Jens Laerke

The time is now for the international community to support the "spirit created by Syrian people" to rebuild their country after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Israeli sent tanks into Rafah in southern Gaza, seizing control of the border crossing with Egypt on Tuesday, an operation the United Nations said denied it access to the key humanitarian passage.

Israel is blocking far more convoys carrying food aid within Gaza, where famine is looming, than convoys carrying other kinds of aid, the U.N. said Tuesday.

A spokesman for the United Nations' humanitarian agency pointed to statistics from March showing that it was much more difficult to get clearance for delivering food than other aid in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel on Wednesday, where he was expected to press for what he called an "essential" truce agreement as the war with Hamas entered its fifth month.

The diplomat was due to meet Israel's leaders as part of a Middle East crisis tour after earlier stops in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar.

More than 52,000 Palestinians have been displaced by Israeli air strikes that have destroyed or badly damaged nearly 450 buildings in the Gaza Strip, the U.N. aid agency said on May 18.

Fighting continued in Syria's rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta on Tuesday despite a "humanitarian pause" announced by Russia, the United Nations said, cited by AFP. 

Fighting raged on in the eastern Ghouta district of Syria on Tuesday, the United Nations said, despite a five-hour ceasefire called by President Bashar al-Assad's ally Russia, reported Reuters. 

Up to 78,000 people could be trapped in Islamic State-held Hawija in northern Iraq, the United Nations said on Tuesday, as security forces push to recapture the town.

A nationwide cease-fire brokered by the United States and Russia was mostly holding across Syria yesterday and efforts to deliver badly needed aid to besieged areas including the northern city of Aleppo got cautiously underway.