The official death toll in South Africa’s devastating floods remains unclear as rescue efforts for missing people continue in the Eastern Cape province.

Authorities said last week that 101 people had died but this number is likely to increase.

Victims include 38 children. The youngest fatality is an infant about 12 months old. Seven bodies remain unidentified and search operations are ongoing for two missing children.

The OR Tambo and Amathole districts were the hardest hit areas.

“This moment will be recorded among the most agonising chapters in our province’s history”, Eastern Cape provincial government official Zolile Williams said in a statement.

“While we have borne witness to tragedies that claimed the lives of our people before, this one resonates on a profoundly deeper level, it wounds the very foundation of our hearts.”

The Eastern Cape provincial government extended its condolences to the victims’ families.

Extreme weather hit the province between June 9 and 10. Heavy rain caused by a cold front turned into floods that swept away victims and their houses, trapped others in their homes, strongly damaged infrastructure and cut electricity supplies.

Electricity has been restored to over 80% of affected customers and more than 95% of the water supply having been restored in the OR Tambo and Amathole Districts, according to Williams.

Local authorities said an estimated R5.1 billion (about $290 million) would be needed to repair damaged infrastructure.

South Africa has declared a state of national disaster, allowing the government to release funding for relief services.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the worst affected sites on 13 June and blamed the heavy rains and catastrophic floods on climate change.

Climatic phenomena, such as the El Niño phase, caused “a series of extreme weather events” on the African continent last year, the World Meteorological Organization found in its 2024 State of the Climate in Africa report.

Another cold front hit South Africa’s Western Cape province last week, bringing days of rain and causing flooding in and around the city of Cape Town.

Donald Trump’s decision to drastically cut US humanitarian aid is expected to have disastrous consequences, researchers warn.

In a study published by the prestigious scientific journal “The Lancet,” they estimate that the collapse of US funding for international aid could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030.

According to their modeling, the 83% cut in US funding—a figure announced by the government in early 2025—could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, or about 700,000 additional child deaths per year.

Examining data from 133 countries, the international team of researchers estimated that USAID-funded programs prevented 91 million deaths in low- and middle-income countries between 2001 and 2021.

USAID-supported programs led to a 15% reduction in overall deaths, with a 32% decline in loss of life among children under 5, researchers found.

The biggest impact was seen in preventable diseases: HIV/AIDS mortality dropped by 74%, malaria by 53%, and neglected tropical diseases by 51% in countries receiving the most aid, compared to those with little or no USAID funding.

Chadian opposition leader and former Prime Minister Succès Masra, who has been in detention since mid-May, has ended his hunger strike after about a week of fasting, his lawyers announced Monday.

” President Masra, physically weakened but morally combative […] is suspending his food strike and will re-prepare for the rest of this procedure,” the group of lawyers defending him announced in a statement Monday evening.

” His doctor, who was able to visit his bedside and consult with him, strongly recommended that he suspend this difficult and painful decision, especially since the medication he must take requires it,” the statement read.

On Saturday, around twenty women from his opposition party, the Transformateurs, demonstrated in their undergarments in N’Djamena to demand the release of their leader.

Masra, arrested on May 16, announced his hunger strike last Tuesday in a letter made public by his lawyers. He is being prosecuted for ” incitement to hatred and revolt, formation and complicity of armed gangs, complicity in murder, arson, and desecration of graves .”

On May 14, 42 people, ” mostly women and children,” were killed in Mandakao, in the Logone-Occidental region (southwest Chad), according to the Chadian justice system, which accuses Masra of having provoked this massacre through one of his public statements.

Success Masra, originally from the south of the country, enjoys widespread popularity among the predominantly Christian and southern populations, who feel marginalized by the predominantly Muslim regime in N’Djamena.