A staggering total of 120 million people are living forcibly displaced by war, violence and persecution, the UN said Thursday, branding the ever-increasing number a “terrible indictment on the state of the world”.
“Conflict remains a very, very big driver of mass displacement,” UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi told reporters.
At the end of last year, 117.3 million people were displaced, UNHCR said in a report.
And by the end of April, the number had swelled further, with an estimated 120 million people around the world living in displacement.
The number is up from 110 million a year ago, and has been rising for 12 consecutive years—nearly tripling since 2012 amid a combination of new and mutating crises and a failure to resolve long-standing ones, UNHCR said.
Grandi told media he had been shocked at the high displacement figure when he took the job eight years ago.
Since then it has “more than doubled”, he said, describing this as “a terrible indictment on the state of the world”.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo and Myanmar, millions more people were also internally displaced last year by vicious fighting.
In the Gaza Strip, the UN estimates 1.7 million people — 75 percent of the population—have been displaced by the war sparked eight months ago by Hamas’s October 7 attack inside Israel.
As for the war raging in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the UN estimated that around 750,000 people became newly displaced inside the country last year, with a total of 3.7 million internally displaced people registered by the end of 2023.
The number of Ukrainian refugees and asylum-seekers increased by over 275,000 to six million, it said.
Syria remains the world’s largest displacement crisis, with 13.8 million people forcibly displaced inside and outside the country, UNHCR said.
