Reporting from Caracas for Al Jazeera, Noris Soto says authorities appear to lack a clear response plan in the aftermath of two powerful earthquakes. The recovery is being hampered by severe damage to communication systems, as displaced residents are housed in hotels.

Darfur, Sudan – Under a lone tree in the Iridimi refugee camp in eastern Chad, 45-year-old Thuraya Mukhtar sits quietly, trying to piece together the remnants of a life that was safe before war tore it from its roots.

Just a week ago, the deafening roar of explosions and relentless gunfire forced her to abandon her home in the Orchi area of western Sudan. She left behind her life’s work and dreams, carrying across the border only the inescapable, haunting identity of a refugee.

“I left without realising that I would never return. I carried my children and ran, with fire behind us and bullets over our heads,” Thuraya told Al Jazeera, her voice steady but laced with exhaustion. “We haven’t eaten for two days, and my children are crying from hunger. I don’t know how I will feed them tomorrow, or where I will sleep tonight.”

Thuraya is but one of thousands of women now bearing the crushing weight of forced displacement. In their eyes lies an endless narrative of fear, hunger and wandering. In silence, they search for a single drop of water for children who ask them every day: When are we going home?

A trail of ashes

The devastation that drove Thuraya into the Chadian desert began on June 15 , when the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) launched a sweeping offensive on the Orchi area in the Um Baru locality of North Darfur.

Riding horses and camels and backed by heavily armed mechanised vehicles, the fighters left a trail of absolute ruin. The assault resulted in the complete incineration of ten villages. The local market was looted and burned to the ground, and vast numbers of livestock and civilian property were swept away.

A week after the skies over Orchi turned black with smoke, thousands of displaced families are still living in the open. With no shelter, food, or medicine, they sleep on the harsh, unforgiving dirt. They huddle under trees that offer no real shield from the scorching daytime sun or the biting desert nights. Some try to cover their shivering children with dry branches; others cannot even find that.

Eating leaves to survive

While political leaders discuss military tactics, the reality for the civilians hiding in the valleys paints a visceral picture of survival. Water is the most urgent crisis; following the deliberate destruction of the Orchi reservoir, the water supply to the burning villages was entirely severed.

“We walked long distances before reaching the Chadian town of Tine. Along the way, we ate tree leaves and drank contaminated water we found in puddles,” Hawa Adam, a 35-year-old mother from Orchi, told Al Jazeera. “Food is almost nonexistent. Whatever supplies we had were either looted by the RSF or burned in our homes.”

For 40-year-old Um Ibrahim, the trauma is compounded by the helplessness of watching her family starve.

“We left our homes with no food or medicine. The night is the hardest part, and the children cry from hunger and fear,” she said. “My kids haven’t eaten in two days. My husband was a farmer, but our livelihood burned along with our house.”

Nowhere to hide

The terror does not end once the ground forces move on. According to fleeing residents, the skies remain deadly.

Adam Abakar, a recently displaced civilian, told Al Jazeera that drones continue to heavily patrol the airspace over their region, methodically targeting remaining water sources, livestock and civilian homes.

“We cannot return to our villages. The planes fly over our heads every day and target any movement, as if they want to expel us from the last place we seek refuge in,” Abakar said, describing the feeling of being caught between the anvil of ground assaults and the hammer of aerial surveillance.

The catastrophic influx of refugees is now overwhelming local humanitarian networks. Mustafa Barah, head of the Darfur Genocide Victims Commission, noted that camps in eastern Chad are receiving up to 80 fleeing families every day. “They arrive exhausted, without food or water, some carrying their sick children on their shoulders,” he said.

Mohammed Safi, the media official for the Tine Emergency Room, told Al Jazeera that resources are virtually depleted. “Over the past two days, we have received more than 7,000 displaced families,” Safi said. “All of them are in desperate need of tents, blankets, food and safe drinking water. The situation requires urgent intervention.”

‘Systematic demographic change’

Sudanese officials argue that the horrors witnessed in Orchi are not random acts of war, but a calculated geopolitical strategy.

Salah Rassas Adam Tour, a member of Sudan’s Sovereign Council, told Al Jazeera that the ongoing military operations by the national army aim to “break the bones” of the RSF.

“The targeting and displacement of civilians is not a tactical error; it is a systematic policy followed by the Rapid Support Forces to change the demographic makeup of the region,” Tour said, warning that calls for the country’s partition are illusions aimed at destabilising Sudan.

Tour called on the international community to intervene and halt the “forced displacement.” Al Jazeera reached out to the RSF for comment regarding the accusations of torching villages and engineering forced displacement in Orchi, but the group had not responded by the time of publication.

A famine ignored

The horrific accounts from the Chad-Sudan border coincide with a dire warning from the international community. On June 17 , a joint report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) declared that Sudan is facing the world’s worst hunger crisis, with 19.5 million people enduring acute food insecurity and famine threatening 14 areas across Darfur.

Yet, for mothers such as Thuraya and Hawa, official statements regarding “systematic displacement” translate into a grim daily reality. As the geography of displacement expands from Tine to Karnoi, and from Um Baru to Orchi, thousands of families are left fighting for survival under the sparse shade of trees. Amid UN warnings of an impending famine, these uprooted civilians are left waiting to see if international intervention will materialise before more villages are burned to the ground.

The court’s three liberal justices dissented, saying the ruling ‘circumvents’ US law by allowing agents to prevent asylum seekers from making a claim.

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that government officials can turn away asylum seekers at the southern border with Mexico if they have not yet set foot on US soil.

The ruling on Thursday clears the way for the administration of President Donald Trump to revive a controversial policy known as “metering”, in which immigration agents physically block those seeking asylum from crossing the border.

