Amid the rubble of Gaza, the majority of the two million population is reliant on humanitarian aid to survive and there are few ways for people to earn a decent salary. The UN says the unemployment rate has passed 80%, compared to 22% before the war. Humanitarian groups see online work – particularly freelancing for clients abroad – as offering some of the best opportunities.

“We talk about it now as a sort of digital lifeline, this idea that if you have a laptop, if you have a working internet connection, you can work and have an income,” says Nicole Hark, from the US humanitarian organisation, Mercy Corps. “It’s really critical to help people go back to work. They don’t want to be dependent on aid.”

Before the latest devastating war, triggered by the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel in October 2023, Gaza had a burgeoning tech sector. Israel and Egypt kept the Hamas-run territory under blockade, citing security reasons. Coding, designing and programming remotely were a way for young graduates to overcome tight border restrictions.

Gaza Sky Geeks was founded in 2012 by Google and Mercy Corps. The initial idea was to promote tech start-ups, but its three bustling hubs also ran coding courses and gave advice on accessing international markets. Two were destroyed during the war.

Mercy Corps now supports some of the new co-working spaces which have popped up across Gaza using generators and solar panels to offer better internet connections and a more stable power supply. Gaza’s power system has suffered near-total collapse and approximately 75% of its telecommunications networks have been damaged or destroyed.

A row has broken out in Germany after the coalition government announced changes to sick-leave rules, requiring Germans to provide a doctor’s note to their employers on the first day of their illness.

The changes also mean workers will not be able to obtain the note by phone, scrapping a measure brought in due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The number of sick days in Germany is too high,” said Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Under the current rules, a certificate is only required if a person is unfit for work for more than three days – in other words, on the fourth day, although employers are entitled to request the sick note earlier.

The plans were agreed by Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and his coalition partner the Social Democrats (SPD).

“This is a tough decision,” the chancellor said. “But we can no longer afford this competitive disadvantage caused by long periods of absence from work.”

Merz said the government would not accept what he called “exorbitant” levels of sick leave in the wake of the pandemic.

Germany was “returning to the arrangements we had before the coronavirus pandemic,” he told ARD TV on Thursday night.

“At the same time, it is up to individual businesses to agree on other arrangements as well.”

Medical groups have strongly criticised the plans.

The KBV, a national association representing statutory health insurance physicians, said that it “bordered on madness” to force thousands of people to visit doctors’ surgeries simply to fill in forms.

“Anyone who is coughing or has a gastrointestinal infection belongs in bed – not in an overcrowded surgery,” it said in a statement.

The Association of General Practitioners warned that infection cases – which would only have required one or two days in bed – would fill up doctors’ waiting rooms.

The leader of the SPD, Vice-Chancellor Lars Klingbeil, attempted to calm the situation, telling RTL TV he was looking for “workable solutions”.

“We now need to put sensible arrangements in place for what has been proposed in the coalition committee,” he said.

Labour Minister Bärbel Bas, also from the SPD, said she would investigate the requirement to provide a doctor’s certificate on the first day of illness.

“That wasn’t my proposal,” Bas told RTL.

“We will look into whether this actually has any effect at all, or whether it is more likely to cause difficulties.”

But Jens Spahn, leader of the CDU’s parliamentary group, defended the plans.

He said Germany’s rate of sick leave was among the steepest in the EU.

“We have one of the highest numbers of sick days – around 18 per year per employee,” he said.

“And those who are genuinely ill should, of course, be able to stay at home.”

The changes were agreed as part of sweeping tax, labour and pension reforms aimed at reviving Germany’s economy.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan face hunger and poverty. The country suffers from repeated floods and earthquakes, declining humanitarian funding and two crises along its borders. 

Logjams and logistics

For many Afghan schoolchildren, the fortified biscuits distributed by the World Food Programme (WFP) are often the most nutritious food they will receive all day. But getting the supplies into the country is a logistical minefield.

Take, for example, the 397 metric tons of this key nutritional boost, intended for some 172,000 students, shipped from Indonesia’s Surabaya port, part of a US$3.5 million contribution from the Government of Indonesia to support WFP school meals in Afghanistan.

The supplies are first sent by boat to the southern Pakistani port of Karachi, but from there things get more complicated.

The original plan was for the shipment to be transferred to trucks for a 7,000 km trip through Pakistan but, amid tensions between the country and Afghanistan, the border was closed.

Hunger cannot wait

A new route has to be found quickly because, as Corinne Fleischer, Director of WFP Supply Chain and Delivery, says, “hunger doesn’t wait for routes to reopen”. 

