The World Health Organization has confirmed that the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo carries a death rate of between 30 and 50 percent among confirmed cases, with WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus travelling to Kinshasa to lead the international response. More than 1,000 confirmed and suspected cases have been recorded since the outbreak was declared on 15 May, with 10 confirmed and 223 suspected deaths reported so far. Officials have acknowledged that the true scale of the epidemic is likely to be considerably larger, given that the virus is believed to have circulated undetected for some time before the outbreak was formally identified.

Relief efforts are being hampered by the outbreak's location in the Ituri province of north-eastern DRC, a mineral-rich region where armed groups, including the Rwanda-backed M23 movement, have maintained a sustained presence. Tedros made a direct appeal to all armed factions in the region to observe a ceasefire, arguing that no political grievance could justify the additional mortality being caused by conflict amid a public health emergency. One patient has already been discharged following two negative tests, offering an early indication that containment measures may be beginning to take effect.

Satellite imagery updated on Google Earth in February 2026 has revealed that large sections of Gaza have been transformed beyond recognition, with entire residential neighbourhoods reduced to rubble and significant portions of the territory's cemeteries either partially or fully destroyed. According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israeli forces are believed to have damaged or obliterated 94 percent of Gaza's burial sites, with the Sheikh Mohammed cemetery in Khan Younis having been replaced by an Israeli military outpost. Palestinian journalist Muhannad Qishta, whose sisters are buried at the site, described his anguish at being unable to visit their graves.

The imagery also documents the near-complete erasure of communities such as the Swedish village in Rafah — a settlement founded in 1965 to house Palestinian refugees — as well as vast housing projects that have been reduced to mounds of debris. For many Palestinians, the updated maps are understood to offer a wide-angle view of losses that extend beyond the living, reaching into collective memory and ancestral connection to land. Nearly 73,000 people are reported to have been killed since the conflict escalated, according to figures cited by human rights organisations monitoring the situation.