UN Relief Chief warns of "seismic shock" to aid sector amid funding crisis

Remarks at the Daily Press Briefing by Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator

New York, 12 March 2025 

Thanks very much, Steph [Dujarric, Spokesperson for the Secretary-General], and it’s great to be here. 

It’s Day 115 for me, so I’m still relatively new by UN standards, but I’m sorry not to have got here earlier. I can give you some of the reasons why I’ve been elsewhere, but I’ve been following religiously the noon briefings. It’s the one bit of paper that I read from top to bottom every day, so I feel I’ve been here with you in different ways over those 115 days. 

I’ll be very brief in the introductory remarks, because I want to leave as much time as possible for the conversation. 

But it’s clear coming into this job that the international system is under greater threat than at any time since the Second World War – and so this is not a drill right now. 

And as we’ve heard, the [Secretary-General] has set out this morning how we’ll meet that moment as we approach the 80th anniversary, and how we can bring fresh ideas and creativity to those challenges, but also build on the reform programme, which he’s laid out over several years now.

Of course, for my part of the system, the humanitarian family, the challenges are particularly urgent. This was already a tough time to be a humanitarian. I said when I came into the job that we were already overstretched, under-resourced and literally under attack, with last year being the deadliest year on record to be a humanitarian worker. 

But of course, it’s far tougher for the people who we serve: 300 million plus right now need humanitarian support. And so the pace and the scale of the funding cuts that we’ve faced are, of course, a seismic shock to the sector. 

Many will die because that aid is drying up. 

And across the humanitarian community, programmes are being stopped right now. Staff are being let go right now. I think 10 per cent of NGO colleagues were laid off in the course of February. 

And across the UN family and our partners, we’re making tough choices day to day about which lives we will have to prioritize, which lives we will have to try to save. And so I think this period ahead, the weeks actually ahead, will define how we emerge as a humanitarian movement from this sustained challenge to our legitimacy, to our morale and to our funding. 

I wrote yesterday, many of you may not be all that familiar with the IASC [Inter-Agency Standing Committee] website, but the IASC is the body that brings together the humanitarian community, so it’s the UN agencies, the NGOs, our local partners. And I wrote yesterday with a 10-point plan on how we will respond to these challenges. I’ll spare you the whole 10-point plan, but it’s on the website if you’d like to see it. 

And the tough message to the sector behind that plan is that we will have to make a calculated regrouping. And it’s not easy, because we’ll be switching off work that we care passionately about. But it’s a recognition that we cannot continue to do all of it. 

And with resources slashed, our defining mission will have to become much clearer. We will have to save as many people as we can with the money we have – not the money that we had, nor the money that we would like. And so the letter has an ambitious plan for reform of the sector, for efficiency. It’s not about defending programmes and institutions and spreadsheets, but defending the people who we serve. 

I’ll receive at the end of this week on Friday detailed plans from all of our Humanitarian Coordinators – so the lead humanitarian official in each of our crisis countries – drawn together by the humanitarian country team across agencies and NGOs, on how they will change their strategies to meet this new challenge.

But behind that regrouping, we’ll also have to renew what we do as well. We’ll have to build fresh arguments, fresh allies for our work. We’ll have to find new sources of funding. We’ll have to fight back. We’ll have to reimagine what we do. And this is an important point – an easy thing to say, much harder to actually deliver: We will have to shift power towards our humanitarian leaders in country and towards the people that we serve, the communities that we work with on the front lines of the humanitarian crisis.

So yes, we’ll be retreating from much of our humanitarian work, but we won’t be retreating from our values and the values that underpin that mission. We’ll still need to call time on this era of impunity, end attacks on civilians and aid workers, and hold the perpetrators to account, as you’ve just been discussing. We’ll need to call time on the era of indifference, support people in need with resources and influence, and ultimately reset this relationship between the world and those in direst need. 

So we’ll need a humanitarian decade. We’ll have to win afresh that argument for humanitarian and international solidarity. And that is a cause which I believe is mightier than year-to-year fluctuations and political changes. 

I’m looking forward to digging into those issues and country issues, if you like, in the time we have together.

Q: Thank you very much. Mr. Fletcher, on behalf of the United Nations Correspondents Association for doing this briefing. We hope you’ll come back often. My name is Edith Lederer from the Associated Press. I know that every person in this room would like some figures on how hard the United Nations programmes itself have been hit by the cuts by the Trump administration to USAID programmes, they said 83 per cent have been cut, and you said that there are 200 million people worldwide who need humanitarian aid. How many of them have a chance of getting aid this year, and how many of them won’t because of these cuts?

