7,000 displaced Rohingya Muslim refugees have been made homeless yet again after a fire tore through their camp in southeastern Bangladesh, according to the UN refugee agency.

 Fire swept through a Rohingya refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh in the early hours of Sunday, destroying about 800 shelters and rendering thousands homeless, officials said.

Fire service officials and Rohingya volunteers brought the blaze under control around three hours after it hit Camp 5 in Cox's Bazar, a border district with Myanmar, shortly before 1 a.m. (1900 GMT).

Apart from homes, several other facilities like learning centres were also gutted, Bangladesh's Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner in Cox's Bazar, Mohammed Mizanur Rahman said, adding that there were no casualties.

UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, said nearly 7,000 have been made homeless by the blaze and around 120 facilities, including mosques and healthcare centres were damaged.

Nearly a million members of the Muslim minority from Myanmar live in crammed, bamboo-and-plastic camps in Bangladesh's border district of Cox's Bazar, most of them having fled a military crackdown in 2017.

Last year about 12,000 were left homeless after nearly 2,800 shelters and more than 90 facilities including hospitals and learning centres were destroyed in a fire. An investigating panel set up by the panel called it a "planned act of sabotage".

Tensions between Israel and neighbouring state Lebanon have escalated since the senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri was killed in a targeted assassination in Beirut, Lebanon on 2 January 2024. Hezbollah, Hamas' Lebanese ally and a Shia Islamist political and militant group, claim that Israel is responsible for the attacks while Isreal has denied the allegation. Following the killing, Lebanon has filed a complaint to the UN Security Council describing the incident as the “most dangerous phase” of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.

The prospect of a broader regional conflict is growing as video footages of Israeli warplanes dropping internationally banned white phosphorus on residential areas in Al-Khayaam, South Lebanon are being shared on social media. See an X post of the alleged Israeli attacks on Lebanon:

Israel just bombed a residential area in South, Lebanon with banned phosphorus munitions, violated Security Council resolution SCR 1701 and international law with absolutely no consequences.

This is another war crime and the International Criminal Court remains silent. pic.twitter.com/lBYKdaUbUE

— Mohamad Safa (@mhdksafa) January 6, 2024

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) , also known as the 'World Court', will hold a hearing concerning the 84-page international law suit that South Africa lodged against Isreal, accusing Isreal of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The complaint was filed before the ICJ on 29 December 2023. The State of Isreal was quick to deny the allegations within South Africa’s complaint as “baseless” and announced on 2 January 2024 that it will challenge the allegations of genocide before the ICJ in The Hague. The ICJ hearing is scheduled for 11 and 12 January 2024. 

Acts of genocide alleged in the ICJ complaint include “killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing their serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction” and attributes all the stated acts to Israel. “In addition to being killed by Isreali weaponry, Palestinians in Gaza are also at immediate risk of death by starvation, dehydration and disease as a result of the ongoing siege by Isreal, the insufficient aid being let through,…the decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure”, South Africa wrote. The complaint further mentions the forced displacement of an estimate of “over 1.9 million Palestinians out of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million” since October 2023. South Africa requested the ICJ for an interim measure to prevent Isreal from relentlessly bombing and systematically killing Palestinians of the Gaza Strip that Israel first launched on 7 October 2023. At least 22,000 civilians including numerous children were killed within the last four months.

The situation remains tense as the international community awaits the ICJ's deliberation on the genocide allegations. In a YouTube interview, lawyer Daniel Machover welcomed South Africa's complaint against Israel. "It's now clear to me that the years of the failure to apply international law and in particular to suppress ... alleged war crimes committed by Israelis during this long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has led us to where we are today with the most serious of allegations against ...the Israeli State, which South Africa has brought ... to the International Court of Justice". "It's a very very sad day it's a horrific situation that we've reached and for Israel to face a claim of genocide just shows us that how far we've gone and that it was all predicted ... in in the clearest way." "This shouldn't in fact ultimately come as a surprise shocking as it is," Machover added.

Read the full ICJ complaint here.

Sudan's army chief, Abel Fattah al-Burhan, has rejected the latest calls for a ceasefire stating that the nine-month war between the military and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary will continue. 

RSF head, Mohammed Hamdan "Hemedti" Dagalo, agreed earlier in the week to a ceasefire under the condition that the military must cooperate. However, this was met with skepticism as the RSF has previously failed to fulfill its promises. 

In a video released by his office, Al-Burhan states "the whole world witnessed these rebel forces committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in West Darfur and the rest of Sudan. For that reason, we have no reconciliation with them, we have no agreement with them.” 

Both the RSF and the military have been accused of committing war crimes. The US has also stated that the RSF is responsible for ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. 

Read more on Al Jazeera. 

