The number of displaced people worldwide reached a record high by the end of 2023, exacerbated by conflicts in Sudan, Gaza, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The annual report released on Tuesday by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva, a non-governmental organization, indicated that the number of internally displaced persons reached 76 million by the end of 2023.
The number of internally displaced persons increased by 50 percent over the past five years, as stated in the report, while it was 71.1 million at the end of 2022.
Conflicts in Sudan, Gaza, and the Democratic Republic of Congo pushed the number of internally displaced persons to a record high, reaching 75.9 million by the end of 2023, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
Unlike refugees who leave beyond the country’s borders, internally displaced persons are forced to move from one place to another within the country they reside in.
In its global report on the number of internally displaced persons, the centre stated that 68.3 million people worldwide were displaced due to conflicts and violence, and 7.7 million due to disasters.
Over the past five years, the number of internally displaced persons due to conflicts increased by 22.6 million, with a significant increase, especially in 2022 and 2023.
According to the observatory, Sudan has the largest number of displaced persons in a single country since these data were first recorded in 2008, with up to 9.1 million internally displaced persons.
Approximately half of the internally displaced persons reside in sub-Saharan African countries.
The director of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Alexandra Bilak, stated: “In the past two years, we have witnessed alarming new levels of people forced to flee their homes due to conflicts and violence, even in areas that were experiencing improvement in this regard.”
She emphasized that “conflicts and the resulting destruction prevent millions from rebuilding their lives, sometimes over years.”
The fighting in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Palestinian territories resulted in the displacement of nearly two-thirds of the new internally displaced persons due to conflicts in 2023.
