Haiti displacement nears 1.5 million, UN warns

Some 1.47 million people are displaced in gang-ravaged Haiti, the United Nations’ migration agency said on Friday, warning that its ability to assist those affected could run out within months, News.Az reports, citing AFP.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas with a population of 12 million, has for years faced instability as powerful gangs carry out widespread killings, rapes, looting, and kidnappings.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) said its updated figures reflect a deepening humanitarian crisis in the Caribbean nation.

The IOM said armed attacks are no longer limited to traditional hotspots and are increasingly spreading into areas that previously served as places of refuge, leaving vulnerable populations with very few safe options.

“Nearly 1.47 million people remain displaced in the country,” Gregoire Goodstein, the IOM chief of mission in Haiti, told a press briefing in Geneva.

“The violence is no longer contained: it is expanding.”

The agency said the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) now represents about 12 percent of Haiti’s population, with more than half of those displaced being women and girls.

It added that renewed violence in May in the Cite Soleil area of Port-au-Prince displaced more than 18,000 people within days, pushing the number of displaced in the capital above 300,000 for the first time on record.

“What we are seeing is the permanent simultaneity of hardship, armed violence, mass displacement, acute food insecurity, forced returns at scale, climate hazards, and institutions under pressure at every level… each one making the others worse,” Goodstein said.

He also noted that more than 270,000 Haitians abroad were forcibly returned to the country in 2025, while another 110,000 have arrived so far this year.

Goodstein said about a quarter of those returnees were women, and nearly 10 percent were children, including unaccompanied minors and newborns.

“For some, this is the first time in decades, or even in their lives, that they have returned to the country,” he said.

Since December, nearly 95,000 people have been newly displaced, while more than 78,000 have returned to their areas of origin.

He cautioned that it is unclear whether these returns are sustainable, adding that “signals require investment to become something lasting.”

However, he warned that funding constraints “now threaten our ability to remain operational beyond October.”

“Without predictable, sustained support to our crisis response plan, our capacity to respond is at stake.”

He also noted that the Atlantic hurricane season began on June 1 and runs through the end of November.

“We can expect displacement sites and cities to flood. Every gap in our response is a gap that armed groups, trafficking networks and despair will fill,” he said.

“Short-term relief alone cannot meet the scale or persistence of this crisis, which has now been going on for nearly five years,” he added.

News.Az 

By Nijat Babayev