The the news coming out of our sister caribbean nation haiti is getting more depressing by the day.

On Friday, I heard that JetBlue and Spirit Airlines had suspended flights to Haiti last week. While neither airline has publicly stated why the flights were suspended, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the new surge in gang violence influenced those decisions.

On Thursday, a helicopter operated by the World Food Program (WFP) was hit by gunfire while flying over the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Fortunately, the aircraft was able to land safely without injuring any of the 18 people on board.

Last Wednesday, the United Nations reported that more than 10,000 people had been displaced by violent attacks in the past week around the capital, which left at least two women dead, one eight months pregnant.

According to television service reports, the fresh violence followed a major gang attack in early October in the central city of Pont-Sonde, where 115 civilians were killed and dozens injured.

Ms. Waanja Kaaria, WFP’s director for Haiti, told journalists at a UN press conference on Friday that uncertainty continues in the country as violence by armed groups and food insecurity “continue to turn Haiti into a spiraling crisis that requires urgent attention”.

A recent WFP report said 5.4 million Haitians – about half the population – suffer from acute hunger.

According to Ms. Kaaria, about 6,000 of these Haitians are classified as internally displaced because they are now living in shelters.

Even more depressing is the WFPs report that 270,000 children across the country are acutely malnourished.

The result is that “hunger significantly increases the likelihood of engaging in adverse coping mechanisms and, especially for young people, the risk of being recruited by armed groups and slipping into crime.”

Currently, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) has reported that children represent between 30 and 50 percent of the members of armed groups in Haiti. Those children are used as informants, cooks, sex slaves and forced to commit armed violence.

Mr. Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, lamenting that gang-affiliated children can become victims of mob justice, pointed to the killing of a 10-year-old boy in July. The boy, he said, was shot and his body burned by a group of vigilantes in Port-au-Prince after being accused of being a gang informant.

There can be no cause so great or noble as to inspire men to subject their fellows to such brutal conditions. The gangsters wreaking havoc in Haiti are nothing more than barbarians who obviously find a sick form of fun in starving, murdering and raping people.

When men take up arms, devoid of any ideology or desire to influence change for the better in their country, no amount of bargaining will convince them to disarm.

Mr. Guterres tells us that since the Kenyan-led security mission arrived in Haiti, they have launched large-scale anti-gang operations in several districts of the capital. However, they “face challenges to sustain control over these areas due to lack of personnel and other resources,” he said.

It is clear that a major ingredient for a solution to the crisis is for the mission to be reinforced with more personnel and, even more importantly, for law-abiding Haitians, with the support of the mission, to unite against the mess that is destroying the country.