable. It only took a short period of warm, dry weather for them to dry out further, providing a carpet for the fire to spread.

Temperatures were unseasonably hot the day the fires started, climbing to more than 85 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the panhandle, Kanclerz said.

Strong winds helped the fire pick up, and the passage of a windy cold front whipped it up further, causing the fire to shift direction and expand.

The region’s geography compounded the situation. The fire was able to rage across the open landscape with little to stop it, making firefighting efforts extremely challenging. The fire grew explosively, engulfing up to 150 football fields of land every minute in the first few days.

Kanclerz said it was clear before the fires broke out that wind, temperature and humidity indicators added up to critical fire conditions.

“But the magnitude of the fire exceeded our expectations,” he said.

It’s hard to witness, he added. Huge fires in these parts of Texas are “not unheard of,” he said, “but we hate to see the frequency of them.”

A shifting climate

Wildfires are fueled by a knot of factors, both natural and human-caused, but scientists say that global warming is loading the dice in favor of more intense and severe blazes.

Hotter temperatures are the clearest climate change-fueled contributor to wildfires. Heat sucks the moisture from vegetation making it much more combustible. “Drier fuels are a critical part of fire, the drier the fuel the easier it is to start a fire,” said Mike Flannigan, professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta.

As well as drying out vegetation, heat could also change the vegetation. In Hawaii, hotter summers have made it easier for fast-growing and more combustible invasive species to take hold, displacing native vegetation such as shady forests.

Periods of drought, which are becoming longer and more intense as the world warms, also dry out vegetation and increase the likelihood of fires igniting and spreading rapidly. The Maui fires happened as a third of the island struggled with drought.

But drought isn’t always needed for fires to spread explosively, Abatzoglou said – something evidenced by the fact that as of earlier in the week, there was no drought where the Smokehouse Creek fire ignited and spread to.

In West Texas, shorter periods of dryness can be enough to fuel huge fires when there is a bumper crop of grasses as well as high winds, he said.

Scientists are still working to understand what impact, if any, global warming is having on the winds that whip up wildfires.

Research has found climate change is fueling the rapid intensification of hurricanes, pushing storms to explode at a deadly pace. Hurricane Dora, a Category 4 storm which passed about 700 miles south of Hawaii’s Big Island, enhanced the strong winds that helped drive the Maui fires.

But it’s hard to attribute climate change to the winds that fueled the Texas fires, Abatzoglou said, “any link right now is most likely weak.”

Overall, however, climate projections “paint a future of more extreme fire weather conditions for the general region,” he added.

It’s a picture that extends across the US, according to a recent report from Climate Central, a nonprofit research group, which found wildfire seasons are lengthening and intensifying as climate change increases the likelihood of the kind of extreme weather that favors fires.

West Texas is one of the most affected states, said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior researcher at Climate Central. The Texas High Plains region, for example, experiences 32 additional days of warm, dry, windy conditions compared to the 1970s, she said.

“As long as the climate keeps warming and makes fire weather more common, the risks will only keep rising.”

The official said the reason was that Hamas had not responded to two Israeli demands: a list of hostages specifying which are alive and which are dead; and confirmation of the ratio of Palestinian prisoners to be released from Israeli prisons in exchange for hostages.

The official asked not to be named as they discussed closed-door diplomatic maneuvers.

A Hamas delegation arrived in Cairo on Sunday, for the talks that are hoped to bring a halt to the fighting.

The decision not to send an Israeli delegation was made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in coordination with Mossad director David Barnea – who has been a key Israeli negotiator – after Barnea received a message that Hamas had not responded to the conditions, the Israeli official said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined the terms in a speech on Thursday, saying: “I demand to know in advance the names of all the hostages who will be included in the outline. I have yet to receive an answer on the two questions and it is too early to say, in spite of our willingness, if we will achieve an outline for an additional release in the coming days.”

The Israeli decision that no delegation will go to Cairo comes a day after a senior Biden Administration official told reporters that Israel had “basically accepted” a proposal for a six-week ceasefire.

