Top UN official in Gaza accused of “serving Israeli interests”
The UN’s top representative in Gaza has enabled Israel’s weaponisation of aid, alienated Palestinian and international colleagues, and contributed to Israeli efforts to sow division among humanitarians, aid workers involved in the response told The New Humanitarian.Suzanna Tkalec was appointed in early 2025 as the UN’s Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory – the UN’s most senior Gaza-based role, which involves negotiating access with Israeli authorities on behalf of UN agencies and the wider humanitarian community.Eleven aid workers currently or recently involved in the Gaza response – five of them in senior roles – spoke to The New Humanitarian about Tkalec. They had similar concerns: She has allowed Israeli authorities to manipulate the aid response; failed to push back against growing restrictions; uncritically repeated Israeli talking points; and offended Palestinian colleagues and community members, including by blaming them for aid shortages.Almost all the aid workers also brought up Tkalec’s negotiations with Israeli authorities to bring dog food into Gaza for stray dogs near a UN guesthouse at a time when Palestinians were starving to death because of Israel’s refusal to allow food into the enclave.“She cares more about dogs than she cares about human beings here,” one UN worker said.Another aid worker described Tkalec’s negotiations over dog food as showing “deep insensitivity toward Palestinian colleagues”.Several aid workers said Tkalec is frequently absent from Gaza – far more than previous senior UN staff who rarely left the enclave. These regular trips are putting additional and unnecessary strain on already-stretched UN resources, with no apparent benefit, they said.The aid workers also said Tkalec has increasingly sidelined UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestine refugees, which Israel has long sought to eliminate.“My positions are the positions of the UN, and my role is to uphold the principles of the UN.”“She seems to be subservient, or serving Israeli interests, in various ways,” said one senior aid worker.“They like her because she provides them with someone to speak to that is not pushing back strongly, if at all… someone that conveys their messages directly to the humanitarian community,” the senior aid worker said. “It was Suzanna that offered them the full package, which was silence and compliance.”The aid workers spoke to The New Humanitarian on condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisals, and because they were not speaking officially on behalf of their organisations. Several said they had reservations about raising the issues publicly, but those worries were outweighed by what they described as widespread concerns about Tkalec’s leadership of the aid response in Gaza at a vital moment.In a written statement responding to questions from The New Humanitarian, Tkalec disputed many of the allegations about her leadership.“My positions are the positions of the UN, and my role is to uphold the principles of the UN,” she said. “My only priority is to get aid to Palestinians – whose suffering over the past two years has been beyond words – in the most efficient, pragmatic, principled, and safest way possible. As long as I’m in this role, this will remain my only focus.”“Manipulated by COGAT”The Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator (DHC) represents the UN in Gaza, serving as the most senior official there and overseeing the humanitarian effort. The three previous DHCs have been senior UNRWA officials. Israel banned UNRWA in January and denied visas to its international staff, necessitating Tkalec’s recruitment. She was appointed permanently in May.Every aid worker who spoke with The New Humanitarian said they were concerned about Tkalec’s relationship with COGAT, the Israeli military department responsible for coordinating with humanitarians.Tkalec “has been consistently manipulated by COGAT”, according to the senior aid worker.“The more I think of it, the more sick it is. I am appalled that she has not been removed.”In late August, Israel announced plans for a major offensive on famine-stricken Gaza City, in the north of the enclave. Israel’s defence minister warned that the city could be destroyed if Hamas did not disarm and release Israeli hostages the group took during the October 2023 attacks on Israel.In the days before the offensive, which has now displaced around 780,000 people, Tkalec negotiated an agreement with Israeli authorities to allow the distribution of tents in southern Gaza, dozens of kilometres from Gaza City, according to three aid workers.They said the agreement was widely perceived within the humanitarian community as an acceptance of the mass displacement of the estimated one million people living in the city.Speaking to The New Humanitarian, a UN official recalled a colleague telling Tkalec: “I will not be involved in the ethnic cleansing of these people.”