AIT MUN

 Humanitarian aid and supplies have not entered the Gaza Strip for
almost seven weeks now (since 2 March 2025), when the Israeli
Authorities imposed a siege. This is three times longer than the
siege the Israeli Authorities imposed in October 2023 when the war
started. As a result, critical humanitarian supplies, including food,
fuel medical aid and vaccines for children, are rapidly depleting.
 On 2 March, the Israeli authorities announced a siege where they
will no longer allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip,
including fuel. No supplies – humanitarian or commercial – have
entered Gaza since. This siege is now more than three times longer
than the initial siege at the start of the war, which lasted from
October 7 to October 21 2023. Critical supplies, including food and
medical equipment, are severely depleted and urgently needed to
address the already catastrophic humanitarian crisis.
 The lack of essential food supplies has contributed to further
deteriorating of the nutrition situation and dietary diversity in the
Gaza Strip. According to the Nutrition Cluster, nearly 3,700 children
in March alone were newly admitted for treatment for acute
malnutrition, compared to slightly over 2,000 in February. Due to
constant challenges and the lack of essential aid, in March, the
number of children who received blanket supplementary feeding
decreased by more than 70 per cent compared to February.
 The access to water and sanitation infrastructure has also been
heavily impacted by the collapse of the ceasefire and the
continuous displacement orders issued by the Israeli military. Over
90 per cent of households are reporting water insecurity,
highlighting that access to safe water has become alarmingly
limited. According to the WASH cluster as reported by OCHA, over
50 per cent of WASH facilities have been impacted by displacement
orders and the imposition of the “no-go” zone, with more than 320
facilities made inaccessible.
 On 14 April, Stéphane Dujarric (Spokesperson of the UN Secretary-
General) stated that “under international humanitarian law, if the
whole or part of the population of an occupied territory is
inadequately supplied, the occupying Power shall agree to relief
schemes on behalf of the said population, and shall facilitate them
by all the means at its disposal. This is reflected in a number of
Security Council resolutions, including resolutions 2730 (2024) and
2417 (2018), which strongly condemn the unlawful denial of
 humanitarian access and depriving civilians of objects indispensable
to their survival.”
 On 27 March, the remaining UNRWA international staff left the Gaza
Strip. All UNRWA international staff are now banned from entering
the Gaza Strip. This follows the passage of two bills by Israel’s
parliament, the Knesset, on 28 October 2024[2], which aim to
prohibit UNRWA's operations in the occupied Palestinian territory
and bar contact between UNRWA and Israeli officials. Meanwhile,
around 12,000 local, Palestinian UNRWA personnel in Gaza continue
to provide services and assistance to an entire population in need,
while spearheading the collective humanitarian response.
 Since the war began 1.5 years ago, the Israeli Authorities have
banned the entry of international media to Gaza to report
independently. This is fueling propaganda, disinformation and the
spread of dehumanization. Palestinian journalists continue to do
heroic work, paying a heavy price. 170 have been killed to date.
Meanwhile, credible accounts and eye witness testimonies from
relief organisations are being discredited and questioned. The free
flow of information and independent reporting are key to facts and
accountability during conflicts.
 There is today in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since
1967 a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system that
privileges the 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers living in the 300 illegal
Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” said
Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human
rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.
 Another two million Palestinians live in Gaza, described regularly as
an ‘open-air prison’, without adequate access to power, water or
health, with a collapsing economy and with no ability to freely travel
to the rest of Palestine or the outside world

Apartheid in Israel
 Apartheid is not, sadly, a phenomenon confined to the history books
on southern Africa,” he said in his report to the Human Rights
Council. “The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court
came into law after the collapse of the old South Africa. It is a
forward-looking legal instrument which prohibits apartheid as a
crime against humanity today and into the future, wherever it may
exist.
 This has been accomplished in part through a long-standing series
of inhuman(e) acts by the Israeli military towards the Palestinians
that have been integral to the occupation, he said. He pointed to
 arbitrary and extra-judicial killings, torture, the denial of
fundamental rights, an abysmal rate of child deaths, collective
punishment, an abusive military court system, periods of intensive
Israeli military violence in Gaza and home demolitions
 For more than 40 years, the UN Security Council and General
Assembly have stated in hundreds of resolutions that Israel’s
annexation of occupied territory is unlawful, its construction of
hundreds of Jewish settlements are illegal, and its denial of
Palestinian self-determination breaches international law
 The Council and the Assembly have repeatedly criticized Israel for
defying their resolutions. They have threatened consequences. But
no accountability has ever followed. If the international community
had truly acted on its resolutions 40 or 30 years ago, we would not
be talking about apartheid today.

