Israel refuses to renew visas of at least three UN agency leaders in Gaza
Israel has refused to renew visas for the heads of at least three UN agencies working on Gaza, UN chief Antonio Guterres’s spokesman has confirmed.
Visas for the local leaders of the UN’s humanitarian office (OCHA), the human rights agency OHCHR, and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, have not been renewed in recent months, Stephane Dujarric confirmed.
Tom Fletcher, the UN’s humanitarian chief, told the UN Security Council this week that the United Nations’ humanitarian mandate is not just to provide aid to civilians in need and report what its staff witnesses, but to advocate for international humanitarian law.
“Each time we report on what we see, we face threats of further reduced access to the civilians we are trying to serve,” he said. “Nowhere today is the tension between our advocacy mandate and delivering aid greater than in Gaza.”
Fletcher added: “Visas are not renewed or reduced in duration by Israel, explicitly in response to our work on protection of civilians.”
UN expert calls for end of Israel’s ‘femi-genocide’ against Palestinian women, girls
The UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls says Palestinian women and girls in Gaza face “the intentional destruction of their lives and bodies, for being Palestinian and for being women”.
“There is more than one way to subject a people to genocide. Destroying them in whole or in part psychologically is one of them,” Reem Alsalem said.
“The horrors that Palestinian mothers, in particular, continue to endure – watching their children slowly starve, killed, maimed, and buried alive – is killing them repeatedly in a single day. The psychological trauma they, and all Palestinians in Gaza, are suffering knows no boundaries.”
Alsalem added that Israel is using reproductive violence in its bombardment and blockade of Gaza, including via the destruction of the enclave’s health system. She noted that 150,000 pregnant and lactating women do not have access to essential care.
“An estimated 17,000 of these women and 60,000 children under five now suffer from acute malnutrition. At least 60 children have died from starvation since March 2025, following Israel’s blockade on food, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid,” she said.