Rights groups have argued that the practice is a way of bypassing domestic law requiring the US to grant the right to apply for asylum to anyone arriving in the country. They also point out that physically blocking individuals from seeking asylum incentivises more dangerous routes.

The 6-3 ruling broke down along ideological lines, with the court’s six conservative justices ruling in favour and the three liberal justices dissenting.

In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito pointed to the provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that says a foreigner who “arrives in the United States” may apply for asylum and must be inspected ‌by a federal immigration official.

“The wisdom of the policy of metering alien arrivals at the southern border is not before us,” Alito wrote. “We decide only that an alien standing in Mexico does not ‘arriv[e] in the United States’. The INA neither entitles such an alien to apply for asylum nor requires an immigration officer to inspect him.”

The ruling reverses a lower court’s decision that found the practice of “metering” illegal. The Trump administration, which has taken a hardline approach to all forms of immigration to the US, had appealed the lower court’s decision.

The practice predates Trump, with former President Barack Obama using “metering” to turn people away at the southern border in the final year of his presidency, amid a dramatic uptick in crossings.

Trump formalised the strategy during his first term, allowing border agents to decline asylum claims when they deem they no longer have the necessary resources to process them. The administration of US President Joe Biden ended the practice in 2021.

In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority’s ruling allows the White House to “circumvent” legal procedures designed to assure every asylum case is individually assessed.

She also underscored the cruelty of authorities refusing asylum seekers who escaped persecution and arrived at the US border, only to be turned away.

“They may do so even if the asylum seeker is at the threshold of a port of entry designated to receive all noncitizens who seek entrance into the country. Even if the port of entry has ample capacity to inspect that person, including an available asylum officer trained to process asylum applications,” she wrote.

“Even if the asylum seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed, if she is turned away.”

Sotomayor further said the majority’s “illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’” She argued the majority failed to consider the “statutory context and history” of how the word is used.

The ruling comes shortly after a federal judge in early June ruled the Trump administration must lift a separate blanket pause on processing asylum cases, which the administration had imposed due to what it called a border “emergency”.

Haiti and Syria TPS ruling

In another immigration ruling on Thursday, the top court cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Haitians living in the US with Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

The status is granted when it is deemed unsafe for citizens of a country to return to their homelands, in light of armed conflict, political instability or natural disaster.

About 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians are believed to currently be living in the US under TPS. Following Thursday’s ruling, those with TPS were subject to losing their work authorisation and could be subject to deportation.

Justice Alito again wrote the majority opinion, saying that the US law on TPS “plainly bars” judicial review of the executive branch’s decision.

Alito also opposed a lower court’s finding that Trump’s actions towards Haitians were likely motivated by “racial animus”.

Plaintiffs in that case had pointed to Trump’s campaign comments, including spreading unfounded claims that Haitians living in Ohio were killing and eating pets.

The deaths come amid escalating Israeli military raids and settler attacks across the occupied territories.

Israeli forces have killed at least two Palestinians in separate shooting incidents in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In a statement on Thursday, the Palestinian health ministry announced the death of 32-year-old Mustafa Taha Mustafa al-Khatib “at dawn today after being shot by Israeli occupation forces in Salfit”.

Al-Khatib was killed after Israeli forces stormed his home and shot him dead, local sources told news agencies.

His family told the Anadolu news agency that al-Khatib had returned from Jordan two years ago to work and had no known security or armed group affiliation.

His uncle Yassin Khatib described the killing as a “cold-blooded execution”.

“From the broken door and the damaged contents of the room, it was obvious they [Israeli forces] forced their way in without giving [al-Khatib] him time even to open the door or get dressed,” Yassin Khatib told Anadolu.

He said his nephew, who held both Jordanian and Palestinian citizenship, had lived on the property for four years, working in agriculture and construction.

Relatives said Israeli troops prevented ambulances from reaching al-Khatib for nearly two hours.

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said Israeli forces left his body inside the house after ransacking it.

The Israeli military told the AFP news agency that its troops had fired at someone “throwing objects” at soldiers during a raid in the area.

The killing came alongside separate settler violence in Halhul, north of Hebron, where residents said Israeli settlers pelted Palestinian homes with stones after the dismantling of a nearby outpost. A local resident told Israeli news outlet Haaretz he saw about 35 masked settlers throwing stones at houses and trying to start fires.

The violence came a day after another Palestinian, Mohammad Nazem Zayed, was killed in Yabad, west of Jenin, after Israeli undercover agents besieged a house and shot him inside.

One killed in Gaza

At the same time, Israeli attacks have not ceased in Gaza, despite a so-called “ceasefire” agreed in October.

In northern Gaza, one Palestinian was killed after Israeli troops opened fire in the al-Atatra area of Beit Lahiya on Thursday, Anadolu reported.

The deceased was transferred to al-Shifa Medical Complex, medical sources said.

A separate drone strike hit a group of pedestrians near the Italian Complex in Gaza City’s Nassr neighbourhood, wounding two people, one critically.

Gaza’s Health Ministry says Israeli violations of the ceasefire, which took effect on October 10, 2025, have already killed 1,031 Palestinians and injured 3309 others. In total, since Israel’s genocidal war began in October 2023, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.

At the same time, violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has escalated sharply since Israel launched its genocidal war, with intensifying Israeli military raids and settler attacks on homes and property.

The Palestinian health ministry said al-Khatib’s death brought the number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank since the beginning of the year to 72, including 17 children, five women, and two elderly people.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said all Gulf countries oppose a toll in the Strait of Hormuz during a tour of the region following US-Iran talks. Rubio added, “There isn’t a nation on Earth that supports having to pay money to go through the straits”.