“We do plans to support the people who would be affected by the military,” the UN worker said. “Not plans that help in the military operations.”News of the agreement prompted some aid workers to send complaints to Tom Fletcher, the UN’s top humanitarian official, according to the UN official who spoke to The New Humanitarian.“The more I think of it, the more sick it is,” the official said. “I am appalled that she has not been removed.”A spokesperson for the UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, which is led by Fletcher, declined to comment on personnel issues, citing security considerations. “We stand behind our team on the ground as they work in extraordinarily difficult conditions,” the spokesperson said.Tkalec told The New Humanitarian that her preparedness and response plan for Gaza City aimed to “ensure that civilians are protected and that they receive the aid they need – wherever they are”. She said the plan involved consultation with Palestinian community and clan leaders, health authorities, and civil society.“Suggestions that we accepted or facilitated the forced displacement of people are inaccurate and contradict both our advocacy and the collective position repeatedly endorsed by the Humanitarian Country Team,” Tkalec said.Four aid workers described another incident in late May, when Tkalec negotiated a delivery of flour – the first aid delivery since Israel imposed a full blockade on Gaza in early March.Previously, flour had been distributed directly to households by UNRWA. But under the May agreement, it was only approved for distribution to bakeries – a detail Tkalec did not properly disclose to UN staff and Palestinian community leaders, according to several aid workers.“A closed-door negotiation took place between her office and COGAT, excluding OCHA,” the UN official said, adding that OCHA had played a critical coordination role in the Gaza response until being sidelined by Tkalec. The bakery-only distribution plan “was made without community engagement, as consultation would have led to its rejection”, the UN official said.Local organisations and Palestinian community leaders raised concerns at the time that the plan “presented risks of harm, bypassed dignified access to food, and would ultimately set the UN up for failure”, the official added.The centralised distribution model also handed another measure of control to Israeli authorities, who issued displacement orders forcing all but four bakeries supplied by the World Food Programme (WFP) to close.The four operating bakeries were in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza. That left none in northern Gaza, where Israeli authorities have consistently restricted access to food while also ordering residents to evacuate.After the flour entered, the Bakery Owners’ Association reported that they were unsure how bread was supposed to be distributed. Individual bakery owners said they were concerned that the centralised distribution would restrict access and cause chaos.Trucks came in for two days, with Palestinian community members protecting the convoys from looting. But when hungry people discovered that they would not receive any flour directly and would have to “go and fight to get the bread to feed their family”, trust was broken, and looting began, according to the UN worker.Community leaders “could no longer, I reckon in good faith, advise to protect the cargo when they knew there was little chance they would receive any”, the UN official said.As feared, crowds of people waiting outside bakeries devolved into chaos. One of the bakeries where WFP flour had been delivered on 21 May closed after just a day; the rest closed by 25 May.With faint hopes dashed, the situation only worsened.On 28 May, shortly after the bakery arrangement ended, crowds of starving people ransacked WFP’s warehouse in Deir al-Balah, looking for flour. Four people were crushed or shot to death, and UN equipment was destroyed.Most of the flour that has entered since has been intercepted en route to UN warehouses and taken by civilians or armed criminals, OCHA has reported.In the days immediately after Israeli authorities allowed the flour shipment into the Strip, Israeli forces also launched airstrikes on at least two bakeries and on civilian police and security personnel protecting a convoy bringing flour to Gaza City, killing or wounding nearly 100 people. The strikes are part of a pattern of attacks on aid seekers carried out by Israel to displace people and pursue other military objectives.