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: That’s the million-dollar question, the billion-dollar question. So we have been reliant in recent years, over-reliant on US funding. Almost half of our appeals have been funded by the American taxpayer. And it’s important to recognize that we shouldn’t ever take that for granted, particularly in a period of economic difficulty and in a period when many governments are in retreat from the world. I don’t believe you build a golden age by retreating from the world, but we do have to recognize the context which governments are taking decisions in. And of course, it’s not just the American Government. I’m spending a lot more of my time than I’d expected in other donor capitals trying to shore up the case for what we do. 

So on the numbers, we have something called the Global Humanitarian Overview, which I released in December, and that’s where we get this 300 million number from. I think as of today, it’s 307 million, there’s an update in the last few days. Within that number, we had already prioritized – and it’s a brutal choice that you have to make – 190 million people that we were aiming to reach. And to do that, we had said $47 billion. Now I can’t sit here and say with any confidence at all that we’ll get anywhere near $47 billion, and we probably wouldn’t have done even before these US cuts. 

So this is why I say we have to save as many lives as we can with the money we have, not the money that we would like to have. And as part of the prioritization exercise that we’ve got underway, I’ve got colleagues in Geneva right now trying to identify how we could prioritize the saving of 100 million lives, and what that would cost us in the coming year – vital, vital work. And behind those numbers, as you all know, and as I’ve been seeing in Darfur and Damascus, in Gaza and Kupiansk, on my travels, are real people, real lives. 

In the midst of all that, I couldn’t put a precise number on what the US cuts, the difference that will make, but what I can say is that over years, over decades now, the US has been a humanitarian superpower, and that US funding has saved hundreds of millions of lives. And so I hope that over time, we can make the case afresh for why that work is so important, and that we can ensure that that funding is resumed so we can carry on saving that number of lives. 

Q: Hi, Michelle Nichols from Reuters. Thank you for coming to brief us. So is it fair to say, just going on the numbers that you mentioned, then if you were aiming to reach 190 [million] and you’re now saying that’s 100 [million], so you’ve halved the number of people that you think you might be able to reach this year? Is that correct?

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: We’re still aiming to reach 300 million if we get the funding. We’ll reach as many as we can with the funding that we have. But within that group, it’s important that we really isolate the life-saving work, the utterly essential life-saving work, in the areas of direst need, and those are many of the areas I visited – from Gaza and beyond, of course. So that’s what the effort is about. We do an exercise every year that classifies, that breaks down those numbers, you can see it on the website, that breaks down within that 300 million where the direst need is. And so this is really an extension of that exercise, but looking not at the money we would like to raise – and I would love to sit here in a year’s time and say, we raised that money and we did it all – but the money which we would anticipate raising in the current funding environment.

Q: Did you try and reach out to Secretary Rubio to sort of make the case? What response did you get back, and which countries do you think can even somewhat remotely begin to fill the gap?

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: So we’ve been in regular contact with the State Department, as it is now, and with colleagues, particularly for specific programmes, specific waivers, but also making that broader case. And I was in Washington a couple of months ago doing that. 

Where does the funding come from? Clearly, we need to broaden that, broaden that base. I was in the Gulf the week before last, talking to partners there, but I’ve also been in a number of the capitals of traditional donors, as I was saying to Edith, making that case for maintaining current levels, but ideally expanding. 

My hope is that the more that we can break down that overall sense of global need, the easier it is to make it simpler for donors to target their funding to the programmes that they really want to support. That will be part of the case, that this is part of a much clearer sense of prioritizations, but also that we’re making the moves ourselves to improve efficiency and reform the sector. I don’t think anyone would pretend that we are perfect, but we’re doing this not because, to the earlier question, DOGE and others are looming in the wings, but because we’re humanitarians and we want to make sure that the maximum amount of our money goes to saving lives. 

So the efficiency programme I launched on November 18th on the first day when I took the job and this wider IASC, sorry to go back to acronym again, sector reform programme is being led by the agencies and the NGOs themselves.

Q: Are you seeing any increase in sort of grassroots fundraising coming in?

