 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news round up. You always give the people what they want, which is brought to you by People's Dispatch. That's Prashant and Zoe bringing you the best news grounded on struggles of people around the world. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. Very happy to be with you. It's the 182nd day of Israel's bombing in Gaza. I want to start as usual with some updates of the numbers that have come to us from the health ministry in Gaza this morning. This is updated numbers right now. 33,091 people dead, of which 75% are children, women and elderly people. There are 7,000 unaccounted for people. Here's the thing that's interesting and I very much hope that our coverage will highlight this. Of the 7,000 people missing, 5,000 of them are children. Many of them very young children who are not being found probably under that 26 million tons of rubble that have not been moved. This is extraordinary. In fact, staying with the topic of children, the Ministry of Health in Gaza has reported that at least 30 children have died of malnutrition and dehydration already. It's just extraordinary to think about this. The damage has been so great that 32 hospitals in Gaza are not able to function. 53 healthcare centers cannot function at all. There are 11,000 injured people who just cannot get urgent treatment because of the lack of hospitals and so on. Ministry of Health estimates bed occupancy rate has gone up 340%. And by the way, I looked into this 340% number. It's not a serious number because in fact, they are counting having stretchers outside the hospital. They are counting tents outside as hospital beds. In fact, if you remove them and say beds inside sterile units, the rate of occupancy is much higher than 340%. There have been 20,000 babies born in these 182 days. Most of these babies are born without any natal care. As soon as they are born, there is no medical practitioner available to help the mother, help the child and so on. These are babies born in tents and camps and so on. There are right now 60,000 pregnant women preparing without prenatal care. The numbers coming out of the Gaza Ministry of Health are extraordinary. No wonder that both the Israeli government and many western governments keep contesting these numbers. They keep calling it the Hamas Health Ministry. In fact, I would like to say, having interviewed a number of these people, that the people who work in the Health Ministry are professional healthcare providers. They are public health professionals. They are trying their best in very difficult circumstances to maintain a record of what's going on. Don't forget that the people who work in the Ministry of Health themselves are not necessarily doctors. They are people who are facilitating, helping doctors do their job. It's extremely hard to work what they are doing and the numbers they are producing are quite extraordinary. One of the numbers that I paid attention to this morning when I got the report was that 75% of homes in all of Gaza have been damaged. 75% of homes in all of Gaza have been damaged. It's striking that when you think about homes being damaged, you have to understand that electricity and water provision is equally damaged. Because after all, if a home is damaged, there is no way that electricity lines and water connections are not damaged. So people are living on the streets in little grassy areas, in tents and so on, without water, sewage and electricity. This is actually a very pressing matter. And the fact that aid cannot enter, Israelis are not permitting aid to enter, is compounding this. And by aid, we don't just mean food, the drops coming from the Jordanians, United States and so on. They're not able to drop sufficient amounts of water. And this has got implications for disease. You see, because there's no sewage, there's no water to wash yourself. This is a very serious problem for disease. If there's 20,000 babies who are trying to survive and any kind of disease comes into the atmosphere, it's going to impact these 20,000 babies, 60,000 pregnant women and so on. The pressing call for a ceasefire is not just to prevent the death of those who are killed by the bombs directly. It's also those who are dying as a consequence of living through this nightmare. Brett Prashan, in the middle of all this, there's a story about an extreme war crime against the Al-Shifa Hospital. Tell us about that. Brett, so Vijay, what we know, of course, is that it actually connects to many of the points you were making. You were talking about the situation, the access to water and one of the horrific bits of information we got earlier this week after the siege in Al-Shifa Hospital was lifted, was about how health authorities were forced to move the patients to a room without access to a food and a toilet and they were forced to share a single bottle of water. 