The Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) volunteers currently in Homs have started evacuating women and children from Bab Amro, the neighbourhood most affected by the violence in the city. Both ICRC and SARC had arrived to Homs early afternoon today and have been negotiating with the Syrian authorities and the opposition in order to evacuate all persons in need of help without exception.
The ICRC is calling on all sides to agree to a halt in the fighting for two hours each day to allow humanitarian assistance in. The Geneva based organisation is negotiating with the Syrian authorities and with the opposition to try to get agreement to this daily pause in the fighting. " What we want is an immediate halt in the fighting so we can access Homs and the other affected areas to deliver much needed humanitarian aid," says ICRC spokesperson Carla Haddad.
Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteers, working in completely unpredictable situations, do not hesitate to put their own lives at risk to save the lives of others. After one of them lost his life a few months back evacuating an injured person in an ambulance, his fellow volunteers became more determined than ever to continue to perform their life-saving tasks. That kind of commitment is usually hard to make, since each of the volunteers has a family, a mother and a father, and children. This series of unique interviews was filmed with Red Crescent volunteers, giving an insight into their hopes, fears and motivation.
After decades of war and neglect, Iraq's health care, water and sanitation services are in a dire state, failing to meet the basic needs of a large part of the population. Despite an improvement in security in some areas, basic services in many places are inadequate.
Medical facilities before the conflict were functioning in Tripoli, but access to health care and life saving treatment became very difficult since the city was turned into a battlefield. Dozens of wounded people who urgently needed treatment did not receive it and died. Health-care workers often couldn''t access medical facilities due to the fighting. At the same time, hospitals and local clinics needed adequate medical supplies to be able to treat the many war wounded.
Ahead of The international Day of the Disappeared on the 30th of August, the ICRC is providing new material from Colombia where nearly 50,000 people are officially missing.
Entire villages have been destroyed and health-care centres looted in western Cote d'Ivoire. As an uneasy calm settles, thousands of refugees and internally displaced people want to return home yet there is little to return to.
Attacks on health-care workers and medical facilities in conflicts and violent upheavals across the world are affecting millions, according to a new report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The report, presented in Geneva, 10 August 2011, is based on research in 16 countries over 3 years since 2008. This is the first time such an investigation has been conducted on an international scale.
The floods that struck Pakistan in July 2010 went on for almost three months wiping out villages from the far north to the deep south of the country. Considered to be one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent times, around 11 million people were left homeless and 2,000 killed.
In June 2007, the Israeli authorities announced the suspension of family visits for Palestinians from Gaza who were being held in Israel. This decision, which was made a year after Palestinian armed groups captured the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, deprives both the detainees and their relatives of an essential lifeline, and cuts detainees off from the outside world. In the past four years, over 700 families from Gaza have been prevented from seeing their detained relatives.
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