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: Not yet. I mean, ultimately, I think that will have to be a large part of how we fill the gap. You know, I hadn’t planned to go to Davos in my first few months in the job. I thought that was one place that wasn’t ‘necessarily on the humanitarian front line. But of course, there’s a case to be made to the private sector there. 

But ultimately, it’s why I talk a lot about the need for a humanitarian movement. We’ve got to get more of a sense of, I think, citizen involvement again in that fundraising effort, and a lot of that means reshaping the arguments, finding that movement once again. And there’s a big challenge there. We can’t keep reciting the same platitudes or running the same campaigns and hope that we can get back that global attention that is clearly slipping away. We’ve got to make the case afresh and find new people and new sources of support. 

Q: Hi, my name is Ibtisam Azem of Al-Araby Al-Jadeed newspaper. I had a first question, if I remember that right, you went to Gaza, so could you walk us through things you saw, your impressions, the challenges you’re facing? And I have also a general question regarding financing. Do you believe that countries who are involved in these different conflicts and who deliberately destroy infrastructure, humanitarian infrastructure, they should be legally held accountable to pay for these humanitarian aid operations? Thank you.

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: So yes, I was in Gaza in January. I’d hoped to get there much earlier. I went to Darfur in the first week in the job. I’d hoped to get to Gaza as early as that, but there were plenty of obstacles in the way of that visit. Absolutely vital to get in and see the operation on the ground. I think when the ceasefire was declared, a lot of people, and I think, to be honest, me included, wondered whether we would deliver the 600, 700 trucks a day that we’ve been signed up to deliver – a massive amount of vital, vital life-saving aid. But we did that. We delivered over 20,000 trucks. We delivered those 600, 700 trucks a day for 2 million people. And every moment when partners or those on the ground sought to find a humanitarian alibi for breaking the ceasefire or ending the ceasefire, we were able to deal with those challenges and keep that aid flowing in. So that made a massive, massive difference, and that’s obviously a difference that’ we’re not making and haven’t been making for the last two weeks since the borders closed. 

Now Gaza – some of you may have been in, probably not because of the restrictions placed on international media – it was much, much worse than I’d anticipated, and I’d really prepared myself for the worst. And bear in mind, by this stage, I’d been in Darfur, I’d been in Kupiansk on the front lines there, and I’d driven from the Lebanese border, the Turkish border, all the way through Syria in the weeks after the change of government there, the caretaker authorities’ arrival in Damascus. 

Gaza was on a completely different level. I’d been in Nir Oz, one of the kibbutzes that was hit on October 7th, where one in four people were killed or taken hostage, so I’d heard those stories, met the survivors there, but then drove in through the Erez crossing into the north of Gaza. 

And, in a way, the shock is even greater there because the devastation, the desolation in northern Gaza is even greater there than it is in the south, and for miles and miles, it’s just rubble. My staff were trying to find a way back to their homes, using GPS, because there were no landmarks to navigate by. You couldn’t see what was a school, what was hospital, what was a home. And I’ve said this before, you know, one of the first shocking things I saw driving in is the dogs going through the rubble. And I said to my colleague who was with me, why are the dogs so fat? And he said, well, because the dogs are looking for corpses. And you notice that the people are thin, and then you see that for miles and miles and miles.

I don’t think anything can prepare you for that, and every single person I spend time with is deeply traumatized by that, by having lived through that, having survived that experience, and that includes our extraordinary staff on the ground, many of whom have lost their own homes and lost families. Utterly, utterly devastating.

I hope that more cameras, more journalists, will be able to get in and tell that story over time. But as Steph was saying earlier on, the key thing now is that we are able to maintain that flow of aid in because it had made such a difference. By the way, I was there during the announcement, I don’t think we’ve seen the detail of it yet, of President Trump’s plan on, I think he’s called it the Riviera in Gaza, and so I was able to talk to a lot of Palestinians because, of course, it’s important that they’re consulted on this plan. And everyone I talked to said they were planning to stay. And everyone I talked to said, give us the tents so that we can rebuild our lives and our communities. 

Spokesperson: Your second question?

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: Accountability, sorry, I’ll be quicker on that. Of course, absolutely there should be accountability for anyone who is blocking aid getting to civilians. It’s extraordinary that you’re even having to ask a question and that I’m having to give an answer with any suggestion there might be any other answer. But this is an example of this age of impunity that we’re living through, that the basic foundations of international humanitarian law within which we operate as humanitarians are being challenged on all sides. I mentioned that number of over 300 humanitarian workers killed last year doing the work that we as the UN and the international community have asked them to do. So yes, there must be accountability. Those are clearly questions for lawyers and others to take forward. But as humanitarians, we want to see that accountability and we want to see that protection for civilians – and we want to be allowed to do our job.