15 people forced to share a single bottle of water. And that in some ways epitomizes the kind of brutal siege that took place at Al-Shifa Hospital for the past for about two weeks. We know the Israeli soldiers began the siege on March 18 and it continued until April 1. Now Al-Shifa has been attacked many times before. It's one of the largest hospitals in Gaza. And time and again Israel has attacked these facilities saying that with the usual claim that they're targeting Hamas is the Hamas operation center, etc. This time, because the extent of this siege, the impact has been really, really horrific. We're talking about hundreds of deaths, of course. We're talking about the fact that it is not just for health workers, patients killed and even hundreds of people who were taking shelter in the Al-Shifa hospital from all around, many of them attacked in various ways. There is no real, I think the numbers are still unclear about how many people have died, how many people have suffered because of the lack of access to reporting. But yet again, and I think it's the World Health Organization which said that they basically ripped the heart out of Gaza's health system by attacking the Al-Shifa hospital yet again. And the amount of impunity that Israel is enjoying at this point is incredible. The fact that they are using, they are able to at will attack these kinds of health facilities which are so vital for the people over there. They're continuously attacking health workers in various ways. Children, of course, many of them suffering. The brunt of the attack, the most wonderful in these kind of circumstances. And of course, attacking hospitals in a war situation is obviously a war crime but that's really, like you said, that's really not just the impact because it's also about malnutrition. It's also about long-term impact, the entire generation being affected in various ways. That happens when an attack like this happens on hospitals. Interestingly, today the UN Human Rights Council has passed this resolution saying that Israel could be held accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity. A significant resolution considering the fact that we are seeing, I think, after all these months, we are seeing even the strongest of Israel's allies incapable of beyond the point defending the kind of atrocities that are taking place. There was the attack on health workers a few days ago as well, aid workers as well. All of that together creating a really, really bad situation for the people of Palestine. There's a horrendous situation, Prashant. I mean, the fact is that we don't even know how to talk about this. I talked about, I mentioned this at the front saying it's extreme war crime because war crimes have become now normal and this is like one step ahead of that. An extreme war crime. Think about the way we as reporters have to use language to depict what is going on. Unbelievable violence. Let's move from Gaza. Of course, we're not going to move from Gaza. We continue to monitor this very carefully. People's dispatch, Globetrotter, we are covering this vigorously because we think you can't stop talking about what's going on there. The extreme war crimes and then the normal war crimes. But Zoe, let's move on to Argentina. Funny things happening in that country. On the one side we see protests and so on. It's been puzzling to me that Javier Millay, the president is a fan of Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps he's forgotten the war in the Malvinas. Who knows? Yeah, one could say that his head is screwed on slightly in a confused manner. But an interesting photo was published last night around midnight. Javier Millay in the southernmost region of Argentina, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. We know this is like the tip of South America with none other than everyone's favorite general, Laura Richardson, who is the commander of Southcom, which is of course the southern command of the U.S. Army. And just in case it wasn't clear, I was being sarcastic. She's not everyone's favorite general. She's actually in the past year has made a lot of explosive statements saying that. We're really just stating U.S. policy quite clearly for everyone, which is to say that Latin America and the Caribbean represent an important region because of the resources, the natural resources that they have. And that's why it's important that there's a U.S. presence there to kind of maintain control over this. And she said this, I think, in some sort of conference, you know, a year and a half ago, I want to say. And since then it's been quite clear. We saw her head to Ecuador at the beginning of the year in January to come to the aid of Danyan Nubola, who we're going to talk about a bit later, to sort of deploy the U.S. Army in Ecuador. And now she had visited, she arrived in Buenos Aires on Wednesday to meet with Javier Milé. And they had this meeting in Tierra del Fuego, which again, tip of southern continent. It is an extremely strategic area, you know, for many reasons. And so essentially, Javier Milé makes this express trip down there, by the way, in the middle of, you know, an insane crisis happening in the northern part of the country, which I'll get to in a minute. And essentially they have this whole photo op and kind of, you know, presentation about, they give speeches about why strategic cooperation with the United States is so important and that Argentina has to have these strategic allies that think in the same way about freedom and liberty. We know Javier Milé again is this whole liberty advances party. He's a big libertarian. His whole stick is, you know, free Argentina from the political cast, from the leeches, from all of these people who don't believe in freedom, what freedom one may ask. But nonetheless, really, you know, symbolically, but also, you know, concretely showing strong signs of this realignment, not only with the US in terms of foreign policy, we know this week Javier Milé also announced that he would be trying to rally countries