Taiwanese President, Tsai Ing-wen, emphasized that Taiwan's relationship with China must be determined by the will of the people and peace must be based on "dignity." These comments come in response to China's leader, Xi Jinping stating that "reunification" with the island is inevitable. 

Xi Jinping's comments depict a shift in tone from the previous year wherein he stated that people on either side of the Taiwan Strait are "members of one and the same family."

On 13 January, democratically governed Taiwan will hold presidential and parliamentary elections. China has been ramping up military pressure to assert its sovereignty over the region in the weeks leading up to the elections.

When asked about Xi's comments Tsai noted that it is the responsibility of both sides to maintain peace and stability in the region. She continued to state that China should respect the outcome of Taiwan's elections. 

During the civil war in 1949, Taiwan split from China. However, Beijing continues to regard the island as Chinese territory. 

China has described the elections in Taiwan as a choice between war and peace. The state has refused multiple offers of talks by Tsai, believing her to be a separatist. 

Read more on AP and Reuters. 

Activists say the review of 113,000 missing people in Mexico is a ploy to reduce the number ahead of the presidential election

The government has now announced it was able to confirm just 12,377 of the more than 113,000 cases of disappeared people.

The registry had become intensely politicised, with the rising number of disappeared a symbol of the continuing insecurity across the country, while the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said that it was being inflated to attack the government.

Violence in Mexico soared with the launch of the militarised “war on drugs” in 2006, and it has remained stubbornly high throughout the term of López Obrador, popularly known as Amlo, which began in 2018.

That same year, the National Search Commission was established to look for disappeared people, working with local commissions and prosecutor’s offices in each state, and regularly publishing the accumulating number of cases in its registry.

Amlo promised a change in security strategy, but has failed to deliver improvements, and the ever-climbing number of disappeared – along with the number of homicides, which in 2022 topped 30,000 for the fifth year in a row – have been a frequent line of attack on his government.

In June, Amlo announced a “census” to review the official total of disappearances, case by case.

Karla Quintana, who had led the National Search Commission since 2019, resigned shortly after that announcement. “Their intention is very clear and it is regrettable: it is to reduce the number of disappeared people, mainly during this government,” said Quintana soon afterwards.

Quintana was replaced by Teresa Guadalupe Reyes Sahagún, who before that had been the general director of the National Institute for Adult Education.

The UN’s human rights office in Mexico criticised the process by which Reyes was appointed, citing a lack of consultation, transparency and scrutiny.

“I think the National Search Commission had important support from the government in the first few years,” said Pérez Ricart. “And now the impression is that the commission is at the service of the president.”

Little information was made public about the methodology with which the commission was updating the registry.

In a statement this week, some collectives of family members of missing people rejected the update, “because without transparency they are disappearing the disappeared”.

“The data is a mess. That’s the reality,” said Pérez Ricart. “[The registry] was an important effort, and I think Karla Quintana was a great civil servant, who did everything she could. But we are talking about a project that regrettably failed, and one that now has very little legitimacy.”

Meanwhile, the underlying phenomenon of disappearances remains poorly understood.

“Various important [questions] remain in the air,” wrote Jacobo Dayán, an investigator and columnist. “Who are these people? Where are they? Who is responsible for their disappearance? Why did they disappear? Why is it not being investigated?”

And the violence and insecurity in Mexico continue unabated.

“Instead of trying to score political points by disputing the number of disappeared, the president should listen to the thousands of families clamouring for justice and take steps to address the systemic causes of this ongoing catastrophe,” said Tyler Mattiace, a Mexico researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Read more at Guardian 

Former Rwandan doctor Sosthene Munyemana was on Wednesday jailed for 24 years by a French court for his involvement in the 1994 genocide of Tutsis.

The 68-year-old former gynaecologist was found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and participation in a conspiracy to prepare these crimes.

The trial at the Assize Court in Paris came nearly three decades after a complaint was filed against Munyemana in the southwestern French city of Bordeaux in 1995.

His lawyers said they planned to appeal the verdict.

The public prosecutor had sought a sentence of 30 years, arguing that the "sum total" of his choices showed "the traits of a genocidaire".

Munyemana was accused of helping draft a letter of support for the then interim government, which encouraged the massacre of the Tutsis. 

He was also accused of helping set up roadblocks to round people up and keeping them in inhumane conditions in local government offices before they were killed in the southern Rwandan prefecture of Butare, where he lived at the time.

During the trial, Munyemana repeatedly disputed the accusations, claiming he had been a moderate Hutu who had instead tried to "save" Tutsis by offering them "refuge" in local government offices.

In 2011, a French court charged the father-of-three on suspicion of taking part in the 1994 genocide. 

Munyemana was close to Jean Kambanda, the head of the interim government established after the plane carrying then-president Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down by a missile in 1994.