Q: Gabriel Elizondo from Al Jazeera English, welcome to your new job, hope it goes well. As you well know, the last 11 days, Israel has blocked the entrances to Gaza. When you were in Israel, you spoke to many high-ranking Israeli officials. Have you, in the last couple of weeks, spoken to them about this, and what are they saying? How much longer can this go on with the borders being closed until it reaches an absolute crisis from a humanitarian standpoint?

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: I’d say 11 days is already 11 days too long to prevent aid reaching civilians who so badly need it. I talked about how, in those six weeks, we made massive progress in feeding many of those millions who needed the food, getting medicine in, starting to get those hospitals back up and running. We opened several new wells while I was there. So all of that was making a massive difference. Fuel – Steph touched on this earlier on – the fact that we’re not getting fuel in means that incubators are being switched off, so this is real already, and will quickly become a humanitarian crisis again. The supplies are clearly running out very, very fast. I’ve been in contact with authorities in Tel Aviv. We are making the case in public and in private for allowing us to get those supplies back through, demanding that we get those supplies back through. And you’ve heard, I know, from my fine, fantastic colleague, Sigrid [Kaag, Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process ad interim], and my fantastic colleague, Muhannad Hadi [Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator], as well, about the efforts that they’re making to get those supplies through. You’ll have seen Muhannad’s statement on that in the last couple of days.

Q: Mr. Fletcher, Sherwin Bryce-Pease, South African Broadcasting. We’re talking here about, you know, responding to the gaps that have emerged in financing and finding new financing. But I wonder if we could take a step back and talk about how we prevent the crises from evolving in the first place and whose responsibility is that – is it the Security Council, Member States, individual countries? Just talk about how we stop this perpetual need for more money to respond to humanitarian crises, which is never enough, when we should really be focusing on prevention, should we not?

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: Absolutely, but what we fail to prevent, it’s our job to carry on responding. But you know, I’ve observed that, effectively, the job we’re asked to do is to drive the ambulance back towards these wars in order to help the survivors, the civilians. But over time, we’ve been asked to also drive the fire engine and start to try and put those crises out. 

Now, of course, there’s a lot we need to do, border point by border point, crossing by crossing, to do the negotiations to get the aid through, but increasingly, there’s also an expectation that humanitarians are then also drawn in to trying to end those crises. But we’re doing all that at a time when the fire engine we’re being asked to drive doesn’t have enough water in the tank and is literally under attack, it’s being fired at. You know, our convoys are being fired at, and so on. 

So this is a real challenge, and it’s exactly the right question. Now, whose job is it to then end those conflicts? Well, I think there’s a collective responsibility for the international community to get much better at switching off conflicts. A big part of the challenge for us is that these wars are lasting longer and they’re more ferocious, they’re more intense. So that combination of the duration and the intensity is what’s driving our numbers in the wrong direction. You know that bottom line number of 307 million, which defines whether we’re doing our job or not, is only going in the wrong direction. 

So yes, I would like to see the Security Council step up several gears in response. I’d like to see Member States step up several gears in response, and, you know, the international community as a whole finding ways to end these conflicts. I think one interesting dynamic at the moment that we’re seeing, though, is that with a Security Council that is evidently struggling to get through a lot of political paralysis in recent years, you’re seeing more regional solutions emerge for many of those crises.

I’ve just come off a call with our Humanitarian Coordinators in all of Syria’s neighbours about how we’re working as a collective to get aid in, but also to ensure there is a political stability there that allows us to reach the almost three quarters of the population who need help right now, up and down Syria. 

And so maybe that’s a bright spot in the midst of this pretty gloomy picture, that those regional groupings will be doing more and more to respond to those crises. I hope so. 

Q: Hi, thank you very much for your briefing. Amélie Bottollier from AFP news agency. You mentioned that your first visit taking the job was going to Darfur. Since then, the situation has not improved. The fighting has not receded in Darfur and the rest of the country. So could you give us an update on the humanitarian situation, especially in Darfur around El Fasher and in some of the refugee camps where we know that there are already famine and risk of famine spreading? Thank you.