On Sunday a Hamas source said there were at least three sticking points remaining before the group would agree to a deal.

They are a permanent ceasefire; withdrawal of what the source called “occupation forces” – that is, Israeli troops – from the Gaza Strip; and the return of displaced people from the south to the north.

Another diplomatic source played down the prospects of an imminent deal, saying progress was slow and it was unlikely there would be a breakthrough within the next 48 hours.

Iranian singer Shervin Hajipour, whose song became popular during mass protests in 2022, has been sentenced to three years and eight months in prison and ordered to write a song about US “atrocities,” a human rights group reported.

The 27-year-old Grammy Award winner was accused of “inciting unrest against national security” and “spreading propaganda against the regime,” according to a report by Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) on Friday.

He was summoned by the police and questioned for “encouragement to protest” in 2022, two days after he posted a video of himself singing his song “Baraye,” which translates to “For…,” on Instagram. The sentence comes in the wake of a crackdown on voices of dissent within the country.

Hajipour, who gained international recognition and a Special Merit Award for Best Song for Social Change at the 2023 Grammys for the song, was detained in Sari, Mazandaran Province by security forces in September 2022 and released on bail that October.

His song became an anthem of protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini that evolved into a broader movement calling for greater freedoms and even an overthrow of the state.

The court’s verdict extends beyond the prison sentence, imposing additional penalties deemed necessary to reflect the “gravity of Hajipour’s actions,” HRANA said.

For two years following his imprisonment, Hajipour is barred from leaving Iran. He is also mandated to engage in activities that “promote the achievements” of the Islamic Revolution, including compiling content on culture, science and art, and producing a song about the “USA’s atrocities against humanity.”

Hajipour must also summarize two books on the status of women in Islam and “document human rights violations by the U.S. government over the last century,” HRANA reported.

On his Instagram account, Hajipour posted a picture of the verdict, thanking his lawyers and management team.

The northern Iran resident released yet another controversial song and music video last month, referencing his recent run-ins with authorities, with lyrics indicating that he’s the “trash who didn’t have anyone to post bail for him,” and that even though he’s “not allowed to sing (in public)” he is the “trash that will stay in Iran to rebuild this city” and never leave the country.

The images were stirring: Alexey Navalny’s mourners lining up on Friday around the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God in Moscow’s Maryino district, risking arrest to pay final respects to a man they call their hero.

Each red carnation clutched by a supporter of the Russian dissident can be seen as a small act of resistance in a country where the state has cleared the landscape of all political competition. And one of the chants of Navalny’s supporters at the funeral – ne prostim (we won’t forgive) – seemed directed at Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But the fact that Navalny’s funeral went ahead, after two cruel weeks of bureaucratic delay and official obfuscation, is perhaps a sign of the Kremlin’s confidence. Its crackdown on dissent is so complete, and genuine political opposition so marginalized, that the event was allowed to take place. The funeral of Navalny was the funeral of the Russian opposition movement – for now.

To be sure, a heavy contingent of police was on hand to make sure the event did not veer outside the boundaries of acceptable protest. Independent monitoring group OVD-Info reported that 91 people were arrested in 19 cities around Russia on the day of Navalny’s funeral, far fewer than the hundreds arrested on the day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine raised the stakes for public protest in Russia, introducing strict new criminal penalties for defaming the country’s military. Hundreds of thousands of Russians went into exile, many of whom were part of Navalny’s constituency. The person who has assumed the mantle of Navalny’s charismatic leadership – his widow, Yulia Navalnaya – is out of the country, and does not immediately present a direct political threat to Putin, who is poised to sail to re-election in two weeks. That all makes Friday’s turnout more remarkable, but what future is there for Navalny’s form of opposition?

Navalny returned to Russia following his recovery from nerve-agent poisoning in 2021 precisely because he wanted to remain an active player in politics. And his form of digitally engaged activism continued, even as state prosecutors piled on charges against him.

