UN GENEVA PRESS BRIEFING

Rolando Gómez, Chief of the Press and External Relations Section, United Nations Information Service (UNIS) at Geneva, chaired a hybrid press briefing, which was attended by spokespersons and representatives of UN Women, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization.

Situation of Women and Girls in Lebanon

Moez Doraid, Regional Director for Arab States for UN Women, speaking from Beirut, spoke of the continued danger that women and girls faced as they attempted to return to their homes in southern Lebanon, under the perceived safety of the ceasefire. Despite this ceasefire agreement taking effect on 17 April, 25 women had been reported killed and 109 reported injured over the past three weeks in Lebanon. Many women had said that their homes in villages south of the Litani river had been destroyed.

Continuing Israeli airstrikes, evacuation orders, bans to return to certain areas, and movement restrictions, meant that most displaced people still could not go back to their homes, with more than an estimated half a million women and girls remaining displaced.

The availability of food was decreasing. Based on the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) projection, UN Women estimated that around an additional 144,000 women and girls were expected to face crisis-level hunger or worse in the coming months, bringing the total to approximately 639,000.

Since 2 March, UN Women had directly supported more than 15,000 women and girls, with reach extending to more than 70,000 people across communities. UN Women was also supporting 534 women leaders to help communities navigate the crisis, connect people to assistance, identify urgent needs, reduce tensions, and ensure that women's voices were heard in local response.

The ceasefire must be fully upheld and transitioned to comprehensive peace, in line with international humanitarian law and international law, as well as with women peace and security commitments, ensuring women's full, equal and meaningful participation in peacebuilding and in recovery efforts.

Answering questions from journalists, Mr. Doraid said that before the current escalation, food security in Lebanon had improved. However, with the escalation on 2 March, needs had multiplied, as about 1.2 million Lebanese people had been displaced from their homes and lands in the south and were affected by food insecurity. The UN system and the international community had doubled their efforts to provide food assistance, along with assistance across essential necessities. However, unlike the previous conflict in 2024, nowadays the UN system faced greater financial constraints.

The impact of the conflict was different for women and girls, because there was an increase in women-headed households. It was harder to reach women with food and humanitarian assistance, which was a key element of UN Women's work to ensure that gender aspects were mainstreamed across the humanitarian response.

Answering a question on the volume of aid reaching south Lebanon, Matthew Hollingworth, World Food Programme (WFP) Assistant Executive Director for Programme Operations, said that 19 interagency convoys had been negotiated to get access into the south of Lebanon (including Nabatieh and Marjayoun, among other villages or towns), to support 84,500 individuals. That was a fraction of the convoys that had been approved. And typically, only 50 percent of convoys were getting approval.

Rolando Gómez, Chief of the Press and External Relations Section, United Nations Information Service (UNIS) at Geneva, reminded that the UN Secretary-General had repeatedly expressed his deep concern by the ongoing tensions in the region, including Lebanon. Despite the ceasefire, the situation remained very volatile, and Mr. Guterres had urged all parties to exercise maximum restraint and avoid further escalation, and to fully respect international humanitarian law and the protection of civilians.

Mr. Gómez also pointed to the latest update from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which journalists had received yesterday, and which went into some details on what the humanitarian community was doing.

Deteriorating Humanitarian Conditions in Somalia

Matthew Hollingworth, World Food Programme (WFP) Assistant Executive Director for Programme Operations, speaking from Rome, said the cumulative effects of repeated extreme weather shocks, conflict and economic pressure, were all pushing hunger to dangerous levels in Somalia. The country had now endured multiple failed rainy seasons, including three consecutively, which had devastated crops and had wiped out livestock, impacting millions of people across the country. In Puntland, water resources had completely dried up.

Today, 6 million people, or almost one in three Somalis, were facing acute hunger; 2 million were already in emergency conditions, one step from famine (IPC 4); and 1.9 million children were acutely malnourished, hundreds of thousands of them being at risk of the most severe form of malnourishment. The crisis was deepening quickly. Families had been forced to leave everything behind them in search of food, water, pastureland and assistance. At the same time, conflict and insecurity limited access to these people.

Somalia's crisis was being exacerbated by the fallout from the crisis in the Middle East, which was driving up food prices by 70 percent in some areas. Fuel prices had gone up by 150 percent. Supply routes had been disrupted, making it more difficult and more expensive to deliver aid inside the country.

WFP was now only reaching one in 10 of people in need of food assistance. A massive emergency response was urgently needed to prevent a worsening situation in Somalia, which was one of the biggest malnutrition hotspots in the world. Without immediate funding, not just for the World Food Programme but across many sectors, life-saving assistance would continue to shrink or - in the Programme's case - could halt in July if resources were not urgently received.

Experience proved that famine was always preventable, and that prevention depended on timely action. WFP had the logistical background in place to support a massive humanitarian response. WFP asked the international community to act now, before the emergency became a catastrophe.

Answering questions from the media, Mr. Hollingworth said WFP could only support 300,000 to half a million persons, instead of 2 million that it should be supporting. He added that organizations were facing significant shortages when it came to nutritious foods to prevent and treat malnutrition in children. Nurses and doctors who were supported by World Food Programme, as well as the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), were having to sending away children for lack of supplies.

Containers of therapeutic food bound for Somalia now arrived 40 days late because of the impact of the war in Iran on global shipping and supply chains.

Update on Hantavirus

Answering questions regarding the number of cases in the hantavirus outbreak, Christian Lindmeier, for the World Health Programme (WHO), stressed that WHO, as a scientific organization, was doing diligent work on all the data available regarding the hantavirus: everything needed to be checked, and counter checked.

Hantaviruses had been around since about 30 years. There were about 2,000 cases each year globally; Swiss authorities said they had about between zero and six cases in a year. This was of low magnitude.

The virus brought pulmonary infections and respiratory problems: coughing and sneezing, maybe fever. Close contact, including the exchange of body fluids, would be a risk factor. However, even persons who had been sharing cabins in the cruise ship did not seem to have been all infected; and the Dutch flight attendant who had handled the sick woman in Johannesburg, shortly before she died, had been tested negative for hantavirus. In these instances, contact tracing had shown to be working.

Apparently, the virus could not jump easily from person to person. The risk remained low: this was not a new COVID-19.

Announcements

Rolando Gómez, Chief of the Press and External Relations Section, United Nations Information Service (UNIS) at Geneva, drew journalists' attention on the Secretary-General's remarks to launch the Expert Group Report on "Beyond GDP". The report offered the UN first global framework for moving beyond GDP, proposing a wider set of measures to guide economic policy towards well-being and environmental sustainability.

The Secretary-General also had delivered important remarks in New York before the International Migration Review Forum 2026. Among other things, Mr. Guterres had highlighted the plight of migrants around the globe, stressing that no country could manage migration alone, and that the international community needed cooperation across borders, across governments and across society.

The Conference on Disarmament would start the second part of its 2026 session next Monday, 11 May, under the presidency of the Netherlands. There would be no public meeting before 19 May, that is until after the end of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) Review Conference.

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the Human Rights Council had started last Monday. The human rights situation in Somalia and the Seychelles would be reviewed by the UPR working group today. (UPR calendar of reviews for this session to be found here.)

On Tuesday, 12 May, at 9:30 a.m., the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) would hold a press conference to launch a new report entitled: New Sand & Sustainability: an Essential Resource for Nature and Development 2026.

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