China –
 The PRC has taken its decades-long repressive policies in Xinjiang to
the extreme since April 2017, detaining more than one million
Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, and members of religious
minority groups in internment camps in a systematic effort to
eradicate their ethnic and cultural identity and religious beliefs, and
control their population growth. Countless publicly available reports
of torture, rape, forced ingestion of drugs, sexual assault and other
horrific abuses occurring in these camps have been documented
based on the experiences of those who have escaped. Outside the
camps, the CCP’s repression of minorities includes coercive
practices such as pervasive surveillance and involuntary mass
collection of biometric data from innocent civilians, state-sponsored
forced labor, and compulsory stays by CCP officials in Uyghur homes
intended to prevent the observance of religious practices. Members
of these minority groups are forcibly relocated to camps and
factories and required to renounce their ethnic identities, religious
beliefs, and cultural and religious practices. In addition, children are
removed from their families and forced into state-run indoctrination
facilities. Women and girls are routinely subject to forced marriages
and other abuses, including forced abortion, forced sterilization, and
involuntary birth control implantation. Leaked government
documents corroborate the coercive nature of these camps and the
CCP’s systematic campaign against these men, women, and
children.
 The CCP has absolute control over law enforcement and the judicial
system, and it uses both to stifle calls from Chinese citizens for
 freedom, human rights, and rule of law. Authorities regularly detain
those who do not conform to CCP ideology. Those brave enough to
speak out are often subject to prolonged and secret detention
without access to legal counsel or the ability to communicate with
their families. Lawyers, human rights activists, intellectuals,
journalists, religious leaders, religious adherents, and ethnic and
religious minorities are frequent targets, accused of vaguely worded
charges that imply treason and subversion. These arrests and the
fear they instill are tools in the CCP’s effort to maintain
unchallenged power over people.
 The PRC government is one of the worst abusers of religious freedom
in the world and is openly hostile to members of all religious faiths,
including Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Christians, and Falun
Gong practitioners. The PRC has adopted a five-year plan to bring all
religious doctrine and practice in line with Communist Party doctrine.
This effort calls for rewriting holy texts, forbidding youth from
participating in religious activities, and implementation of mass
detention camps that indoctrinate detainees in CCP ideology and force
renunciation of faith. Leaked PRC government documents show use of
“religion-related reasons” such as men wearing beards, women
wearing veils, and families having too many children as justification to
detain Uyghur Muslims and impose further ideological control on the
Chinese population.
 The CCP also insists it has the authority to select Tibetan Buddhist
lamas, including the next Dalai Lama, and considers house churches
and Falun Gong adherents and their practices to be “illegal” if they
refuse to join CCP-led organizations or renounce important elements of
their beliefs. Authorities routinely shutter or demolish houses of
worship and offer cash rewards to those who inform on religious
adherents. Individuals found violating the laws and regulations
controlling religion are harassed, surveilled, interrogated, arrested,
beaten, sentenced to prison, detained, or disappeared.
 The PRC is continuing its decades-long campaign to eradicate Tibet’s
unique religious, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identity. Tibetans live in
a virtual police state and face severe restrictions of their human rights
 and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of religion or belief. The
PRC interferes in the selection, education, and veneration of Tibetan
Buddhist religious leaders and has evicted thousands of monks and
nuns from religious institutions while destroying their dwellings. The
PRC government has refused repeated requests to hold a meaningful
and direct dialogue with the Dalai Lama or his representatives without
preconditions. Instead, it has cut off the Tibetan community from the
rest of the world, including by systematically impeding access to the
region for foreign diplomats, journalists, and tourists.

Syria
 The fall of the Assad Government in December 2024 has resulted
in spontaneous returns to Syria . More than 1 million Syrians have
returned home, including some 301,967 Syrians from neighboring
countries like Türkiye, Lebanon and Jordan, and 885,294 internally
displaced persons (IDPs) since the end of November 2024.
 Following recent events in Syria, UNHCR conducted a regional
survey to better understand the views of Syrian refugees on
returns to Syria. Overall, more than 80 percent of refugees hope to
return to Syria one day, a major shift from the previous survey
conducted in April 2024 which indicated only 57 percent expressed
hope to return. Similarly, the intention to return in the short-term
has also increased significantly—27 percent of Syrian refugees
intend to return in the next twelve months compared to 1.7
percent previously. Spontaneous returns are expected to continue
throughout 2025.

