NEW YORK CITY: Seven months after the Security Council adopted Resolution 2803 in support of the US peace plan for Gaza, the ceasefire in the territory remains fragile and the humanitarian recovery is dangerously incomplete, the UN’s aid chief warned council members on Thursday.
Palestinians are still being killed each day, nearly a million people lack adequate shelter, and children are awoken by rats biting their faces, said Tom Fletcher, the under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator.
He told the council that while Resolution 2803 — which endorsed US President Donald Trump’s 20-point “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” in November last year, a month after the Sharm El-Sheikh Peace Summit on the issue — had produced measurable gains, those gains simply represented “movement away from a catastrophic baseline, not the fulfillment of fundamental needs.”
Fletcher added: “Gaza is being held together by humanitarian workarounds and Palestinian perseverance. This is unsustainable.”
By the time Resolution 2803 was passed by the Security Council, more than 67,000 Palestinians had been killed during the war between Israel and Hamas that began in October 2023, and more than three quarters of buildings and roads in Gaza were damaged or destroyed.
Since the ceasefire took effect, Fletcher said, nearly another 1,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to figures from Gaza’s Ministry of Health, including, UNICEF has reported, more than 250 children.
“This is what happens when children are described as ‘collateral damage’ and ‘potential terrorists’ rather than humans and potential neighbors,” he told the council.
Fletcher acknowledged that significant humanitarian progress has been made since the ceasefire took hold. Denial rates for humanitarian missions have fallen from 31 per cent to 11 per cent. The proportion of households that report going to bed hungry has dropped from 92 per cent to 36 per cent.
Gaza is no longer classified as being in “famine” (Phase 5 of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), though it remains in “severe crisis” at Phase 4. More than 21,000 truckloads of aid, an average of 108 per day, have been delivered by the UN and its partners, a 72 per cent increase from pre-ceasefire levels. More than 600,000 people have received shelter aid, and one hundred classrooms have been rehabilitated.
But Fletcher said that there is still no hospital in Gaza that is fully operational; for 1.1 million children, clean water remains a daily uncertainty; and sanitation conditions are deteriorating to the point where doctors report a stark increase in cases of rat bites.
“Let that sink in,” Fletcher said.
Seventy per cent of the population still requires proper shelter. Restrictions on so-called “dual-use” items that Israeli authorities say might be used for military purposes — which the World Health Organization reported has at times included prosthetic limbs — are blocking the delivery of critical supplies. Fuel shortages, lack of spare parts, and restrictions on armored vehicles for aid workers further compound an already dire picture.
“It is not enough to silence the weapons — we must restore dignity,” Fletcher said.
Gaza remains the most dangerous place on earth for aid workers, he added. Almost 600 humanitarians have been killed there in nearly three years, more than half of all those killed worldwide during that time.
Fletcher warned that less than a quarter of the 2026 humanitarian appeal target for Gaza has been funded: “Behind these numbers are meals not cooked, water not delivered and nearly 1 million people left without adequate shelter.”
He also drew the council’s attention to deteriorating conditions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where he said a decades-long decline was accelerating. More than 1,000 incidents of settler violence have been recorded in 2026 alone, an average of six a day.
Calls by Israeli officials for “voluntary migration” by Palestinians, combined with forced displacements, home demolitions, land confiscations and restrictions on movement, were “hollowing out daily life,” Fletcher said, and appeared to be designed to alter the demographic composition of the occupied territory in violation of international law.
The council also heard from Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam’s global humanitarian policy lead, and a Palestinian mother from Jerusalem living in the West Bank, whose husband’s family remains trapped in Gaza.
She told council members that the ceasefire “is failing,” that Gaza was “being carved up again,” and that highlighting only the number of aid trucks crossing the border masked a deeper failure to reach families with desperately needed assistance.
“A truck crossing a border is not the same as aid reaching a family,” she said.
She also relayed testimony from people on the ground in Gaza, including Eman, a mother of three living in a cloth tent, who described how mice and rats chew through the fabric and contaminate her family’s food.
Tahrir, a grandmother who has to walk for hours to collect water, said “every cup has become precious.”
Even when goods reach local markets, Khalidi said, high prices mean they are inaccessible to many people. Wheat is currently more than five times its prewar price, eggs are four or five times more expensive, and the cost of cooking gas has more than doubled.
Israel has banned Oxfam and many other humanitarian groups from bringing any goods into Gaza at all since March 2025, she added.
“Blocking principled humanitarians is part of a wider collective punishment,” Khalidi said.
She called on the council to hold parties accountable for their actions immediately — not after further political negotiations, not after disarmament, and not as a reward for compliance — and to use “all available political, diplomatic and legal tools to end atrocities, to end the occupation.”
She added: “We cannot allow the summit of our ambition and our will to be a world where children have sufficient calories to survive and are spared constant bombing, yet remain hungry, bitten by rats, homeless and out of school.”