For that, he paid the price: Whatever the ultimate cause of his death in prison, Navalny’s term in a remote penal colony north of the Arctic Circle was designed to break him physically and psychologically.

Behind bars, Navalny had remained a potent symbol of resistance, sending messages that poked fun at the prison administration. Even in death, his sense of humor and pop-culture savvy surfaced. Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman, noted that music from an Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster was played as his body was laid to rest.

“Alexey considered Terminator 2 the best film on earth,” she wrote. “Music from the final scene was played at his funeral.”

To quote the Terminator, Navalny will be back.

“Schoolkids hear about heroes in schools but here we have a true hero which we were happy to work with through the years,” his longtime aide Maria Pevchikh said in a live YouTube broadcast on Friday. “Navalny will become a giant figure in Russian history,”

But while Putin is in power, the anti-corruption activist’s name will not be seen on streets and squares. So how long Russian schoolchildren will wait for him to enter their history books is a very open question.

Flights at Port-au-Prince airport in Haiti’s capital have been disrupted for the second straight day by heavy gunfire nearby, as the Caribbean nation grapples with surging gang violence and political instability.

The US Embassy in Haiti issued a security alert on Friday, warning of gunfire and disruptions to traffic near the domestic and international terminals of the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, as well as surrounding areas including a hotel and the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police.

“The US Embassy is temporarily halting travel of official US personnel to the airport and instructing any US personnel at the airport to remain there,” the embassy said.

It comes a day after shootings erupted across Haiti’s capital, forcing flight cancellations and killing at least four people during an attack on a police station.

American Airlines said Thursday it had suspended its daily service between Miami and Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince.

Rapid gunfire near the airport had “caused damage to some aircraft and endangered users” of the domestic terminal, according to Sunrise Airways.

A US flight carrying dozens of Haitian deportees was also canceled, according to a source with knowledge of the operation and a lawyer for one of the deportees.

“It’s baffling that we’ve continued to deport people to Haiti when the conditions are so dire,” he said, while also complaining that US authorities had failed to provide food to the detainees or let them out since 4 p.m. the previous day.

Surging gang violence

Haiti has been gripped by a wave of unrest and gang violence in recent years.

Warring gangs control much of Port-au-Prince, choking off vital supply lines to the rest of the country. Gang members have also terrorized the metropolitan population, forcing some 200,000 people to flee their homes amid waves of indiscriminate killing, kidnapping, arson and rape.

Some 1,100 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in January alone, in what the United Nations called the most violent month in two years.

More than 8,400 people were victims of such violence through last year, according to a report from the UN Integrated Office in Haiti (BIUH).

Waves of crime and violence began to sweep across Haiti following the assassination of former President Jovenel Moise in 2021.

Public frustration has mounted against Prime Minister Ariel Henry for his failure to put a lid on the unrest, especially after he failed to hold elections supposedly slated for last month, citing the escalating violence.

On Wednesday, Henry told other Caribbean nations’ leaders during a regional summit that he would hold polls no later than August 31 next year, his first confirmation on when a vote will finally go ahead.

Leaders from the CARICOM regional bloc – a political and economic grouping of 20 developing countries and mostly island states – said they agreed to dispatch a team to assess the electoral needs of Haiti.

A powerful Haitian gang leader said gun fights that broke out across Port-au-Prince on Thursday were aimed at overthrowing Henry’s government, multiple media outlets reported.

Three other people were injured in separate attacks across the capital – one at the airport, a second near a prison in downtown Port-au-Prince, and a third inside the prison, the security source said.

International support

The security mission, authorized by the UN, has been seen by the international community as key to containing the situation in Haiti. Kenya volunteered to serve as the lead nation in that mission.

Officials from Kenya signed an agreement on Friday to send 1,000 police officers to Haiti as part of the security mission.

“From Kenya, we are ready for this deployment, and I request all the other partners across the globe to step up so that we can provide a response in good time,” Ruto said on Friday.

