At least 117.8 million people, or one in 70 individuals globally, remain forcibly displaced, according to a report released today by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
For the first time in 10 years, forced displacement has declined – a shift driven by large-scale returns of refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) from the world’s biggest displacement crises.
Despite a roughly 4 percent decrease in the number of displaced people in 2025, this progress has been overshadowed by Lebanon’s fast-growing displacement crisis. Since the US-Israel war on Iran began in late March 2026, Israeli attacks have forcibly displaced more than one million people, with a further 3.2 million internally displaced in Iran.
Of the 117.3 million forcibly displaced, almost three-quarters (72 percent) of all refugees came from just seven countries: Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ukraine, Sudan, Palestine, and Myanmar.
Under international law, refugees are people who are forced to flee their home countries to escape persecution or a serious threat to their life, physical integrity, or freedom.
More than one-third of the world’s refugees live in just seven countries: Iran, Turkey, Germany, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, and Chad.
Some 65 percent of refugees and other people in need of international protection lived in countries neighboring their countries of origin. Nearly all refugees in Iran and Pakistan are Afghans, while most refugees in Turkey are Syrians.
In 1951, the UN established the Refugee Convention to protect the rights of refugees in Europe after World War II. In 1967, the convention was expanded to address displacement across the rest of the world.
When the Refugee Convention was born, there were 2.1 million refugees. By 1980, the number of refugees recorded by the UN surpassed 10 million for the first time. Wars in Afghanistan and Ethiopia during the 1980s caused the number of refugees to double to 20 million by 1990.
The US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, together with civil wars in South Sudan and Syria, resulted in refugee numbers exceeding 30 million by the end of 2021.
The war in Ukraine, which started in 2022, led to one of the fastest-growing refugee crises since World War II, with 5.7 million people forced to flee Ukraine in less than a year.
In 2023, conflict in Sudan between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces increased the number of refugees to 1.5 million. In the same year, Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip had a devastating toll on the Palestinian population, displacing nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people.
In 2025, the number of refugees and IDPs returning home rose by 50 percent compared with 2024, with just over 14.7 million returning – the largest wave of returns recorded by UNHCR. Some 92 percent of returns were to just six countries: Syria, Ukraine, South Sudan, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic, and Somalia.
UNHCR warns that conditions for refugee returns are far from ideal, with many people returning to violence and instability, raising questions about the dangers facing those who go back to their country of origin.
Source: www.aljazeera.com