in the region together to push sanctions against Venezuela, not only because he's been attacking some of the progressive governments in the region, but also it's seeming like there is, there's been a lot of kind of rumors in the Argentine media about whether there will be a US base kind of permitted in this area in this region. You know, what kind of military cooperation is there going to be between Argentina and the United States? We know that, you know, across Latin America, there are dozens of US bases, seven in Colombia. Ecuador under Rafael Correa had actually pushed out all of the US bases, said that we don't have any need for US bases, they don't need to be here. This question of the base is actually really important. It's a global struggle. There are over 800 US military bases across the world. So, you know, Javier Milé is not just this kind of fool that we laugh at because of the crazy things that he says, but, you know, concretely, it's having a huge impact. The other aspect is that while he's in Tierra del Fuego meeting with Laura Richardson, 11,000 public sector employees lost their jobs on Thursday. So, you know, they go in, or sorry, this was Wednesday, they go into their place of work and essentially there are lists of people whose contracts weren't renewed, extreme chaos, massive police deployment at all of these public sector agencies. Of course, protests begin because people are finding out they were a year away from receiving their pension and now they have had all their benefits terminated. You know, you can imagine the commotion of people who have, you know, been working their entire lives for this and now have just lost everything. This is something that he had announced, his chainsaw style politics, just attack, attack, attack the public sector. This isn't going to solve, of course, Argentina's economic problems. This is an austerity measure that is going to plunge the people of Argentina even more into economic crisis in January. 50% of the population was living in poverty. So while the U.S. is praising Javier Millay and saying, look at all these economic, this economic progress that he's achieving, you know, who are they actually referring to and what policies are referring to because, you know, thousands of Argentinians are living, tens of thousands are losing their livelihoods. Of course, if you're a state employee, you're probably providing for your family and your extended, you know, so there's, it's a really difficult week. There was a massive mobilization yesterday of education workers today. Public sector workers are on strike. The Argentinian people are continuing to struggle. They're continuing to fight back against these policies. But we're seeing that it's not just about his domestic economic policies, which are, of course, reprehensible. But the Strategic Alliance of the United States is an extremely worrying development and a departure, of course, from his predecessor, Alberto Fernandez, for all of his setbacks and his deficiencies, was definitely exploring other relationships. Javier Millay has also paused projects with China. They hasn't stopped all cooperation, but a lot of the development projects have been essentially put on hold. So difficult week in Argentina. Argentina, the second largest economy in South America, it's a considerable country. You always give the people what they want, brought to you from people's dispatch. That's Zoe and Prashant. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter, really happy that you're with us this week. We try to come to you every week and give you the best stories that we think are not being covered, or with the way in which we cover them, because we cover them from a human perspective. And I hope you appreciate that. We're going to go back to Zoe, because this is, of course, a year where Mexico is entering into an election. It doesn't need to have tensions with other countries. But Zoe, it seems like Mexico and Ecuador, which don't share a border, nonetheless are having a little bit of a public spat. Tell us about what's happening between Mexico and Ecuador. Well, Andrés Manuel, again, this is essentially his last several months as president. And he is not holding back at all from criticizing leaders in the region for calling them what they are. Another part of the Milés saga this week was that in an interview with CNN, where the CNN interviewer did a pretty lazy journalism, knowing that anything that Javier Milés says is pretty explosive. So he kind of just goes through the list of things and says, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And he said, what do you think about the fact that Andrés Manuel has been criticizing you? And he said he's ignorant. What do I care? It actually excites me that he doesn't like me. Anyways, Andrés Manuel has been calling it what it is. He called me a fascist. And he also had some words for Ecuador's president, Daniel Noboa, who has assumed presidency, of course, in a difficult moment in Ecuador. He, of course, is the son of a billionaire in Ecuador who is big in the banana business. There's a lot of weird ties of Noboa's family to criminal groups, et cetera, et cetera. Nonetheless, there has been this ongoing conflict because Jorge Glass, the former vice president of Rafael Correa, has been essentially taking refuge in the Mexican embassy. Jorge Glass was one of the many people who was targeted in the right-wing lawfare campaign against people in Rafael Correa's