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: So I’m reaching for my paper here, because one of the grim things about this job is that I have a number in my head about the number of people we need to reach, which was 25 million when I visited Sudan. And I’m just checking, and it’s now 30 million on the briefing note. So that tells a story in itself.

I went in that first week in office and spent a week – so not just Darfur, but also looking at the various different crossing points, taking one of the first humanitarian flights, the second humanitarian flight to Kassala, and trying to get agreements made with the parties on the ground to get more access, get more checkpoints open, lift restrictions, and particularly to get more cross-line access, and looking particularly at getting into Darfur. 

So I went through the Adre crossing, which we’d got the extension for, and then into Darfur to show that the international system should be there, visibly on the ground. So several objectives, really – one for that visit was just to raise the visibility of the crisis, to get it into the media more widely, and Lyse Doucet from the BBC was with me and did an extraordinary job of telling those stories and getting that message through. 

Secondly, as almost everywhere, it’s about access. Jan Eliasson, one of my predecessors, said you’ve got to be able to be the idealist in the system talking about international humanitarian principles, but also do the deals on the crossing points and the checkpoints, truck by truck. And so I spent three days talking to the [Sudanese Armed Forces] and the [Rapid Support Forces] about those very specific deals to get more access, access in, and as a result of that, we opened up more humanitarian hubs, which have been really important for aid distribution, and we’ve been able to scale up the aid that we can deliver. But it’s still nothing like enough. 

We’re getting more international missions, including into Darfur. I think one mission stayed almost two weeks in Darfur, which is very important. Our humanitarian teams are the people who are pushing us hardest to get in and stay and really deliver, even in those incredibly difficult security conditions in places like Zamzam camp. So the access really matters. 

But ultimately, to come back to your point, you know, we need this conflict to end. We need the guns to fall silent so that we can reach more of those in need. And we need the money. And the Sudan campaign this year is, I think, somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent funded so far. The great [UN High Commissioner for Refugees] Filippo Grandi and I launched it in Geneva about a month ago. And my hopes for getting that funded are clearly receding in this current environment. So massive, massive challenges there, and the most brutal of choices over which lives to save.

Q: Thank you, Mr. Fletcher. My name is Abdelhamid Siyam from the Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi. I have two interrelated questions. On a personal note – I appreciate your comments about your observation after visiting Gaza. My question, first, about the West Bank: Do you see what’s happening in Gaza is copied now – a carbon copy – of what happened in Gaza, happening now to the West Bank? And the second, sir, weaponizing humanitarian aid is a war crime. Fourth Geneva Convention is very clear about it. The Security Council, the [General Assembly], the humanitarian office of the UN, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, all speak in one voice that humanitarian aid should not be weaponized. However, there is a Member State who’s shrugged off all these calls and yet continued day in and day out weaponizing humanitarian aid in Gaza and the West Bank. What else could be done, other than appealing to the killer to be a little bit merciful? Thank you.

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: Thank you. So I’m really concerned about what’s happening in the West Bank, and I spent a day driving around observing it myself and talking to people who had been displaced or were facing displacement forcibly. And clearly, the facts on the ground are being changed very rapidly, and that is a tragedy at the human level, of course, for those involved, but it’s also a tragedy for the prospects for the two-State solution, which – call me old-fashioned in the fact that I still use the phrase – but I still think it’s the best hope we have for providing security, justice, opportunity for Palestinians and Israelis. I’ve not heard in the midst of all these creative ideas from various quarters a better idea than the two-State solution, however dim and distant it feels as a prospect right now. 

I don’t know if it’s a carbon copy of what’s going on in Gaza. I think the situations are very different, but they are both extremely troubling in their own right, and we’re spending a lot more time now focused on supporting communities who’ve been displaced in the West Bank, alongside, of course, that work on Gaza. 

You know, I think I refer you to Steph’s answer earlier on, referring you to his answers in the past, on war crimes. I mean, what I would say, and I think I said this earlier on, is that international humanitarian law is very clear that we must be allowed to deliver aid to civilians wherever they are, and clear that there must be accountability if anyone stops us doing that. And the rest, I think, I leave to lawyers and other parts of the system to comment on. 

