Nazih Osseiran

Before the Israel-Hamas war, the women of the West Bank-based tech non-profit FINOMENA had grand plans.

Some were honing their coding skills ahead of a hackathon in partnership with Microsoft. Others were excitedly planning to travel to a networking event in Dubai where they hoped to impress potential customers and investors.

Like many fellow residents of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Shady Choucair despaired when he heard last week that countries had halted their funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinians (UNRWA).

"It's a disaster. We were able to survive off the help we got from UNRWA," he told Context in his small grocery store in the Mar Elias refugee camp in Beirut, where he has lived with his family for over a decade.

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-Hamas war was affecting business. Instead, he and 40 others were laid off.

Khalifeh, who lives in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, had worked as a housekeeper in the hotel in East Jerusalem for more than 20 years.

Somali aid worker Hasan Mohammad Sirat has almost no tools at his disposal to tackle the devastating effects of extreme weather in his war-torn country, where floods this year have followed hard on the heels of a severe drought.

"We are trying our best," he said, pointing to awareness measures such as teaching camp residents forced to flee violence and hunger to move to higher ground to escape flooding, which has killed nearly 100 people and uprooted 700,000 since October.

It's the multi-billion dollar question and the stakes for the world could not be higher: Will oil and gas interests at the COP28 climate talks silence calls for the phase-out or phase-down of increasingly profitable fossil fuels?

It's a perennial Turkeys-voting-for-Christmas question when it comes to COP - but this time it has added relevance, and not just because the talks are happening in the oil-producing United Arab Emirates and led by Sultan al-Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).

Representatives from nearly 200 nations are gathering for COP28, this year's annual U.N. climate conference, which is being held in the oil-producing United Arab Emirates and led by the head of the country's state oil giant.

Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) chief Sultan al-Jaber - the COP28 president - is also founding CEO of Abu Dhabi's renewable energy firm Masdar.

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 fledgling digital infrastructure has been destroyed, and hope for a better future obliterated. Many now fear that local, tech-savvy talent will also rush for the door.

Israel cut off food, water and fuel to Gaza shortly after the deadly Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants, leading to desperate humanitarian conditions among more than 2 million Palestinians living in one the world's most densely populated areas.

But even before the latest fighting began, Israel supplied only around 10% of Gaza's water, so why is the territory severely short of water?

Hours after the Israel-Hamas conflict erupted on Oct. 7, Bharat Nayak, a fact-checker in the east Indian state of Jharkhand, noticed a surge of disinformation and hate speech directed at Muslims on his dashboard of WhatsApp messages.

The viral messages from hundreds of public WhatsApp groups in India contained graphic images and videos, including many from Syria and Afghanistan falsely labelled as being from Israel, with captions in Hindi that called Muslims evil.

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 said by phone from the deprived Akkar region, adding that she had been calling a government hotline twice a week to ask why she was turned down after applying more than a year ago.