Henry thanked Kenya for agreeing to lead the mission, saying that after six months of fine-tuning it, “finally, we sign. It’s the last step.”

The signing of the deal is intended to satisfy a court ruling from Kenya’s High Court, which delayed the deployment of troops in January after finding that a reciprocal agreement with Haiti was needed.

The United States intended to contribute $200 million to the multinational security support mission to back the Haitian national police “with planning, with intelligence, with airlift capacity, communications, and medical equipment and services,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week.

Before the war, Mohammed Hamouda and his wife, Dina, would stroll along beaches in northern Gaza, where their three young children loved to swim, eat ice cream, and ride camels on the shoreline.

Now, the sound of laughter has been replaced by that of Israeli strikes raining down on the enclave.

“They are very fearful. All day, we have to be by their side,” Hamouda reflected from Rafah, in southern Gaza, where they have fled. “They keep asking me about when we will go back home.”

But the family has no home to go back to. They recently learned that their house in Beit Lahia was destroyed. Hamouda’s youngest child, Kareem, 2, is too young to understand, but his eldest children, Ella, 6, and Sila, 4, were devastated by the loss and would not stop crying. “I couldn’t find any words to console her (Ella),” he said.

Of the 2.2 million people living in Gaza, about half are under the age of 18. As a result of Israel’s partial blockade, the life expectancy for Palestinians in Gaza was already a decade shorter than in Israel, with rates of neonatal, infant and maternal mortality more than three times higher, according to the World Bank. Since the war began, life for young people in the strip has become even more fragile.

Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza after the militant group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing at least 1,200 people, including 36 children, and kidnapping more than 250 others.

I feel scared and fear the planes will bomb us, especially when my father leaves for work.”

Ella Hamouda, 9, displaced in southern Gaza

No relief for injured children

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has demolished family homes, razed entire neighborhoods, and turned swathes of the territory into rubble-filled wasteland. In recent weeks, the Israeli military intensified airstrikes in central and northern Gaza, ahead of an anticipated ground offensive in Rafah. Families like the Hamoudas fear they will have nowhere left to flee.

Nearly 30% of Gazans are estimated to have no home to return to, with more than 60% of housing units across the strip either totally destroyed or partially damaged, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported in February.

Ella dreams of the day she can return to the beach with her friends, siblings Amira, 8, Yehia, 10, and Mohamed, 6, Hamouda said.

He hasn’t had the heart to tell her that Amira was killed, along with her father, Waseem El Ostaz, and his wife, Helal, in a strike on their home in Beit Lahia, in November. Hamouda felt able to tell his daughter only of the death of Amira’s parents, who were close friends of the family.

“She cried a lot, and she was very sad… She stopped eating,” said Hamouda of Ella. “She asked me to bring over those kids after the war is over and take them to the beach … to make it up to them because they lost their parents, so that she can have a role in helping them and comforting them.”

Both Yehia and Mohamed were burned in the strike, according to Hamouda. Yehia also sustained a fractured lower limb. The two siblings were displaced to a relative’s house in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza. 

Many children have sustained life-altering injuries from Israeli strikes, according to the UN’s children’s agency (UNICEF). Around 1,000 children lost one or both legs from the beginning of the war until the end of November, UNICEF reported.

Forced displacement leads to insecurity, hunger

Ayas, 8, who was disabled, and lived in an orphanage in Gaza City, was en route to a hospital in Rafah when he died, Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi, the orphanage director, said.

His condition had worsened after the orphanage was forced to flee with all 40 young people in its care – most of them children and infants living with disabilities – and bring them south. Due to shortages, Ayas couldn’t get the medicine he needed. Without it, his muscles stiffened, his convulsions and inflammation increased, making it difficult for him to eat or sleep, Al-Naizi said.

We hope that this war will end, and the suffering of the children of Palestine will end. Ayas is just a child among thousands of children who suffer here in Gaza and whose lives are exposed to danger every day. They die of hunger, disease, fear or bombing.”

Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi, orphanage director, displaced in southern Gaza

UNICEF warned in January of a triple threat to children in Gaza – not just the danger of raging war, but also of malnutrition and disease. Israel’s bombardment and restrictions on aid entering the strip have severely diminished food and water supplies, exposing the entire population to the risk of famine.

In February, UNRWA, the main UN relief agency in Gaza suspended deliveries to northern Gaza after an Israeli attack on one of their convoys, further limiting aid. Soon after, the UN World Food Programme also stopped deliveries, citing attacks.

One in six children under the age of two in northern Gaza are estimated to be acutely malnourished, according to an assessment by the Global Nutrition Cluster, which is co-chaired by WFP and UNICEF.

Ayas was displaced at least six times before his death, said Al-Naizi. At least 1.7 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced, according to the UN. Many of those – including about 610,000 children – have sought refuge in cramped shelters in Rafah, according to Save the Children.

Forced displacement, even to the homes of relatives or acquaintances, exposes children to the indignities of cramped living conditions with little privacy, according to Saeed Muhammad Al-Kahlot, a mental health specialist displaced in Rafah with his three children – Siwar, 15, Muhammad, 9, and Saba, 7.

As many as 17,000 children in Gaza are unaccompanied by or separated from their parents, UNICEF said in February — about 1% of the total displaced population. Children whose parents have been killed by Israeli bombardment – or who have been separated from their guardians – are forced to take on the role of parenting younger siblings.

“I also saw a kid who is barely seven years old, and he was getting his baby sister’s milk ready, and he was changing her diaper because he lost his mother,” said Hamouda.

Many kids who lost their parents are now playing the parent for their other siblings.”

Mohammed Hamouda, father-of-three, displaced in southern Gaza

Nearly 20,000 babies were born in Gaza from October 7 to January 19, UNICEF reported, meaning many newborns are starting life amid these dire conditions.

Robbed of an education

Dressed in a blue pinstripe dress with a frilly collar, Ella used to carry her pink and purple rucksack to pre-school – where she would play with her friend, Aya.

“She is very upset because she doesn’t know how to read or write.”

Children in Gaza are expected to lose at least a year of education because of the war, according to the UN. A recent damage assessment by UNICEF identified over 160 school buildings that were directly hit. Field reports from the agency also found that nearly four-fifths of school buildings across the strip have been damaged and at least 26 destroyed.

There is no safe place for more than 625,000 students who need schooling, UNICEF added. One in 100 teachers and one in 130 students have been killed by Israeli strikes, as of January 30. 

Psychological trauma, changes in behavior

The number of children in need of mental health support has doubled to more than 1 million since the start of the war – nearly all children in the strip, UNICEF estimated. 

“This situation we are going through has never been seen before in the previous wars,” he added.

Loss is a harsh and traumatic human experience. In the psychological clinic, one of the fathers, who was suffering from a panic attack, told me that he hugs his children every night before bed and firmly believes that this will be their last hug.”

Saeed Muhammad Al-Kahlot, mental health specialist and father-of-three, displaced in southern Gaza

“There is no safe place for us to take them to play,” he reflected. “I fear losing their souls and I fear that they might get injured or that they might suffer from a disability for life.

“I want my children to live like the rest of the world’s children.”

Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.

Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.

Israel’s throttling of aid came into sharper focus Thursday when its military opened fire as desperate Palestinians gathered around food aid trucks in western Gaza City, according to eyewitnesses. This triggered panic and some people were shot while others were plowed by trucks whose drivers tried to flee, eyewitnesses say. At least 112 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more were injured, according to health officials. The IDF said it had fired warning shots to disperse a crowd after seeing that people were being trampled.

A White House readout of a phone call between US President Joe Biden and Qatari Emir Tamim al-Thani on Thursday said both leaders agreed the horrific event underscored “the urgency of bringing negotiations to a close as soon as possible and expanding the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza.”

US Senator Chris Murphy said the situation was “a result of the complete breakdown in social order in Gaza, which is spiraling out of control without a massive influx of humanitarian aid and a pause in the fighting.”