WFP shipping officers reroute the cargo to the port of Jebel Ali in Dubai, with a plan to ship it across the Persian Gulf to Iran and then move it on by road. 

However, geopolitics strikes again and, as instability spread across the Middle East, in effect closing the critical Strait of Hormuz since March, WFP is forced to rethink the plan once more. 

Inside WFP operations rooms, logisticians go back to basics, poring over maps to see whether the region’s geography might offer a solution. 

They find one: an entirely new land corridor from Dubai to landlocked Afghanistan across the Caucasus. It’s costlier, more complex and adds another 8,000 km to the journey, but it is the only remaining option.

New route, new hope

One overcast morning, a 21-truck convoy rumbles out of Dubai and heads out along the desert highways of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, up through Jordan, Syria, Türkiye and Georgia before boarding a ferry in Baku, Azerbaijan, and crossing the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan.

Days later, the trucks cross into Afghanistan through the remote Torghundi border crossing, before continuing on to Kabul. Every country the convoy passes through requires new customs clearances, security assessments, transport permits and coordination across seven borders.

Along the route, truck drivers face long waits at border crossings, signing paperwork and snatching moments of sleep beneath open skies.

“I remember the ferry line at Alat port [Baku] where hundreds of trucks were waiting to cross – the line was close to 30 km long,” says Hüseyin Sarraç Ulus, a Turkish truck driver who made the roughly 3,000 km journey from Dubai to the Caspian Sea.

Working day and night

“We drove around 11 hours a day and slept in the truck cabin most nights – it was not always comfortable, but we are used to it,” he recalls. “We ate simple food like soup, bread, rice and tea. But it felt good. Knowing the cargo was helping children made me proud to be part of the journey.” 

Inside a World Food Programme (WFP) warehouse on the outskirts of Kabul, Abdul Ahad Monib watches as the trucks slowly back into unloading bays.

“There was a feeling of relief when we saw the trucks arrive,” says Mr. Monib, a WFP Supply Chain and Delivery officer. “We followed every step of the journey closely – every delay, every border crossing, every change of plan. 

After weeks on the road, the biscuits reach the hands of girls and boys in schools across Ghor, Nuristan and Paktika provinces, in central, northeastern and eastern Afghanistan, respectively. 

“For the children, it’s a packet of biscuits that helps them stay healthy,” says Monib. “For us, it’s a logistics feat. No one sees the thousands of kilometres, the delays or the rerouting behind each packet. But that’s exactly the point – whatever the obstacles, WFP delivers.”

This story was first published on the WFP website.

For Olga Scripovscaia, a field security coordination officer based in Odesa, each day starts with the same question: “what changed overnight?”

After nights frequently interrupted by air alerts and coordinated attacks, mornings are spent reviewing incident reports, checking updates from local authorities and monitoring conditions across Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kherson, areas where humanitarian access can change within hours.

“There is always something ongoing here,” she said. “Things are never quiet.”

‘A road that is usable today may not exist tomorrow’ 

Ms. Scripovscaia works across all UN agencies operating in southern Ukraine, helping assess whether missions can proceed safely and advising on movement plans, operational concepts and contingency measures. 

Her team monitors security conditions around the clock, producing flash reports after incidents and conducting personnel headcounts whenever attacks occur.

“A road that is usable today may not exist tomorrow,” she explained.

Conditions on the ground continue to evolve. According to Ms. Scripovscaia, increasingly sophisticated threats, including mines and highly precise drones, require constant reassessment of routes and operational procedures.

If missions are planned in areas where conditions have recently deteriorated, teams may need to reroute or delay deployments entirely.

‘You see tears. You see emotions’

Coming from a military background, she says structure remains essential to managing the volume of information and decisions that flow through security operations.

Yet she believes her experience as a woman in the field shapes how she approaches the work.

“Being a woman, maybe you see more than protocol,” she said. “You see tears. You see emotions. You see things beyond procedures.” That perspective, she explained, becomes especially important before missions into difficult environments.

Alongside formal security briefings, she pays attention to how colleagues are feeling, asking whether they feel prepared, whether they understand the risks and whether they need more information before deployment.

When security and humanitarian needs collide

Among the most difficult parts of the job, Ms. Scripovscaia says, is supporting humanitarian access into locations where people urgently need assistance, but conditions remain dangerous. 

She described a recurring dilemma: balancing professional responsibility with humanitarian need.

