The news coming out of our sister Caribbean nation Haiti gets more depressing by the day.

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

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

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

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

On Friday, Ms Waanja Kaaria, the WFP director for Haiti, told journalists at a UN news conference that uncertainty continues in the country while violence by armed groups and food insecurity “continue to plant Haiti into a spiral crisis that requires urgent attention”.

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

According to Ms Kaaria, approximately 6,000 of those Haitians are categorised as internally displaced people as they are now living in shelters.

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

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

As it now stands, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) has reported that children make up 30 to 50 per cent of members of armed groups in Haiti. Those children are used as informants, cooks, sex slaves, and forced to commit armed violence.

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

There can be no cause so great or noble that would inspire men to subject their fellow human beings to such brutish conditions. The gangsters who are wreaking havoc in Haiti are nothing more than barbarians who obviously find some sick form of enjoyment in starving, killing, and raping people.

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

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

It’s obvious that a major ingredient for a solution to the crisis is for the mission to be reinforced with more personnel and, even more crucial, for law-abiding Haitians, with the support of the mission, to unite against the scum who are destroying the country.