For months, queues of trucks bound for the enclave have been backed up along the highway leading from the Egyptian town of Arish, a major logistical hub for aid, to the Rafah crossing with Gaza. In a satellite image from February 21, a queue of trucks can be seen stretching out for 4 miles from the crossing.

Across the border, Israel’s bombardment edges closer to some two million people hemmed in between the southern Gazan city of Rafah and Egypt’s frontier. Further north, at least six children have died in hospitals in recent days from dehydration and malnutrition, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

It’s deliberately opaque, deliberately ambiguous

Senior humanitarian official

“While there’s a war being fought in Gaza, we are fighting a different war here,” said one humanitarian worker at Egypt’s Rafah crossing with Gaza. “It is a war to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza.”

Several sources said a substantial portion of the donations they handled were either rejected or held up by a long wait for clearance by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, which manages the flow of aid into the strip.

“It’s deliberately opaque, deliberately ambiguous,” said another senior humanitarian official. “You can receive clearance from COGAT and arrive to find police or finance and customs officials who will send the truck back.”

“Israel assists, encourages and facilitates the entry of humanitarian aid for the residents of the Gaza Strip and for medical and other critical infrastructures in the strip,” the statement said. “Israel’s war is against the Hamas terrorist organization, not against the residents of the Gaza Strip.

Israel has long barred certain items from entering Gaza. In 2007, it imposed a blockade on the strip after Hamas took over. A year later, COGAT released a list of banned “dual use” items, making slight modifications to the document in the years that followed.

These are goods which, it said, could be repurposed for military use and would be barred from entering Gaza, such as concrete, agricultural fertilizer, certain chemicals and other miscellaneous items like binoculars, underwater cameras and water skis.

But those criteria appear to have been abandoned in the aftermath of Hamas’ brutal October 7 attack on Israel, which left about 1,200 people dead and over 250 people held hostage, according to Israeli authorities.

We provide minimal humanitarian aid… If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

The Israeli military responded with an intensive air, sea and land assault on Gaza that has sent the death toll soaring to over 30,000 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry, devastating most of the strip’s buildings and houses, as well as large swathes of its commercial sector and farmlands.

In a January 13 press conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about permitting “minimal humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza.

“We provide minimal humanitarian aid,” Netanyahu said. “If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.”

The international community has repeatedly criticized Israel for issuing insufficient permits, and security clearances, for aid trucks to Gaza. There have also been instances where the Israeli military struck food deliveries. Looting by desperate civilians and criminal gangs in some of the hardest hit areas in the north of Gaza has intensified that crisis, bringing UN food deliveries there to a grinding halt.

Exacerbating the situation is an apparent ghost list impeding the delivery of a wide range of items.

“I’ve never seen a supply chain that ought to be so simple be so complicated,” said Save the Children US president and chief executive Janti Soeripto. “The level of barriers being put in place to hamper humanitarian assistance; we’ve never seen anything like it.”

She said toys were rejected because they were in a wooden box rather than a cardboard box, sleeping bags were denied because they had zippers, and sanitary pads were turned back because a nail clipper was included in the hygiene kit.

In January, US Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley saw maternity kits and water filtration systems among the items Israel turned back from its inspection point in Nitzana.

“We learned that when a truck with just one of those items is turned down, the entire truck gets turned around and has to go back to the beginning of the process, which can take weeks,” Van Hollen said.

“We talked to the heads of international aid organizations that had been working in conflicts worldwide for decades,” the senator added. “They said they’d never seen a more broken system.”

The situation prompted Van Hollen to spearhead US congressional efforts to hold Israel accountable for its handling of humanitarian aid, which he described on the Senate floor earlier this month as a “textbook war crime.”

Israel’s elusive guidelines on restricted items

Publicly, COGAT claims that it has abided by its 2008 banned items list. In private, COGAT has said that that document is now obsolete, according to a humanitarian official in direct contact with the Israeli unit.