In meetings after the May flour deliveries, Tkalec blamed Palestinian community leaders for failing to prevent the looting and creating Israel’s pretext for denying household distribution, two aid workers said.“She held the people responsible for not doing the household distribution, though the Israelis are the ones who banned it from the start,” the UN worker said.Tkalec said she pushed for flour to be distributed directly to families during months of negotiations with COGAT, who ultimately only allowed flour to come in for five days in May to supply bakeries.“Despite the limitations, we saw this five-day window as a narrow but vital opening to ease people’s suffering, while continuing to press for broader humanitarian access, including the delivery of fuel, sanitation, health, and shelter supplies, as well as commercial goods,” she said.She added that community leaders across Gaza had been informed of the arrangement. “I categorically reject any suggestion that I blamed Gazans for looting,” she said. “My position has always been that no one should face harm or risk death when simply trying to feed their families.”“Compliant and silent” Previous DHCs and other senior UN staff have directly criticised Israeli atrocities in official public statements. Multiple aid workers pointed out that Tkalec has not done the same.One aid worker said her approach to engaging with Israeli authorities was “obedient” and “docile”.Several said Tkalec seems overly deferential and appreciative of Israeli authorities, celebrating when small amounts of supplies have been allowed into Gaza by the same authorities who have blocked them.“She made it sound as if they are amazing for agreeing to allow this,” the UN worker said.The UN official who spoke to The New Humanitarian recalled her making statements to colleagues like, “Negotiations with COGAT are going really well” and, “They’re really trying”. “This is an organ of the state that’s conducting a genocide,” the official said, adding that this “compliant and silent approach” has not only failed to address Israel’s aid restrictions but also makes the UN complicit. Tkalec said her “engagement with COGAT has always been principled, clear, and consistent – with the sole purpose of securing assistance for Palestinians in need in Gaza”.Here in #Gaza, 2 months since the ceasefire collapsed, we’re doing everything possible to help survivors – amid shelling, attacks, and carnage.The blockade on aid is deadly. Lift it NOW!#StopNOW weaponizing #HumanitarianAid.- Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator Suzanna Tkalec pic.twitter.com/fRhLmNmHic— OCHA OPT (Palestine) (@ochaopt) May 18, 2025While some aid workers said they thought Tkalec genuinely believed appeasing Israel would increase aid access, they said this approach was misguided.“She constantly repeats to the humanitarian community ‘assurances’ that she has received from COGAT, none of which ever actually materialise,” the senior aid worker said.Two aid workers described a meeting with international NGO leaders in late August where Tkalec, along with her superior, UN Humanitarian Coordinator Ramiz Alakbarov, painted a hopeful picture of aid efforts in Gaza. The aid workers said this characterisation was completely at odds with the reality their colleagues were seeing on the ground.The meeting came just days before a UN-backed panel of experts concluded that more than half a million people were experiencing famine in Gaza City and the surrounding area, with conditions likely just as bad in northernmost Gaza, and the rest of the Strip just weeks behind. At least 185 people starved to death in August, according to Gaza’s health ministry.Responding to Tkalec and Alakbarov at the meeting, the international NGO leaders voiced concerns about the disastrous state of aid access – the refusal by Israeli authorities to allow tents and other shelter items into Gaza, a shortage of fuel tankers, and the looming deregistration of international NGOs deemed non-compliant with strict new Israeli regulations. But instead of addressing the concerns of the NGO leaders, Tkalec and Alakbarov “listed all the things going well”, one aid worker recalled. Those limited successes included permission to bring in animal fodder.People in Gaza have previously resorted to eating animal fodder as a result of the imposed starvation. Just 1.5% of Gaza’s agricultural land is still accessible and undamaged, according to the UN. As of November 2024, the UN estimated that 95% of large livestock had been killed, along with half of all goats and sheep.“The entire meeting was a mess,” the aid worker said.Several aid workers said that, in essence, Tkalec has suggested the humanitarian community should accept even less than the next to nothing they currently get from Israeli officials.Tkalec said her negotiations have “secured important gains”, including an increase in entries of food, fuel, chlorine for cleaning water, and the reopening of crossings.