According to UN figures, the number of refugees worldwide has reached a new high of around 114 million people. “At the moment, the world is rightly looking at the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. But around the world, too many conflicts are spreading or escalating,” the head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Filippo Grandi, said Wednesday in Geneva.
In the first half of the year, he said, the wars and conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo drove people to leave their homes. He said that the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and the situation in Somalia, marked by drought, floods and insecurity, also prompted many people to flee.
According to UN figures, since the large-scale attack on Israel by the radical Islamic Palestinian organization Hamas and subsequent Israeli airstrikes, the number of internally displaced persons in the Gaza Strip has risen to 1.4 million people out of a population of 2.4 million.
More than half of the people forced to leave their homes never cross a national border, the UNHCR said. These are then considered internally displaced people. It said about one-third of all refugees currently come from just three countries: Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine.
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