COGAT enforced the 2008 list when the war first erupted on October 7, the official said. “About three weeks in, they said that list is not valid for this response. This is a different context. They said ignore the list.”

“No one can argue that sleeping bags are going to win a war,” the official said. “We did push back on that and warned them that it would look pretty silly if this got out.”

Four sources described another incident when Israel rejected a shipment of dates – a rich source of nutrients desperately needed by a hungry population. Two of the sources said it was because the seeds were picked up as a suspicious object in the x-ray inspection imaging.

Other trucks carrying dates have been allowed into Gaza, according to UN data. But humanitarian workers have said they are worried about a repeat, and several have resorted to pitting dates prior to inspection.

COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.

The confusion prompted Israeli rights group GISHA to file a Freedom of Information Act request on February 7 asking the Israeli government to release details of any new restrictions on aid imposed since October 7.

“The Israeli public has a right to know what is being done in its name in Gaza.”

Anesthetics, crutches and other ‘frequently rejected items’

For doctors and patients inside Gaza, the implications are excruciating. There are numerous reports of preventable deaths for lack of oxygen and ventilators. Over 1,000 children have undergone leg amputations in Gaza, according to UNICEF, some without anesthesia. That figure was compiled by UNICEF at the end of November and has not been updated since.

There was no anesthesia. My anesthesia was the Quran which I was reciting

Ahed Bseiso, 17, recalling her leg amputation

“He brought the kitchen knife and cut my leg off with it. And in that moment, I said praise be to God. Because he brought me patience.”

Medicines in Gaza began to run out shortly after the war erupted on October 7. Injuries from intensive bombardment skyrocketed while Israel stifled aid deliveries.

“Towards the end of my 43 days in Gaza, we had run out of anesthetic, and we were doing procedures with no anesthetic at all,” said British-Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah from his clinic in London, two months after his return from Gaza.

“We were having to do extremely painful cleaning procedures to stop wound infections on children with no anesthetic and no analgesic.”

In the absence of appropriate medical supplies, Abu-Sittah concocted a solution to fight infection: dish soap mixed with vinegar and saline.

“I would pour that over the wound and scrub the wound down,” Abu-Sittah said. “It was probably the darkest moment of my life. The child was screaming. The parent was crying, and you’re trying to just block all of this out and do it as quickly as possible.

“But knowing that if you hadn’t, that child would be dead by the end of the day.”

Another humanitarian source inside Gaza said that in early February he witnessed a six-year-old child with burns covering 40% of her body. She was at a hospital in Rafah, the best supplied population center in Gaza, where medics could only give her aspirin to ease her agony.

Another woman, Um Adel, said her granddaughter died due to a lack of oxygen at a hospital in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis.

Israel’s restrictions have also impacted medicines for the chronically ill. For weeks, COGAT temporarily prevented insulin pens for children with diabetes from entering Gaza, according to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick and one other source.

“On the goods that are being prohibited, it’s a full range,” said McGoldrick in a January 24 press conference. “Some of it is medical material such as basic drugs and material for treating not just trauma but for chronic illnesses.

“One example would be most recently the pens that are used for insulin for children,” he added. “In terms of the rationale for it, I really can’t explain it because I don’t know.

“These are essential commodities for us to address the emergency which is currently unfolding in a very dramatic fashion.”

At one of the waypoints of aid in Jordan, stacked boxes of donations extend for around eight miles, a backlog that would require around a thousand trucks to deliver, Jordan’s charity officials estimate.

The director of programs and planning for the Jordanian Hashemite Charity Organization (JHCO), Marwan al-Hennawy, slits open a box of food to show what should be reaching people in Gaza; this one contains rice, chicken stock, tuna and dates. It is enough to feed a family of five for two weeks.

Al-Hennawy scans the sea of boxes around him. “It’s painful to look around and see all this,” he says. “I feel like I’m trapped. I know Gazans desperately need this help but I can’t get it to them. It’s like a nightmare.”