A UN report released Tuesday details a wave of violence that has swept Haiti’s rural reaches, describing gang raids on villages and alarming levels of food insecurity caused by the targeting of farmers in the country’s historic breadbasket.

The U.N. says gangs are invading Haiti’s rural central region and suffocating a once peaceful area that served as the country’s food basket but that is now plagued by kidnappings, killings and rapes

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said long-awaited international security assistance - requested by Haiti's unelected government a year ago and authorized by the U.N. last month - should be deployed "as soon as possible".

A hospital in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, has been evacuated by police after nearby gang violence. More than 100 patients - nearly half of them children - had to be removed from the Fontaine Hospital Center, according to its director Jose Ulysse.

Murders, kidnappings, rapes and other attacks are increasingly becoming part of the daily reality for thousands of Haitians in the country’s once peaceful countryside, the United Nations said Tuesday,