Q: Thank you, Mr. Fletcher. My name is Sinan Tunçdemir, I’m with Rudaw Media Network. I have a question on Syria. If I’m wrong, please correct me. You were in Damascus last December, and you met with the transitional government to discuss humanitarian coordination to scale up humanitarian assistance in the country. So I wonder, since then, according to your observation, anything has changed? Is it easier to reach out to especially minorities to like help out? And secondly, have you ever been to north-east Syria, or are you planning to visit there to watch or observe the humanitarian situation there? Thank you very much.

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: Thank you. So yes, I was there in December and spent a week in Syria, as I say, drove up from the Lebanese crossing all the way to the Turkish border, and so saw Idlib, Homs, Aleppo, Damascus, saw the reconstruction effort that lies ahead of us. Spent a lot of time with communities who’ve been displaced.

As I say, I think three quarters of Syrians still need humanitarian support. So just because there has been that change, that need hasn’t gone away – the needs are as high as ever. And in particular, people tell me they need the unexploded munition cleared so they can head home, start to rebuild their lives. They need food and water, medicine, and they need kahraba – they need electricity. Consistently, people talked to me about electricity. And consistently, people said, give us those three things, and we will go back to being an exporter of generosity and compassion to the region once again and not have to rely on that generosity from our neighbours.

Just coming from a call with our Humanitarian Coordinators – a lot of people on the move right now, including because of the recent violence in Lattakia across into Lebanon. So real needs, ongoing needs, there. 

To your point – have the conditions for delivering aid changed? Yes. It is now easier for us to operate in Syria and across Syria than it was under the Assad regime. And I had excellent conversations with the caretaker authorities. They were pretty freshly arrived, it’s fair to say, in Damascus, still building up capacity. We knew them, of course, from Idleb already. We’d been working with them on aid delivery there. And so far, every time we’ve hit a road block, a problem in the delivery of aid, I’ve been able to raise it with the authorities, with the Foreign Minister [Asaad] al-Shibani] and colleagues, and it’s been dealt with, including keeping the border crossings open that we need open. 

So I’ll be going to Brussels on Monday, to the Syria Pledging Conference, with a positive story about what we’ve been able to deliver, the scale-up since my visit, which has seen a lot more aid get in, but also the challenges which remain – including, as you say, in the north-east. And we’ve got a mission there today assessing the conditions and seeing if the recent political changes, the agreements made over the weekend, can help us get more aid in to those who so badly need it.

Q: This is Iftikhar Ali from the Associated Press of Pakistan. My question has been asked, but I take this opportunity to ask you about this dire humanitarian situation in Afghanistan. While I’ve heard you speak in the Security Council about the situation, but when are you going to set your foot on Afghanistan and visit to see the situation yourself and come face to face with the Taliban leaders? 

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: April. In a few weeks’ time. The third week of April. 

Q: Hi, Rachel Wolf, Fox News Digital. I’m going back to Israel and Gaza for a moment. Hamas, hostages, rather, who have been released in this most recent ceasefire deal have made allegations that either UN workers were involved or they were held in UN facilities, such as Emily Damari, who said she was held in an UNRWA facility. Are you planning on investigating those claims? 

Under-Secretary-General Fletcher: Yeah, I discussed this point, actually, with the Israeli authorities as well in Tel Aviv, and obviously with my colleagues from different UN agencies operating in Gaza, you know, among whom we’ve lost hundreds of our own people, by the way, during this conflict.

And utterly clear: If we get evidence of – I mean, I can’t believe I’m even having to say this – but if we get evidence of a UN worker involved in an act of terrorism or hostage-taking, yes, of course, we are going to investigate. And, you know, I’ll happily lead that investigation myself. I mean, that would be an appalling thing for UN workers, UN colleagues, to be involved in. 

And so absolutely, if we get that evidence, and I’m constantly asking for that evidence. It was raised with me as well while I was there, the allegation that hostages have been held – and it was actually, I think, a British Israeli hostage who was alleged to have been held in a shelter that had been used by the UN before we were bombed out of it by the Israelis. So we were pushed out of that shelter and had to leave it, as we had to leave a lot of Gaza when we had to flee parts of it for our own security under bombardment. 

Now, would Hamas have then started using those shelters for other things? Very possibly, and we weren’t there to stop them doing that, because we’d been bombed out of those shelters ourselves.

But I’ve not seen a shred of evidence so far – and I’ve asked for it – that suggests that there was any UN acquiescence in that or involvement in using UN buildings, or UN staff being involved in holding those hostages. And I’d be utterly horrified, and I know that is shared throughout the Organization, if that was the case.