“These steps are far from sufficient, and I will continue to advocate for more aid to reach people safely and for civilians to be protected, guided by principles of humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality,” she said.Aid workers, however, disputed Tkalec’s assessment of progress made. UN reports also show a more nuanced but darker picture. Israeli authorities ended a nearly three-month total blockade of aid in late May, during Tkalec’s tenure, but only after a UN-backed report warned of imminent famine, and amidst daily images of starving children. The end of the blockade has also coincided with increasing deprivation and starvation in the north, where almost no humanitarian aid has entered since Israeli authorities closed the last crossing and launched an offensive on Gaza City in mid-September. At the end of September, just eight community soup kitchens in the north were still open, providing 70% less food than in the previous month; most bakeries have closed and moved to the south. Throughout Gaza, vegetables, meat, and dairy are largely unavailable. Since famine was declared in Gaza City on 22 August, 175 people have starved to death in the Strip. Few convoys reach their destinations without being looted by starving people or armed gangs. Average daily meals rose from one to almost two between July and September, according to WFP. But the amount of cargo picked up by aid agencies plummeted by nearly 60% in the second half of September, OCHA reported.“Supply lines to the Gaza Strip, particularly to the famine-struck Gaza city, have been unpredictable,” OCHA reported, noting a slew of border closures by Israel. In early September, OCHA reported that shortages of chlorine were contributing to a “surge in diarrhoeal infections”, accounting for over a third of all illnesses reported in Gaza. Israel has allowed in a trickle of fuel since July, “a fraction of what’s required to run essential life-sustaining services”, according to Fletcher, the head of OCHA. With so many services on the verge of collapse, the senior aid worker said, Tkalec’s claims of significant gains are “an example of how pressure on COGAT is eased through this kind of engagement”.Frequent absencesSeveral aid workers also said the offices of Tkalec and Alakbarov have consistently declined to provide written readouts of their discussions with COGAT, leaving aid agencies surprised by agreements made without their knowledge. “Information from my meetings with COGAT is shared widely,” Tkalec said.At the same time, multiple aid workers said they are concerned that Tkalec is not passing on accurate or complete information between the field and senior leadership. One aid worker said they now contact other UN staff to re-check information received from the DHC because, they said, “I do not think that she’s delivering the correct message”.Multiple aid workers also raised concerns about Tkalec’s frequent trips outside Gaza to meet Israeli authorities in person.Leaving Gaza requires extensive coordination and security planning, as well as armoured vehicles and UN staff, including trained convoy commanders – all of which are in short supply and otherwise needed to move supplies and carry out other missions within Gaza. Tkalec’s absences also send a message to other aid workers in Gaza.“Having UN leadership in Gaza means something… It reassures other humanitarian agencies that leadership is here, and Gaza is not just the other (side) of the world,” one aid worker said.“In order to understand Gaza’s context, you need to live it,” they said. “But if you’re coming here for a couple of weeks and then going to another COGAT meeting, it doesn’t help.” Tkalec said she has “only exited Gaza as part of regular staff movements, at the request of my leadership, or to meet the demands of the role, including during the ceasefire negotiations”.“The response is more divided”Aid workers who spoke with The New Humanitarian said Tkalec’s leadership has encouraged an increasingly divided approach, where individual agencies are negotiating directly with Israeli officials – exactly the scenario Israeli authorities have tried to create since the beginning of the campaign in Gaza. “She achieved nothing but more fragmented UN leadership,” one aid worker said. Several aid workers said that some UN agencies are now “doing their own thing”, as one put it – trying to strike their own deals with Israeli officials to bring in critical items like fuel.Tkalec’s leadership has also increasingly cut UNRWA out of the UN’s operations in Gaza, excluding the agency staff from key meetings and advocating for some of its responsibilities to be distributed to other agencies, several aid workers reported. She is “avoiding UNRWA like they don’t exist anymore”, one said.A spokesperson for UNRWA declined to comment. Removing UNRWA has been a longstanding policy goal of Israeli officials, who see the agency as a key symbol of the Palestinian cause. In addition to killing more than 300 UNRWA staff, Israel has sought to cut off the agency’s international funding and sever it from the rest of the humanitarian system through dubious accusations of links to Palestinian armed groups. The UN worker and another aid worker said Tkalec has favoured WFP for food distribution and sidelined UNRWA – even though, as one put it, “every single layer of this community asks for UNRWA and wants UNRWA to be the one responsible for distribution”.Over the past two years, UNRWA’s local staff have used their extensive registration system and vast aid distribution infrastructure, including clinics and schools-turned-shelters, to keep delivering to people in Gaza.Publicly, other UN agencies have tried