It is the sixth trial in France of an alleged participant in the massacres, in which around 800,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, were slaughtered over 100 days by Hutu soldiers and extremist militias, according to UN figures.

France has been one of the top destinations for those implicated in the Rwandan slaughter fleeing justice at home.

Rwanda under President Paul Kagame has accused Paris of being unwilling to extradite genocide suspects or bring them to justice.

Since 2014, France has tried and convicted six figures including a former spy chief, two ex-mayors and a former hotel chauffeur.

Read more here

The Irish government has initiated a legal challenge against the UK government over its controversial decision to offer immunity for Troubles-era crimes. 

In September the Troubles Legacy Act received royal assent despite widespread opposition from victims' organizations, political parties in Northern Ireland, and human rights organizations. 

Critics of the Act have emphasized that the law would remove access to justice. The Act will stop future civil cases, legacy inquests, and, criminal prosecutions during Northern Ireland's Troubles. 

Amnesty International released a statement welcoming the Irish decision to pursue a legal challenge to the Act.

In the statement, Grainne Teggart, Amnesty International UK's Northern Ireland Deputy Director, stated "The Irish Government is doing the right thing for victims, for the rule of law and for the upholding of human rights". Teggart continued "Victims' right to truth, reparations, and justice must be realized".

Michael Martin, Ireland's deputy premier, and foreign affairs minister, said they are taking the case reluctantly as the UK government pursued the decision unilaterally. 

Read more on BBC, the Irish News, and Amnesty International. 

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have seized Wad Madani, the city has been housing hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled the country's capital Khartoum due to conflict between the state forces and the RSF paramilitary. 

After three days of intense fighting, the RSF advanced and captured the capital of el-Gezira state. Thousands of people have fled the city, heading towards the south. 

During the RSF advance, army intelligence units were reportedly arresting civilians, specifically individuals from Darfur, based on their ethnicity. Many people who were arrested had been living and working in the region as agricultural workers for decades.  

Aid organizations operating in Wad Madani were reported to have stopped their essential work upon the RSF advance. The UN has stated that nearly half of the Sudanese population is facing hunger, around 18 million require urgent humanitarian food assistance. 

Both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF have been accused of committing war crimes including the mass rapes of women and girls. Since the conflict began in April of this year 10,000 people have been killed, and 6 million have become internally displaced.

Read more here.

Human Rights Watch have stated that the Indian government should conduct thorough and impartial investigations into allegations that government agents were involved in assassination plots against Sikh activists in the United States and Canada.

In a statement released on 15 December, the organisation notes the "Indian government’s systemic failures to prosecute security force personnel for extrajudicial killings and other serious abuses in India... raise broader concerns about its willingness to address transnational repression – abuses committed against nationals outside the country"

"India’s alleged involvement in assassination plots in the US and Canada suggests a new and notorious leap in extrajudicial killings,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The Indian authorities’ repeated failure to hold police and military personnel accountable for unlawful killings demonstrates the need for more credible investigations.”

In September 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused India of involvement in the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh activist leader, on June 18, in British Columbia. The Indian government dismissed the allegations as “absurd.”

On November 29, US authorities announced charges against an Indian national, Nikhil Gupta, whom they allege was recruited by an unnamed Indian government official to arrange a contract killing of a Sikh activist leader in the US. The Indian authorities said such actions were “contrary to government policy” and announced a high-level inquiry committee to investigate the allegations.

While the indictment for conspiracy to commit murder does not name the intended target of the plot, it was widely reported to be Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the general counsel for the US-based Sikhs for Justice. The group advocates the secession of Punjab state from India to create the independent nation of Khalistan for Sikhs, a minority religious group in the country. The alleged plot was foiled by US authorities, according to the prosecutors.

The allegations of Indian government involvement in targeted killings abroad come amid increasing reports of serious human rights violations against activists in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government has attempted to silence dissent using intimidation and harassment of critics through raids and arbitrary arrests, including under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the primary counterterrorism law. The Washington Post alleged online harassment, reporting that an organization linked to Indian intelligence agencies “combined fact-based research with unsubstantiated claims to paint U.S. government figures, researchers, humanitarian groups and Indian American rights activists as part of a conspiracy, purportedly led by global Islamic groups and billionaire George Soros, to undermine India.”

The BJP government’s ultranationalist ideology promoting Hindu supremacy has fueled and encouraged violence against religious minorities, especially Muslims and Christians, but also attempted to label Sikh farmers protesting against government agriculture laws as Sikh separatists. Police and other authorities have failed to hold supporters of the BJP and members of BJP-affiliated groups to account for violence, often instead targeting members of victim communities or their advocates.

Read more at Human Rights Watch 

According to the United Nations Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) families in Sudan's conflict zones are being pushed toward famine-like hunger, approximately 18 million people require urgent humanitarian food assistance. 