administration. We know that Rafael Correa, essentially, if he returns to Ecuador, he's going to be arrested because the prosecutor, the attorney general, under Lenin Moreno, under Guillermo Lasso, who we know cut his term a little short, pursued this very, very aggressive campaign, charging different members of the Correa administration with corruption. We actually know that Rafael Correa was charged with having psychic influence, and that was one of the, you know, just ridiculous charges. So, Jorge Glass finally was released, though, in a deal that was made in Congress, and he has since been taking refuge in the Mexican embassy given the fact that, well, the political climate is not very apt for him to just be kind of waiting around for his next legal proceedings. And Mexico, as it has in many other cases, has played this role of being, you know, not taking a side necessarily, but offering refuge and offering kind of this safe middle ground. We know that in the coup in Peru, Mexico offered asylum to Pedro Castillo's family. Aval, importantly, escaped assassination attempts with help of Andrés Manuel. Mexico has historically played this role in the region, and essentially in the Mañanera, going back to the Comitó, Andrés Manuel, he made a couple of comments about how it was very suspicious how the former presidential candidate, Villavicencio, had been assassinated during the presidential campaign, and whether, you know, questioned how this could have happened, and if it was all related to the president himself, Daniel Noboa, because Villavicencio had made some sharp critiques, and then days later he's assassinated. This comment essentially provoked Noboa, who said that Andrés Manuel is a persona non grata in the country, deepened this kind of diplomatic dispute, which obviously has its roots in the fact that Jorge Glass is taking refuge in the Mexican embassy. It's not really about what he said in the Mañanera, but anyways, tensions across the continent nonetheless. Tensions across the continent? My God, this sounds like some sort of playground spat. I'm sorry to say, I know these are serious men, but for goodness sake, very important developments, of course, in the southern part of Africa. We're going to pivot to that drought and so on. Prashant, lead us there, and then I'm going to end on the story about migration in the northern part of the continent. But first, let's go to the drought in the south. Sub-Saharan Africa really facing quite an intense drought and a lot of problems that come with it actually. In fact, a story that's maybe reported at one level, there's been some amount of media attention, but some of the aspects that we want to look at not getting maybe that amount of attention. But if you just look at the facts, they're quite staggering. We're talking about millions of people in a number of countries in the region. We have a great story by our colleague Tanupriya on this. I would encourage all of you to read that. We're talking about we have millions of people in countries like Angola, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Malawi, all of them facing various levels of hunger. And like I said, accompanying issues as well, including malnutrition for that matter and various other kinds of social issues also taking place. Now on the face of it, one reason for this is what is called the El Nino effect, a very familiar climate effect to all of us. But more than that, I think it's equally important to note that it's not just a climate phenomenon that is causing this. There is a wide variety of social and governmental policies, including in the field of agriculture, which have escalated many of these issues of economic policies, including sanctions. Very important sanctions play a huge role in Zambabwe still facing sanctions and that is really worse in the condition for them as well. But overall what we're seeing is millions of people in all these countries are facing various levels of malnutrition and even starvation. Many of these countries have declared emergencies of various degrees, but that's not really kind of addressing the issues. Now small farm holders, people who own small farm land, so to speak, are among the worst affected, although they are actually the majority of the people in many of these countries. Food prices have soared massively. Just to take one example, we're looking at Zambabwe where food price inflation is around 50%. The price of maize has soared by 80% compared to the previous year. This is one example. And like I said, across the region, we are having these kind of issues as well. There's issue of water scarcity as well. And a lot of this is connected again with climate change where the question of justice comes up, which time and again has been something we are focused on. The fact that many of these countries barely are contributors to global warming and climate change at all, yet they are the countries bearing the brunt of a lot of these policies. Governments also not in the position to really intervene so drastically as they should be able to and thus a lot of the owners is on farmers who are adapting by, say, adopting, for instance, policies like agroecological policies, et cetera, et cetera. But that's really only helping them so much. So when we hear about all these discussions that take place at climate change conferences about how to sort of deal the loss and damage fund in adaptation and mitigation, all these questions. These are the