Qatar
 Authorities continued to restrict the right to freedom of expression and
silence critical voices. Migrant workers continued to face a range of
abuses, including wage theft, forced labour and exploitation, and had
inadequate access to grievance and redress mechanisms. Women
continued to face discrimination in law and practice. Discriminatory
laws put LGBTI people at risk of detention.
 Freedom of Expression - The authorities continued to curtail the
rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, including by
arbitrarily detaining individuals for exercising their human rights.
 Two activists imprisoned for online posts were released after serving
their sentences. One of them, Abdullah al-Mohannadi, was released in
August after completing an eight-month sentence imposed for posts
and activism relating to the National Campaign for Travel-Banned
Citizens. However, he remained subject to a travel ban.
 Migrant Right’s - Migrant workers continued to face serious abuses,
including wage theft, restrictions on changing jobs and inadequate
grievance and redress mechanisms. In early January, hundreds of
marshals and security guards contracted to Qatar-based Teyseer
Security Services, who had worked excessive hours without rest days
on FIFA World Cup 2022 sites, staged protests days before their
contracts expired to demand they be paid their dues in full.
 Qatar’s monthly minimum wage continued to be too low for workers to
have an adequate standard of living or free themselves from debt
bondage caused by paying illegal recruitment fees.

 Migrant workers continued to face bureaucratic hurdles when

seeking to change jobs without the permission of their employers,
even though such permission was no longer a legal requirement.
 Live-in domestic workers, most of whom are women, continued to
face particularly harsh working conditions and abuses as a result of
the government’s ongoing failure to implement measures
introduced in 2017 to protect them.

 Migrant workers continued to face barriers in accessing justice and

receiving remedy for a range of abuses, including historic ones. The
problems included: delays in the legal process for up to a year;
language barriers; non-payment of dues when cases were won; the
exclusion of some abuses such as the payment of illegal recruitment
fees; and the inability of workers to access justice remotely once they
leave the country.
 Women’s Rights - Women continued to face discrimination in law
and practice. Under the guardianship system, women need the
 permission of a male guardian – usually their husband, father, brother,
grandfather or uncle – to marry, study abroad on government
scholarships, work in many government jobs, travel abroad if aged
under 25, and access reproductive healthcare.

Kuwait
 Freedom of Expression - On 10 August, authorities arrested Fadhel
Dhahi, a Bidun activist previously prosecuted for participating in a
peaceful pro-Bidun protest in August 2022. They charged him with
“cybercrimes” for his use of X (formerly Twitter) to criticize Kuwait’s
treatment of the Bidun. He was released on bail on 31 August, but the
case against him was ongoing at the end of the year.
 Also in August, the Ministry of Information submitted to parliament a
draft Law on Regulation of Media, which, like the existing law, would
criminalize criticism of the emir, and would now explicitly criminalize
criticism of the crown prince and Islamic religious figures and require
state permission to establish a publishing venture. The proposed law
would add as a new crime speech that “leads to shaking confidence”
in the country’s currency or economy. The same month, authorities
banned any showing in Kuwait of an Australian film because it featured
a transgender actor.
 On 3 September, authorities arrested Bidun human rights activist
Mohammad al-Bargash, who had been vocal on social media and in
peaceful demonstrations for Bidun rights for several years. Like Fadhel
Dhahi, he had participated in and was prosecuted for his role in the
August 2022 protest. Authorities refused to publish the charges
against him or share them with any party other than the defence
attorney because it was a secret “state security” case. Judicial
authorities charged him with “undermining the country’s prestige and
standing” by spreading “false and biased news and rumours” about it
 on X and in media interviews. On 25 October, after more than seven
weeks in prison, he was acquitted and released.
 Protests - Public protests in Kuwait remained infrequent and Kuwaiti
law continued to criminalize those involving over 20 people that had
not received prior permission from authorities. There were no public
demonstrations of significant size in 2023.