to maintain a united front to back up UNRWA in the face of relentless military and bureaucratic attacks by Israel. Aid workers have repeatedly said, including to The New Humanitarian, that succumbing to that pressure would enable efforts by a party to the conflict to use aid as a political tool, and to reduce the humanitarian response to the bare minimum of food delivery.Israeli leaders appear to prefer for WFP to handle food distribution. In August, the agency’s executive director, Cindy McCain, was photographed shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two released a joint statement following a “constructive meeting” discussing the importance of protecting civilians from hunger and malnutrition.While WFP delivers large amounts of supplies into Gaza, it lacks the distribution infrastructure UNRWA has built up over decades. WFP has reported that it can reach 1.6 million people in Gaza, which has an estimated 2.1 million residents. “What about the rest? Who feeds them? She never asks that question,” one aid worker said, referring to Tkalec. “So the rest can go hungry.”Tkalec’s exclusion of UNRWA, the UN official said, is the latest “reason why so many agencies now are unable to deliver”.“We have repeatedly stressed that UNRWA is the backbone of UN operations in Gaza,” Tkalec said. “I have consistently advocated for UNRWA to be able to continue its operations and to have what it needs to keep its services running.”The New Humanitarian was unable to find any public statements by Tkalec to that effect. The senior aid worker and the UN official disputed her characterisation. “It boggles my mind to see someone lie so blatantly in front of the mountain of evidence that proves otherwise,” one said.“An insult beyond measure”In mid-2025, during Israel’s offensive on Deir al-Balah, Tkalec tried to use UN resources to import dog food into Gaza for stray dogs near her guest house, and to evacuate those dogs, multiple aid workers told The New Humanitarian. “She actually negotiated with COGAT to bring in large quantities of dog food into Gaza during the time that the UN was being denied from bringing in food for our staff,” the senior aid worker. “It sounds frivolous, but it’s also quite indicative of her broader insensitivities to where she is.”In August, 39% of people in Gaza were not eating for days at a time, and parents were regularly skipping meals so their children could eat, UN-backed famine experts reported. Aid and healthcare workers were reportedly fainting from hunger while working. One aid worker described the dog food incident as “an issue of duty of care” for their Palestinian colleagues. “We have aid workers who are on top of their jobs, doing the best they can do, but we’re not feeding them,” they said.In July, Israeli authorities issued displacement orders covering a part of Deir al-Balah where the UN had facilities. During the offensive, a WHO guesthouse was hit by Israeli fire and raided by soldiers who detained and strip-searched Palestinian UN staff. Several aid workers told The New Humanitarian that during the offensive, Tkalec asked for a UN vehicle to transport the dogs from the guesthouse in Deir al-Balah to another UN location in Khan Younis. Staff refused. “I reject any allegations that I used any UN resources for personal reasons,” Tkalec said.Other behaviour has reportedly caused additional friction with Palestinian colleagues and civil society. In June, Tkalec hosted a briefing with Gazan journalists where she advised them to discourage their communities from looting aid, according to a statement later released by the journalists to UN staff and seen by The New Humanitarian. Tkalec’s prewritten remarks, the statement said, made no mention of Israel.“You cannot discuss looting without addressing the crimes of the occupation,” the journalists wrote. “Every one of us is hungry. We have lost family members… To scold us and assign blame to us and to request that WE manage our communities and WE respond to the organised crime that the occupation is responsible for… it is an insult beyond measure.”“We will not be participating in these so-called round table discussions in the future with your deputy humanitarian coordinator,” the journalists wrote. “We look forward to having discussions with other UN colleagues that have respectfully engaged with us based on a common understanding of what Gaza is experiencing.”Tkalec did not comment on the altercation with the journalists. Her 800-word statement to The New Humanitarian includes a single mention of Israel, referring to “Israeli-militarised zones” in Gaza.Several aid workers pointed to similar attitudes among other senior UN staff, including Alakbarov, Tkalec’s more recently appointed superior, who also serves as the UN’s Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. Four aid workers raised concerns about Alakbarov’s statement in August that called the famine in Gaza “entirely human-made” but did not mention Israel – an omission one aid worker called “utterly shameful”.