The UN IPC has identified the violence between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) along with other organized violence as the primary driver of life-threatening food insecurity in Sudan. 

Most of those facing catastrophic food insecurity are concentrated in the country's capital, Khartoum. 

Sudanese families are struggling to keep up with the rising costs of imports. The IPC has warned that without urgent humanitarian assistance, civilians will eventually deplete their resources and starve to death. 

Agencies providing lifesaving and life-sustaining assistance are unable to safely access people who require support. The IPC has emphasized that the complex dynamics of the conflict have proven to be an obstacle for humanitarian organizations.

On 11 December, the United Nations appealed for $46bn in funding for 2024 to help hundreds of millions of people impacted by humanitarian crises including those in Sudan.

Read more here.

The UN General Assembly has overwhelmingly adopted a non-binding resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, alongside the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages and well as "ensuring humanitarian access".

153 member states voted in favour, 10 against and there were 23 abstentions.

 This was a second attempt by the UN General Assembly which in October had called for "a humanitarian truce" in a resolution adopted with 121 votes in favour, 14 against and 44 abstentions.

Before the vote, the UN General Assembly president, Dennis Francis, delivered a speech in which he spoke of the “onslaught on civilians, the breakdown of humanitarian systems, and profound disrespect and international law and international humanitarian law”.

Before the vote the governments of Canada, Australia and New Zealand issued a joint statement of support  for "efforts towards a sustainable ceasefire in Palestine", according to a joint statement released from the prime ministers of all three governments, Reuters reported.

“The recent pause in hostilities allowed for the release of more than 100 hostages and supported an increase in humanitarian access to affected civilians … We want to see this pause resumed and support urgent international efforts towards a sustainable ceasefire,” read the statement.

“We are alarmed at the diminishing safe space for civilians in Gaza. The price of defeating Hamas cannot be the continuous suffering of all Palestinian civilians,” read the statement, further.

The prime ministers added that a ceasefire must also include Hamas releasing all hostages and to “stop using Palestinian civilians as human shields”, the statement read.

This latest statement comes after the US vetoed a UN security council resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, a move that garnered criticism from several world leaders.

The US vetoed a UN security council resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas.

The vote on the draft resolution put forward by the United Arab Emirates underscored the US and Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation, as the Israel Defense Forces continue to press the military effort against Hamas in southern Gaza.

Thirteen security council members voted in favour of the resolution. The UK abstained.

Speaking after the vote, US deputy ambassador to the UN Robert Wood said Washington could not support an unconditional ceasefire, which would only benefit Hamas.

“This is not only unrealistic but dangerous, it would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7,” Wood said, adding it would “only plant the seeds for the next war”.

The US and the UK also criticised the draft for not including language condemning Hamas’s October 7 attack, in which the group killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages.

The vote came after UN secretary-general António Guterres made use of a rarely exercised power to warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Gaza and push for a vote on a ceasefire. His use of Article 99 of the UN Charter was the first time the authority had been used in more than 50 years.

More than 17,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in Israel’s air and ground attacks on the strip, which they launched in response to the Hamas incursion in October.

To be adopted, a resolution needs nine votes in favour and cannot be vetoed by any of the five permanent members of the security council.

Arab foreign ministers were in Washington on Friday meeting with US secretary of state Antony Blinken to press him to support the resolution and for the US to do more to bring about an immediate end to the fighting.

“Our message is consistent and clear that we believe that it is absolutely necessary to end the fighting immediately,” Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan told reporters earlier Friday. “One of the disturbing facts of this conflict is that ending the conflict and the fighting doesn’t seem to be the main priority for the international community.”

Faisal was joined on the visit by the foreign ministers of Jordan, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority.

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter, urging the UN Security Council to act on the war in Gaza.

Article 99 allows the secretary-general to “bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security”.

In his letter to the council’s president, Guterres invoked this responsibility, saying he believed the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, “may aggravate existing threats to the maintenance of international peace and security”.

Article 99 is a special power – and the only independent political tool given to the secretary-general in the UN Charter – that allows him to call a meeting of the Security Council on his own initiative to issue warnings about new threats to international peace and security, and matters that are not yet on the council’s agenda.

If the council does choose to act on Guterres’s advice and adopt a ceasefire resolution, it does have additional powers at its disposal to ensure the resolution is implemented, including the power to impose sanctions or authorise the deployment of an international force.

But the council’s five permanent members – China, Russia, the US, the UK and France – hold veto power.

The US used that veto on October 18 against a resolution that would have condemned Hamas’s attack on Israel while calling for a pause in the fighting to allow humanitarian assistance into Gaza.

Twelve other council members voted in favour, while Russia and the UK abstained.

Read more at Al Jazeera