Humanitarian agencies sometimes seek access to locations where risks remain extremely high and where local support networks may no longer exist.

For security teams, those decisions are rarely straightforward.

“Protocol gives me maybe 75 per cent of the reason to say no,” she said. “But I still keep 25 per cent in my heart for those people.”

Finding another way

When missions cannot proceed, she says, the conversation does not end there. 

Instead, the focus shifts to finding another way, whether it’s through changing routes, reassessing conditions or identifying a future window for access.

For her, that persistence reflects the purpose of security work in humanitarian settings. “If today is not possible,” she said, “we are already thinking about how to make it possible tomorrow.”

“We had to watch two of the babies die before our eyes,” said Dr. Hasan Babikir, describing the death of premature triplets he was unable to treat due to a lack of intensive care beds.

As tens of thousands of people, many in urgent need of healthcare, flee the violence engulfing South Kordofan, health workers at the El-Obeid Maternity Hospital in neighbouring North Kordofan describe dire conditions. 

Shortages

“There’s a severe shortage of surgical and normal delivery equipment, as well as essentials such as antibiotics, surgical sutures and gloves,” Dr. Babikir told the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, UNFPA. 

“This forces us to buy them from the market at very high prices.” 

The maternity hospital is the only referral hospital in western Sudan and currently serves over 230,000 displaced people, most of them women and girls facing sexual violence, hunger and a near total lack of healthcare. 

The city of El-Obeid has also come under frequent drone attacks, with multiple attacks against health facilities that have killed and injured health workers and patients.

A growing maternal health crisis 

“Previously, the hospital didn’t have a neonatal intensive care unit,” said Dr. Babikir. “At the beginning of 2026, we opened one with only four beds, which are constantly occupied, and we urgently need to expand capacity.”

The increasingly fraught conditions are driving up maternal death rates, he warned. “We have lost patients due to prolonged waiting times. Although there are two emergency operating rooms, they are currently out of service.” 

“In many cases, emergency patients arrive while all rooms are occupied, sometimes resulting in the loss of the mother or fetus.” 

Newborns’ lives are in danger too, “we don’t have tables to place newborns on, nor do we have adequate infection control equipment in the delivery rooms,” said midwife Laila Sarfo. 

To combat these challenges, UNFPA has installed a solar power system to help mitigate power outages at the maternity hospital, rehabilitated delivery rooms, and trained and deployed skilled health workers to assist with emergency obstetric and neonatal services.

Health workers under pressure 

“The salaries we receive are not enough to cover even basic transportation or the meals we need during our shifts,” explained Insaf, a senior midwife. 

“Many times, women arrive without the means to purchase essential delivery supplies, and we find ourselves paying for these items out of our own pockets,” added Insaf. 

Yet she and her colleagues are determined to keep delivering care, “some midwives are working 24-hour shifts to meet the overwhelming demand,” said Insaf.

‘Women are exhausted from the war’ 

Nearly three years of civil war have pushed more than 33 million people in Sudan into severe need of humanitarian aid. 

The conflict has been marked by horrific sexual violence, kidnappings and child marriage, with survivors struggling to access any safe spaces or healthcare. 

In the crowded Al Moaskar Al Mwahhad displacement camp in South Kordofan, UNFPA operates a mobile health clinic and a safe space for women and girls who are survivors or at risk of abuse. 

“Women are exhausted from the war,” said Salma, 50, who has been sheltering at the camp for eight months now. 

“Many crimes have been committed against women, including rape. Many women have been widowed. In this camp, the number of women who are still with their husbands can be counted on one hand,” she added. 

For girls, the crisis is impacting almost every part of their lives and their futures, “We travelled by donkey for three days, and after those trucks brought us here,” 16-year-old Ismailia told UNFPA. 

“I hope to return to my town and my school. Please allow us to rebuild our home and go back.” 

To continue supporting women and girls in 2026, UNFPA is urgently calling for $129 million, of which just $33 million has so far been pledged.

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Phil Perry

Could jobs be lost?

Some are extremely fit

More than 35 people have been killed in Israeli strikes and gunfire since the early hours of Saturday morning, hospital sources in Gaza say.

A strike on a house in central Gaza left at least 11 people dead – more that half of them women and children – according to officials at al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City.

Health workers said nine members of the same family were among those killed in an Israeli strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp, and at least six people are reported to have been killed while seeking aid in central and southern Gaza.

It comes a day after Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu told the United Nations that Israel “must finish the job” against Hamas.