 Migrant workers - Migrant workers, who make up the vast

majority of the private sector workforce, continued to be barred
from forming unions, although after five years of residence they can
join existing unions created by Kuwaiti nationals.
 A study published by Kuwaiti and international researchers in April
found increased rates of injury among migrant workers in the
private sector who do outdoor labour and have had to work in rising
temperatures in recent years. The study noted that the
government’s regulatory approach to health and safety for these
workers is inadequate. The existing policy – a simple time-based
ban on outdoor physical labour from 11am to 4pm during the
summer – does not ensure that workers are not labouring in
dangerous levels of heat, since temperatures are often hazardous
outside of those months and hours. Authorities did not respond with
any initiatives to modify this policy.
 The government undermined protection for migrant domestic
workers by shutting down a safe house rented by the embassy of
the Philippines in Kuwait for workers fleeing abusive domestic
employers.

 In Kuwait, "Bidoon" (also spelled Bedoon, Bidun, or Bedun) refers to a

stateless Arab minority group who were not granted Kuwaiti
citizenship at the time of the country's independence in 1961

 Right to Education - As has been the case for three decades, Bidun
families who could not claim a special exemption (such as having a
male family member in the military or police) could not send their
children to the free government schools, and instead had to register
them in for-profit private schools. Because the Bidun population
had, on average, far lower income than recognized nationals, the
schools Bidun families could afford were often inferior to the free
government schools and lacking in basic equipment.
 The government did not allow Bidun families with expired cards
from the Central System for the Remedy of the Situation of Illegal
Residents, the agency governing Bidun affairs, to register their
children for school in advance like Kuwaiti citizens. Instead, no
announcement authorizing school registration for this group was
 made until 12 September, giving them just two working days to
register before classes started. Many Bidun do not renew their
Central System cards, which expire annually, because when they
do, they are at risk of being assigned a false, non-Kuwaiti nationality
on their new card, making it more difficult for them to ever end their
statelessness

Sudan –
 Indiscriminate Attacks - In April, intense armed clashes erupted
between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel
Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries,
led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (also known as Hemedti),
in the capital, Khartoum. The clashes quickly spread to other areas,
including Darfur and North Kordofan. The fighting came after
months of tensions between the two groups over security force
reforms, proposed as part of the negotiations for a new transitional
government, among other issues.
 Despite multiple ceasefire declarations, fighting intensified.
According to the UN, more than 12,000 people were killed between
April and December nationwide. In October, it was reported that
about 15 million people – 31% of the population – were acutely food
insecure.
 Fighters, mostly RSF, engaged in widespread looting of homes,
businesses and public institutions, including hospitals, humanitarian
organizations’ warehouses, and banks in Khartoum and in the Darfur
region.
 Many civilians were caught in the crossfire as members of the SAF
and RSF, often using explosive weapons with wide area effects,
launched frequent attacks in and from densely populated civilian
neighbourhoods. People were consequently killed inside their
homes, or while desperately searching for food and other
necessities. Others were killed and injured while fleeing from the
violence, and in places where they had sought safety. In most cases,
it was difficult to establish which side fired the munitions that killed
and injured civilians.
 Sexual and Gender-based violence - Scores of women and girls,
some as young as 12, were subjected to conflict-related sexual
violence, including rape, by members of the warring sides, mainly
RSF and allied militias. Most of the survivors were Sudanese, and
some were nationals of other countries. They were abducted and
subjected to sexual violence in their homes or when they went out
to look for food or other necessities. In one case, RSF members
abducted a group of 24 women and girls and took them to a hotel in
Nyala where they were held in conditions amounting to sexual
slavery for several days during which they were raped by several
RSF members.
 Many survivors had no access to necessary medical and psycho-
social support because of the limited protection, rehabilitation and
livelihood services available to them. Many health facilities had
been damaged and looted in the conflict, and medical personnel had
fled. Time-sensitive post-rape care was limited or non-existent;
survivors were unable or too afraid to report assaults and seek
medical care. In addition, communication networks were weak or
cut off in some areas and movement was severely restricted by the
conflict.
 Internally Displaced People’s Rights - The conflict was
devastating for civilians and the situation continued to deteriorate.
Over 5.8 million people were internally displaced since April, making
Sudan the scene of the largest displacement crisis in the world.
Over 4.5 million of these were displaced between 15 April and 19
October alone, according to the UN. Among those displaced were
refugees from other countries, especially Ethiopia, Eritrea and South
Sudan, who had sought refuge in Sudan. The humanitarian crisis
faced by internally displaced people was exacerbated by acute
shortages of food, water, medicines and fuel. The price of essential
goods increased dramatically due to disrupted trade routes and
limited access, making them unaffordable to the population.