• UN agency says 8,500 abandon homes in Port-au-Prince

• Families ‘caught in crossfire’ sleeping on concrete floors

Escalating gang violence has pushed nearly 8,500 women and children from their homes in Haiti’s capital in the past two weeks, according to Unicef.

Officials say the gangs’ fight over territory in Port-au-Prince has forced hundreds of families to abandon burned or ransacked homes in impoverished communities, with many of them staying in gymnasiums and other temporary shelters that are running out of water, food and items like blankets and clothes.

Notorious gangster Arnel Joseph shot dead at police checkpoint after more than 400 inmates escape in country’s biggest breakout for 10 years

More than 400 inmates have escaped and 25 people have died in a prison breakout in Haiti, authorities say, making it the country’s largest and deadliest one in a decade. A prison director and a powerful gang leader were among those killed.

The breakout at Croix-des-Bouquets prison on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince on Thursday was believed to be an attempt to free gang leader Arnel Joseph, who had been Haiti’s most wanted fugitive until his 2019 arrest on charges including rape, kidnapping and murder.

Damage to part of Unesco world heritage site is emblematic of uncaring government, critics say

Cultural leaders in Haiti have described the gutting by fire of a celebrated 200-year-old church as an avoidable tragedy that highlights the fragility of the Caribbean nation’s patrimony – and the need to preserve its historical treasures.

The Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception church in the town of Milot is part of a Unesco world heritage site that includes the ruins of the Sans Souci palace and the Citadelle Laferrière, an imposing fort that looms over Haiti’s northern plains.

• Soldier died of his wounds after gunfight
• Authorities warned of risk of ‘bloodbath’

Fears are growing over an increasingly febrile security situation in Haiti after police and soldiers fought a deadly gun battle which lasted for hours outside the country’s presidential palace.

The exchange of gunfire on Sunday shattered the opening of Haiti’s annual carnival as police and soldiers exchanged volleys of gunfire sending bystanders diving for cover.

As conflict racks the nation and anger at a political scandal grows, Haitians are rallying to the country’s founding father more than 200 years after his assassination

On the walls across Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, a stencilled image can be found. Depicting a figure in a Napoleonic-era cocked hat and military frock coat, it first emerged amid the country’s long-running political and security crisis that began last year.

The man portrayed is Jean-Jacques Dessalines – Emperor Jacques I of Haiti – the rebel general who defeated French forces at the battle of Vertières to found the state of Haiti in 1804. And it is not only in graffiti that Dessalines’s two centuries-old legacy has been seen in the recent months of political turmoil that has gripped the country.