Source: United Nations (video statements)
Media Stakeout by Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ghana, following the vote in the General Assembly on the Resolution declaring the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and the Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity.
Source: United Nations (video statements)
Essential medical supplies have arrived in Lebanon, where escalating violence has driven some 1.2 million people from their homes. The shipment, a collaboration between Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health, the World Health Organization and UNICEF, will contribute to trauma care and disease management.
Source: United Nations (video statements)
Members of the UN Security Council visit Lehman College in the Bronx, #newyork, which served as the location of the first Security Council meeting on US soil on 25 March 1946.
Source: United Nations (video statements)
Media Stakeout by Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ghana, following the vote in the General Assembly on the Resolution declaring the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and the Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity.
Source: United Nations (video statements)
Informal comments to the media by UN Secretary-General António Guterres on the situation in the Middle East.
Source: United Nations (video statements)
Joint media stakeout by Bahrain, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Pakistan, Somalia, and the United Kingdom, on the situation in the Middle East including the Palestinian question.
Source: United Nations (video statements)
Security Council briefing by Ramiz Alakbarov, Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator, on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.
The United Nations Security Council met to receive briefings on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a senior UN official reporting that Israeli planning authorities had advanced or approved over 6,000 housing units in occupied Palestinian territory during the reporting period.
“Security Council resolution 2334 (2016) calls on Israel to ‘immediately and completely cease all settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,’” Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN’s Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process said to the Security Council. “Settlement activity has, nevertheless, continued at high levels,” he added.
Alakbarov told the Council that Israeli authorities had demolished, seized or forced people to demolish 429 structures in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, displacing 575 persons, including 290 children and 150 women. He said 28 of the structures were donor funded.
He added that on Jan 4, Israeli police forcibly evicted two Palestinian families from their apartments in the Batn Al Hawa area of Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem, displacing eight people.
Alakbarov also said Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad had continued to praise terror attacks and call for additional violence against Israelis, while Israeli ministers and members of the Knesset had continued to call for re-establishment of settlements in Gaza, annexation of the West Bank and the “emigration” of Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territory.
Source: United Nations (video statements)
Joint media stakeout by Bahrain, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Pakistan, Somalia, and the United Kingdom, on the situation in the Middle East including the Palestinian question.
Source: United Nations (video statements)
Noon Briefing by Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the Secretary-General.
Highlights:
Occupied Palestinian Territory
Lebanon
Sudan
Sudan/Humanitarian
Haiti
Colombia
Central America
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Security Council/Ukraine
Exhibition
International Days
Guest
—————–
OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY
At 3:00 p.m., the Security Council will hold an open briefing on “The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.” Our Deputy Special Coordinator and Resident Coordinator at the Office of the Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Ramiz Alakbarov, is expected to brief on the implementation of resolution 2334, which is related to settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.
Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace High Representative to Gaza, is expected to brief on the implementation of resolution 2803 which endorsed the US “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” last November. Meanwhile on the ground, persistent challenges remain and are preventing the UN and our NGO partners from fully responding to people’s needs.
Since the reopening of Rafah crossing last Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners have supported the medical evacuation of 16 patients who needed treatment unavailable in Gaza, along with 30 companions. UN teams have also offered services to 20 returnees. That support was provided on Thursday and Sunday, with a scheduled break for the weekend.
Dr. Ramiz Alakbarov, is engaging with authorities to ensure that the voluntary movement of people in and out of Gaza can continue safely, with dignity, and in accordance with international humanitarian law. Our support to medical evacuation, and returnees, is scheduled to resume on Thursday.
Kerem Shalom remains the only operational crossing for humanitarian and commercial cargo to enter the Strip.
We again call for the opening of additional crossings and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian operations. In the West Bank, OCHA warns of the harsh humanitarian impact of settler attacks against Palestinians and of Israeli policies that leads to dispossession.
Over the past few days, our field teams have recorded multiple attacks by settlers that resulted in casualties, property damage and displacement among Palestinians, including recently in Batn al Hawa in Silwan neighbourhood, in East Jerusalem.
Evictions, demolitions and violence have grave physical, social, economic and emotional impacts and deepens reliance on humanitarian support. Palestinians must be protected and perpetrators be brought to justice.