crises that we're talking about. The fact that millions of people are struggling with their future. The future of children across these countries is affected. All these are really questions that these disasters are taking place and that there is no real financial will or financial resources to kind of address them. Similarly, interestingly or unfortunately, another food crisis taking place in Nigeria as well. We'll have a story up there about that soon. Again, very unfortunate considering Nigeria's resources. The reason seems to be the removal of subsidies which have really kind of escalated food prices. There's a huge massive protest taking place in various parts. Repression being unleashed by the government. That's a story we'll be continuing to track as well. But across the region, we are seeing a crisis which is, like I said, which at one level you can attribute to climactic factors, but the intermediate reasons are definitely human induced in various ways. Human induced, this is an important phrase, even more so when it comes to the question of migration. The International Organization of Migration, which is a UN body, had started 10 years ago a project called the Missing Persons Project. It's actually quite an interesting project because they try to calculate exactly who has gone missing while migrating. It's obviously an undercounted number because they don't have everybody. I mean, there are people trying to cross, for instance, the Hindu Kush, that region. They are not going to be found. There are migrants between Assam and India. Nobody's keeping track of them. Nonetheless, something interesting if you just look at the numbers, the trend line, because the bulk of the migration they track is across the Sahara and across the Mediterranean. So on average, about 4,000 people have died a year migrating. That's about the average. Again, it's a depleted number. Last year the number was 8,000. It doubled. They say in the last 10 years that 64,371 people have died. Again, this is a grossly undercounted number, but it's still a trend line. Now, what I found interesting in this is, of course, the bulk of the migration that has been pointed out is across the Mediterranean because then Europe sees the migrants in the boats and so on. What is not talked about is the migration across the Sahara. About a decade ago, when the Missing Persons Project was set up, the French government worked with the governments of the Sahel, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Niger and so on, created a group called G5 Sahel where they had exported, using European Union money, surveillance technologies banned in Europe to prevent migrants from going north. The French, in fact, pushed the government of Niger to pass a law in 2015 which made trafficking illegal. Now it's very important to understand that the traffickers, so-called traffickers, because I've seen them talk to them, many of them are not traffickers, many of them are themselves migrants who are helping others because they know how to drive and so on, but they were criminalized. Interestingly, with the coup d'etats and the shift of governments in the Sahel region, we're seeing a real shift in terms of their attitude. So for instance, the government of Niger has now revoked the law from 2015 that criminalized migration effectively. Most of the countries in the Sahel have now left the G5 Sahel. They don't want to participate in this. And what we're going to see, therefore, is increasing numbers of people going through particularly the Niger-Libya border, which is a big crossing route. It's dangerous, very dangerous, but it's going to become a zone. The reason it's become a zone of traffic is that the older routes going through Morocco, because there's a piece of Spain in North Africa, colonial part of Spain, and a lot of people were going through the boundaries there, going into Morocco and then getting into Spain and then crossing the Mediterranean from that angle already within the EU. The other channel that's become very difficult is the channel via Turkey. So it has increased the pressure of the journey through Niger with all kinds of smugglers and so on. So this week I've got a piece from Globetrotter, which I very much hope people will read because it tries to bring together both the UN numbers on migration, but also what the implications are with this change taking place in the Sahel states. They no longer want to be the policemen of Europe. That's basically the short answer. They don't want to be Europe's policemen. And in fact, what they are saying is, you better settle accounts with the countries from which people are going because many of them are fleeing because of the drought situation, climate change. They are fleeing because of the austerity politics of enforcing debt regimes and so on. People don't want to migrate. The people I've interviewed don't want to migrate. They would like to make a living in their homes, but they just cannot. And so they are dragged to the richer economies that have been stealing from them. And the Sahel states are saying, we are no longer your border guards. You've been listening to give the people what they want, brought to you from people's dispatch. That's Zoe Prashant and Vijay from Globetrotter. Really happy to have you with us. Excited to be back with you next week. Make sure that you're with us again and please share the knowledge that this show exists. Very much like you to do that. See you next week.