Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Thomson Reuters Foundation
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In Lebanon, people with disabilities isolated, abandoned by war
As bombs rained down on Beirut’s southern suburbs, Ali Hussaini faced a heart-wrenching challenge: how to explain what was happening to his two partially deaf daughters. “They would ask me what is going on. Why are we running away?” Hussaini said. “When the bombs hit, I would try to move them...
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'We will die from hunger': Gazans decry Israel's UNRWA ban
After surviving more than a year of war in Gaza, Aisha Khaled is now afraid of dying of hunger if vital aid is cut off next year by a new Israeli law banning the UN Palestinian relief agency from operating in its territory. The law, which has been widely criticised...
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In Egypt, prospect of Trump win raises fears over school funding
In Egypt, education officials are watching the US election with concern, worried that if Republican Donald Trump wins, he could reduce US financial support for schools catering to students who hope to help lead the energy transition. The former president has pledged to roll back key climate policies implemented by...
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Sudan war risks 'lost generation' of children
Amina’s eyes were red-rimmed and vacant, her voice a whisper of grief as she recounted the day her 17-year-old son was killed in Sudan’s south-eastern town of Sinja. As gunfire erupted near their home in April, she tried to escape with her five children, but Ahmed was caught in the...
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One year of war in Gaza: Deadliest conflict for reporters
Palestinian journalist, Islam Al-Zaanoun, was so determined to cover the war in Gaza that she went back to work two months after giving birth. But, like all journalists in Gaza, she was not just covering the story – she was living it. The 34-year-old, who works for Palestine TV, gave...
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Sudan refugees in Egypt caught between conflict and crackdown
Abdallah Bahr waited with his family for hours in the scorching sun outside the UN Refugee Agency’s Cairo office, hoping to receive the asylum identification cards that would allow them to stay in Egypt after fleeing Sudan’s war. They had arrived at 2 a.m. in the morning, and finally got...
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Sickness can be 'death sentence' in Gaza as war fuels disease
In Gaza, falling ill can be a death sentence. Cancer patients are waiting to die, polio has returned and many of the doctors and nurses who might have offered help are dead, while the hospitals they worked at have been reduced to rubble. Doctors and health professionals say that even...
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In Gaza, keeping the internet on can cost lives but also save them
Forced to flee his home yet again as war raged across the Gaza Strip, Khalil Salim was desperate to get his family to safety but how could he be sure he wasn’t leading them deeper into danger? He needed up-to-date information and so he went online and checked out the...
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Gaza's pregnant women defy odds to give birth, protect babies
In a flimsy tent crouched low among the smashed buildings of Rafah, Palestine Bahr felt her contractions begin early one day in May. Her baby was coming but how would she make her way through the rubble-strewn streets to hospital without a car? She managed to find a donkey cart...
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Palestinian tech firms adapt to survive as war hits business
Before the Israel-Palestinian war, the women of the occupied West Bank-based tech non-profit Female Innovators and Investors of MENA (FINOMENA) had grand plans. Some were honing their coding skills ahead of a hackathon in partnership with Microsoft. Others were planning excitedly to travel to a networking event in Dubai...
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Palestinians lose jobs as Israeli firms seek foreign replacements
When Taha Amin-Ismail Khalifeh dialled into a conference call with his Israeli employer last month, the Palestinian hotel worker expected a briefing on how the Israel-Palestine war was affecting business. Instead, he and 40 others were laid off. Khalifeh, who lives in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, had worked as...
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Gaza's tech 'window to the world' shattered by Israel-Palestine war
If the internet was once Gaza’s window to the world, that window has now slammed shut and the Strip’s nascent tech industry has gone from incubator to grave in six weeks of all-out war. Some of Gaza’s brightest brains have died in the punishing Israeli bombardment, much of the Strip’s...
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In the Middle East, poor miss out as 'faulty' algorithms target aid
Asma Ibrahim, an unemployed woman who lives in a cramped shack in northern Lebanon, has no idea why she was refused a welfare benefit for the country’s poorest people – money that would prevent her five children from going to bed hungry. “People in need are not receiving anything,” she...
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Turkiye fishermen fight to save wetlands as water scarcity bites
They won a pioneering climate change lawsuit earlier this year – but few fishermen in the Turkish village of Tekelioglu feel hopeful that an ongoing battle in the courts can revive the dried-out lake where they have worked for generations. “I don’t feel anything anymore,” retired fisherman, Suleyman Pekkara, who...
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Afghan women take protests online as Taliban crush dissent
Days after the Taliban administration in Afghanistan announced in July that all women’s beauty salons must be closed within a month, videos on social media showed groups of women protesting on the streets in Kabul, as well as in their homes, with many holding signs that read: “Bread, justice,...
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In a world of competing conflicts, Sudan struggles for attention
In a world of competing conflicts, Sudan ranks low when it comes to getting the outside help its population so badly needs. Three months into factional fighting that has upended life – shutting hospitals and schools, emptying shelves and banks – foreign donors have coughed up only half the funds...
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Migrants in UAE turn to crypto to send remittances home
Muhammed Bilal used to have to wait his turn outside a money transfer office in the scorching heat of Dubai to send home $1,000 to his wife and parents in Pakistan each month, at a cost of about $7 per transfer. He has, since, switched to an app that allows...
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Shining example: Solar power boosts struggling Tunisia school
A decade ago, the Makthar Boarding School in northern Tunisia had little clean drinking water or heat, poor food and no electricity for its nearly 570 students. But now, solar water heaters ensure hot water for showers and solar panels produce enough electricity, not only to power the school and...
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Baghdad youth reclaim their city, 20 years after US-led invasion
Mouayad Mohsen is appalled by the ways of the modern world, and the 58-year-old Iraqi soldier-turned-painter is on a mission to teach his neighbours some manners. “No one says hello anymore, especially the youth,” he said, enjoying a tea at a cafe near his home in Baghdad Gate, a walled-off...
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CCTV cameras will watch over Egyptians in new high-tech capital
The gleaming tower blocks and high-tech facilities of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s flagship new capital are a far cry from Cairo’s congested streets and crumbling facades. In the New Administrative Capital that is taking shape in the desert, lamp-posts double up as WiFi hotspots, key cards grant access to buildings...
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Decline of the Tigris spells doom for Iraq fishermen
Every morning at sunrise, Iraqi fisherman, Ahmad Hassan Lelo, emerges from his shack on the banks of the Tigris River in the heart of Baghdad, and every morning his heart breaks at the sight before him. The once mighty river that meandered past his home is a shadow of its...
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Egypt farmers fear rising social tensions over scarce water
For three decades, brothers Ramadan and Mamdouh Othman have grown summer crops of maize, olives and cucumbers on their Nile Delta land in Egypt’s northern governate of Fayoum. But, over the past year, the amount of water in the canal that supplies their sandy 3-acre (1.2-hectare) farm in the village...
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In Iraq's Babylon, age-old building techniques heal climate scars
At the temple of Ninmakh, the Sumerian mother goddess, Iraqi archaeologists are using 7,000-year-old techniques to protect the monument, and the rest of the ancient city of Babylon, from salt seeping into its heart and destroying it from within. With carefully made desalinated mud bricks, they are repairing the ruins...
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Saudi snitching app turns citizens into social media police
A Saudi app that lets ordinary people “play the role of a police officer” may have alerted authorities to the tweets of a student whose sentencing to 34 years in jail has drawn international condemnation. Just weeks after the verdict against Salma Al-Shehab – a doctoral candidate at Britain’s Leeds...