The Israeli air force says it has hit approximately 120 targets across the Strip since Friday – including, the military says, “buildings used by terror groups, terror operatives and other infrastructure”.

It is clear there has been no let up in Israel’s recent expanded ground offensive against Hamas, which is now mainly focused on Gaza City, where Israel says is the last stronghold of the armed group.

Hundreds of thousands of residents have fled the territory’s biggest urban centre, where a famine was confirmed last month by a UN-backed body. But hundreds of thousands more remain there in dire humanitarian conditions, with health and other essential services collapsing.

“They tell us go there, then come back here… People are in the streets, in the south scattered everywhere. Where should we go?” said Salwa Subhi Bakr, as quoted by AFP.

“What does the world want from us? What does Netanyahu want? What does Hamas want?” she said.

Several members of the Bakr family were killed during a strike on Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, the news agency reported, citing the Hamas-run civil defence agency.

While international calls for a ceasefire have redoubled – bolstered by multiple new recognitions of Palestinian statehood at the UN this week – Israel remains intent on maintaining maximum pressure on Hamas to try to force it into surrender.

That was the message once again from Prime Minister Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly in New York on Friday, where many delegates walked out in protest as he took to the stage.

Donald Trump has once again expressed optimism about negotiating a deal that would see the hostages released and a new ceasefire in Gaza.

The US president said his team was close to achieving this goal, as what he called “very inspired and productive discussions” were being held with countries across the region.

Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, says that the US has come up with a new 21-point peace plan for the Middle East and Gaza.

It has not been formally presented, but various media reports have laid out what is said to be its key provisions.

These reportedly go beyond the release of all hostages, large numbers of Palestinian prisoners and an immediate ceasefire, to include what The Times of Israel says would be a pathway to a future Palestinian state.

But that is something Netanyahu strongly rejected in his address to the UN.

It has also been reported that the plan would enable Palestinians to remain in the Gaza Strip, rather than encourage many to leave.

Such provisions – if they are confirmed – are certain to be talking points when Trump meets Netanyahu on Monday. The US leader’s optimism may receive a reality check at that meeting.

The Times of Israel – which says it had seen a copy of the US proposal – says that it also includes a commitment for Hamas to disarm, as well as the full demilitarisation of Gaza and the establishment of a process to de-radicalise the population.

It is clear that both Hamas and the Israeli government would have to make greater concessions than they have so far committed themselves to, if the plan as it has been reported so far is to have any chance of success.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 65,549 people have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Foreign journalists have been banned from entering Gaza independently since Israel launched its 2023 offensive following the Hamas 7 October attacks.

With the two-year anniversary of the Hamas-led attack on Israel just over a week away, there are many in Israel and Gaza who will be fervently hoping that that they will not have to live through a third year of the war.

Two ambulance workers have been arrested over the deaths of six adults, police have said.

The investigation was launched in 2023 and last year a man in his 30s, from West Wiltshire, was arrested on suspicion of six counts of gross negligence manslaughter and four counts of ill-treatment or wilful neglect by a care worker.

A 59-year-old woman was also arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter in March this year. Police have only released details of the investigation and arrests now.

The two South Western Ambulance Service workers have been released on bail, Wiltshire Police said.

“We can confirm a major investigation is under way relating to several adult deaths in and around Wiltshire,” said Det Ch Insp Phil Walker from the force’s major crime team.

“Our focus is on supporting the families and loved ones of those who have died,” he added.

Det Ch Insp Walker said the investigation has been ongoing since an initial report in 2023. The man in his 30s was arrested in June 2024.

“Detailed inquiries have been undertaken since to ascertain the facts,” he added.

A spokesperson for the ambulance service said it started an internal investigation as soon as it became aware of concerns and had since been “working closely” with police.

The service said the two workers were “immediately relieved of all duties, including the treatment of patients,” adding one of the individuals is no longer employed by the trust.

“We would like to reassure people that this is an isolated situation and there is no ongoing risk to patients. Please continue to call 999 in a life-threatening emergency,” the spokesperson added.

According to the Crown Prosecution Service, the offence of gross negligence manslaughter requires the breach of an existing duty of care, which gives rise to a serious and obvious risk of death.

South Western Ambulance Service was most recently inspected by health watchdog the Care Quality Commission in 2022 and was rated as “good”, having made improvements since previous inspections.

The trust was rated as “outstanding” for care and “good” for its response times, effectiveness and leadership.

Its emergency and urgent care services was rated as requiring improvement.