Record Record, 117 Million People Forced To Evacuate Throughout 2023

Refugees of children from Ukraine arrived at Polish Przemysl by train. (Wikimedia Commons/Mirek Pruchnick)

JAKARTA - The UN refugee agency on Thursday said the number of people forced to flee over the past year reached a record 117.3 million people, warning this figure could rise further without major global political changes.

"They are refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced people, people forced away by conflict, by persecution, by a variety of increasingly complex forms of violence," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Filippo Grandi.

"The conflict remains a very, very deep driver of the evacuation," he continued.

In its report on global trends in forced evacuation, UNHCR said there had been an annual increase in the number of people who had forced refuge over the past 12 years.

UNHCR estimates forced evacuation will continue to increase in the first four months of 2024, while the number of refugees may have surpassed 120 million by the end of April.

"Unless there is an international geopolitical shift, unfortunately, I actually see that number continuing to increase," Grandi said, referring to the risk of a new conflict.

Conflicts that have prompted evacuation include the war in Sudan, which Grandi described as "one of the most powerful" although less attention than any other crisis.

More than 9 million people have fled internally and another 2 million have fled to neighboring countries including Chad, Egypt, and South Sudan, Grandi said.

"People come in hundreds every day," he said, referring to the entry of people seeking safety in Chad.

Meanwhile in Gaza, Israeli land bombings and operations have left about 1.7 million people nearly 80 percent of the Palestinian enclave population internally displaced, many of whom fled many times.

Grandi warned that the possibility of crossing Gazans to Egypt from the southern border city of Rafah to avoid Israeli military attacks would be catastrophic.

"Another refugee crisis outside Gaza will be catastrophic at all levels, including because we have no guarantee that people will be able to return to Gaza one day," Grandi said.