“I’ve heard him make comments about, ‘Why doesn’t Hamas just give all the hostages back’, as if that would end things,” the senior aid worker said. “So I think it’s very clear where the values lie.”Several aid workers raised similar concerns about the August meeting between Netanyahu and McCain, the WFP chief. “I don’t know of any other context where a UN agency would have put out a joint statement with a person that is wanted by the ICC,” the senior aid worker said, referring to the International Criminal Court, where Netanyahu is wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.A spokesperson for Alakbarov did not address specific questions from The New Humanitarian but said, without mentioning Israel: “Ramiz Alakbarov has been consistent and unequivocal, both publicly and privately, in calling for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, as well as for unfettered humanitarian access to Gaza. His focus remains on alleviating the immense suffering of civilians and ensuring that humanitarian principles are upheld.”“I’ve seen worse in Goma”To many aid workers in Gaza, Tkalec appears to lack both expertise and interest in the Palestinian context, where Israel has maintained a nearly seven-decade military occupation deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice and described as apartheid by leading global human rights groups.“She was of the view that this is just like anywhere else, and she could deal with the authorities as she had done in any other context,” said the senior aid worker. Before moving to Gaza in 2025, Tkalec worked as DHC in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Before that, she worked with Catholic Relief Services for more than a decade, including with its emergency response team, then moved to the International Rescue Committee, where she worked on aid responses in Yemen, Syria, and Jordan, among other countries.The senior aid worker recalled her saying: “I’ve seen worse in Goma,” referring to her prior experience during the conflict in eastern DRC. “There is no doubt in my mind that what Palestinians are enduring in Gaza is horrendous and unprecedented – more than words could ever convey,” Tkalec told The New Humanitarian.A UN Commission of Inquiry recently described it as genocide.Newly arrived humanitarian leaders in Palestine, the senior aid worker said, often think they have “the magic touch with the Israeli authorities”.But they meet a formidable Israeli bureaucracy that has systematically used manipulation or outright violence to weaponise the humanitarian system for political and military goals. Over the past two years, many aid workers have described to The New Humanitarian variations of the same traps into which others now say Tkalec has fallen – part of a longstanding playbook. “They’ll send the nicest person that they can find to meet with you and to make you feel like you’re being heard, and you’re being understood, and they’re going to help you,” one aid worker said.Even when these negotiations go nowhere, they have a disarming effect. “You feel like you’ve got someone on the inside who wants to help you, and you feel good, and you want to continue pursuing that, when in the end, the impact is either non-existent or very, very minimal,” the aid worker said.Often, the same techniques are recycled. A year before Tkalec’s negotiations with Israeli authorities to allow tents into southern Gaza, a nearly identical scenario almost played out ahead of Israel’s invasion of Rafah. After refusing for months to allow the import of shelter items, forcing many Palestinians to endure a frigid, wet winter outdoors, Israeli authorities began contacting NGOs, offering them tens of thousands of tents that they had purchased and planned to release into southern Gaza – right before the planned operation in Rafah that displaced nearly a million people and collapsed the humanitarian system. Most aid groups rejected the offer. At the time, aid workers called the effort an obvious attempt at manipulation, with some telling The New Humanitarian that accepting it could make humanitarians complicit in ethnic cleansing. The senior aid worker and the UN official said that before Tkalec’s arrival, UN leaders in Palestine understood this playbook and maintained a more adversarial relationship with Israeli authorities. That relationship, they said, felt more aligned with humanitarian principles. The current leadership has felt increasingly aligned with Israeli objectives, they and other aid workers said. “I feel like the DHC sidelined anyone with a moral compass,” said the UN official. “We’re not there to be friends with parties to the conflict – certainly not ones that are accused of committing genocide,” the senior aid worker said. “Having a relationship that’s in tension is not a sign of failure. It’s a sign that we’re doing our jobs.”Riley Sparks reported from Paris. Jacob Goldberg reported from Bangkok. With additional reporting by Tammam Aloudat. Edited by Andrew Gully and Eric Reidy.
已Opublikowany: 2025-10-03 14:37:00
źródło: www.thenewhumanitarian.org
