Every child has a story

“It is so hard to live these days," says 10-year-old Mohammed, who has taken shelter in a UN-run school in Gaza City after fleeing the family home in Shishaya. “There was shelling. My family and I hid under the staircase. We were very scared and rightly so, because our home was destroyed. Thanks to the staircase, we survived. We ran away, it was scary because the whole neighbourhood was being shelled. Now we are in this school. I feel safe here, it is a school,” he says.

As the hostilities enter their twenty-first day, the number of children dying is growing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been reported killed so far, of whom around 230 were children – more than 10 a day. The youngest child killed was only 3 months old.

A humanitarian pause is taking place today in Gaza for five hours. UNICEF staff members are on the ground, checking primary health care clinic and hospitals to help injured children and evaluate their needs.

Applying innovative technologies to the largest emergency in the world is a necessary yet tricky challenge. Leading that challenge in Lebanon is James Cranwell-Ward (JCW) a technology specialist from the UK. His innovations lab has been creating some inspirational ideas that UNICEF are testing out in Lebanon such as Raspberry Pi.

My mission was relatively straightforward: to follow the joint UNICEF and WFP Rapid Response team going to Pagak, a small village on the south eastern edge of South Sudan, near the border with Ethiopia, in Upper Nile state.

Q&A with Ettie Higgins the Cork-born woman who is UNICEF's Deputy Representative in South Sudan. Ettie has worked for UNICEF for over a decade in countries like Somalia, Syria and the Central African Republic.

In the distance neat lines of white shelters appear on the landscape of Jordan’s barren eastern desert. This vast site is Azraq refugee camp that opened at the end of April. Built to house Syrians still fleeing the more than 3-year old conflict in their country, the camp now hosts some 6,000 people.

Before conflict broke in South Sudan last December, Nyagonar was in school finishing 4th Grade. She dreamed of being a teacher but her ambitions now resume to peace and seeing her mother again.

Nyamach was a happy, high-achieving, girl who loved school and was top of her class. Now the 17-year-old from South Sudan is picking up the pieces of her life following a series of horrific events that she has experienced since violence broke out in her country last December.