Humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia's Tigray at "tipping point"

United Nations — In his harshest statement yet on the seven-month crisis in northern Ethiopia's Tigray region, U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock told Security Council members Tuesday "there is now famine in Tigray." He put the blame squarely on forces from the neighboring nation of Eritrea.

"Eritrean soldiers are using starvation as a weapon of war," he said. Lowcock painted a brutal picture. "Rape is being used systematically to terrorize and brutalize women and girls. Aid workers have been killed, interrogated, beaten, blocked from taking aid to the starving and suffering and told not to come back," he told diplomats in a closed briefing at an informal dialogue of the U.N. Security Council that was requested by the Mission of Ireland.