In 2012, Nobel Prize-winner Dr Denis Mukwege was attacked by gunmen – a consequence, he believes, of criticising the Democratic Republic of Congo government’s policies on gender-based violence.

A decade later, living under the protection of UN peacekeepers, Dr Mukwege has launched another challenge against the nation’s leadership. He will be running for president in elections due in December, he announced on Monday.

Known as “Dr Miracle”, the 63-year-old rose to global fame for performing reconstructive surgery on women who had been raped in the country’s war-torn east. His hospital has so far treated more than 50,000 survivors of sexual violence, while he has cemented himself as one of the world’s foremost experts in his field.

Dr Mukwege was born in 1955 in Bukavu, a city in eastern DR Congo. After numerous visits to see sick members of the community with his preacher father, he decided he wanted to become a doctor. He began his training at a medical school across the border in Burundi, later studying gynaecology and obstetrics at the University of Angers in France.

In 1998, he set up a clinic in his home city. The doctor intended Panzi hospital to be for maternal health, with his team treating new or expecting mothers. However, when war broke out, more and more women came to the clinic with gruesome injuries from sexual violence committed by various armed groups.

In 2013, Dr Mukwege told the BBC that rape in eastern DR Congo was part of a ‘stratergy’ to force communities away from their land and resources.

For three decades the region has been wracked by conflict, with numerous armed groups battling for gold and other valuable resources. Different militias have been accused of carrying out indiscriminate rape – tens of thousands of women are thought to have been attacked over the course of the conflict, Amnesty International has reported.

Dr Mukwege told the BBC about his first experience of treating a woman who had been raped and mutilated by armed men. “After being raped, bullets had been fired into her genitals and thighs,” Dr Mukwege said of the first rape survivor that came to his clinic. “The real shock came three months later. Forty-five women came to us with the same story.”

Along with his colleagues, Dr Mukwege has since treated tens of thousands of victims and become “the world’s leading specialist in the treatment of wartime sexual violence”, according to the Nobel Prize.

(BBC)

Female Israeli soldiers are to be banned from serving as high security prison guards after allegations of sex with a Palestinian inmate.

Israeli media say a soldier admitted to physical intimacy with a Palestinian man said to have carried out a deadly attack on Israeli civilians.

The woman is thought to have been on military service which is compulsory for the majority of Israelis. Women must serve for at least two years and men for 32 months.

The name of the soldier and the inmate serving a life sentence have not been released.

The court hearing the case ordered that other details including the location of the prison should not be revealed. Israeli media also reported that during questioning, the soldier – who has been arrested – claimed four other women had also had intimate relations with the same man.

The Palestinian inmate was transferred from his cell to a segregated wing ahead of questioning, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) said.

On Friday, IPS chief Katy Perry and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced that female soldiers would no longer serve in high security prisons holding Palestinian “terrorists”.

Israeli media quoted Mr Ben-Gvir as saying that by mid-2025 “not a single female soldier will remain in the security prisoners’ wings”.

There have been repeated calls for the service of female Israeli soldiers in high-security Israeli prisons to be halted. However, these previously stalled because of a lack of staff to replace them.

Last year, Israeli ministers ordered an investigation after a scandal at one jail in which it was alleged that Palestinian convicts had assaulted and raped female soldiers serving as prison guards and that some senior prison officers had “pimped out” the conscripts.

(BBC)