LEBANON
Moving to Lebanon. We remain gravely concerned about the escalating rhetoric and ongoing hostilities between Hizbullah and Israel. More than one million people, including nearly 370,000 children, are now registered in the country as displaced. Our humanitarian colleagues on the ground tell us that strikes have been reported across Lebanon, with airstrikes overnight on Beirut’s southern suburbs, following further mass displacement orders across multiple neighborhoods.
In southern Lebanon, at least seven key crossings over the Litani River were struck in the past week, restricting people’s movement and hindering humanitarian aid from reaching people fleeing the violence. We and our humanitarian partners continue to respond to growing needs, providing food, shelter, water, medical care and protection support to families forced to flee their homes. As of yesterday, the World Food Programme (WFP) and its partners have distributed 1.7 million hot meals and 50,000 ready-to-eat kits.
Our partners working in education and protection are also helping displaced children by providing psychosocial support, recreational activities and alternative ways of learning. We reiterate that there is simply no military solution to the conflict. We continue to call for de-escalation and urge all sides to avail themselves of diplomatic channels available to them and to recommit to the full implementation of Security Council resolution 1701.
Full Highlights: https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/noon-briefing-highlight?date=2026-03-24
Source: United Nations (video statements)
Briefing a Security Council session on maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo said four years since the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “the violence is worse than ever,” and noted that “since February 2022, the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has verified that 15,364 civilians, including 775 children, have been killed in Ukraine.
DiCarlo said, “over the winter, damage to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure brought the country’s energy grid to the brink of total collapse,” as “60 percent of gas production capacity has been destroyed, and all the country’s power stations damaged, leading to persistent disruptions in electricity, heating and water across the country.”
She noted that the Russian Federation “has also reported attacks impacting civilians and civilian infrastructure,” including over the weekend of 14 to 16 March, when local authorities reported “the largest Ukrainian drone attack targeting Moscow to date.”
Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher, for his part said, “strikes on energy and other vital infrastructure are cutting civilians off from the basics of survival.”
Fletcher said, “tens of thousands of families across the country are left in the dark and cold for weeks on end. These attacks reflect a sustained pattern of damage to the systems on which civilians depend to survive, with humanitarians increasingly stepping in to fill the gaps left by the deterioration of essential services.”
Fletched stressed that despite “immense challenges and the risks to humanitarian operations, and our people, help is getting through.”
He said, “in January alone, we and our partners reached nearly one million people with food, cash assistance, medical care, shelter and protection. Over a cruel, cold winter, around 100 humanitarian organizations supported more than 1.6 million people. And in recent days, our interagency convoy reached the frontline community in the oblast of Kharkivska, delivering help to some 500 residents in an area with no pharmacies and limited availability of basic services.”
Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya told the Council that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “is literally flabbergasted by the spotlight shifting from Ukraine and his own heroic persona, over to the situation surrounding the escalation in the Middle East, a situation which objectively needs the close attention of the international community.”
Nebenzya said, “instead of showing concern for his own people, his own country, he’s trying to remind his Western sponsors of how useful he is at any cost. Otherwise, God forbid, the money his regularly pocketed and put into the pockets of his associates will flow from Ukraine to the Gulf, which is far from Ukraine.”
He said, “clearly, what’s more important for Kyiv today is to be involved in any war, rather than seek a path to peace back home statement.”
Ukrainian Ambassador Andrii Melnyk for his part said, “the Kremlin is not just providing Tehran with intelligence support, including satellite imagery and other crucial data that facilitate targeting of US military assets across the Middle East, there is, moreover, enough evidence that Russia is now transferring modernized Shahed type drones to Iran, drawing on its own production capabilities based on licensed Iranian designs. The same Shahed drones that Tehran was sending to Moscow since the beginning of the war, 2022, to murder Ukrainian civilians, are now produced in Russia and sent back both to destroy oil and gas infrastructure as the backbone of the economy in the Gulf state, and to kill American soldiers.”
Melnyk said, “this axis of evil between Moscow and Tehran constitutes an enormous threat to international security.”
He said, “their military cooperation is truly alarming. The United States and the international community must take this threat seriously and act before it is too late. With those Russian drones the Tehran regime will be capable of waging this war for a very long period, destabilizing not just the region, but the whole global economy.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Melnyk said, “demands that Ukraine abandon without a fight territories in the Donetsk region that Moscow have failed to occupy over 12 years of its aggression” and is “turning such ultimatums into preconditions for negotiations,” and is “deliberately obstructing the peace process.”
He said this was “one of the biggest stumbling blocks on the way to a peaceful resolution.”
