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Humanitarian worker: Overstretched and Under-resourced – Press Conference | United Nations
Summary
2340seconds video
Tom Fletcher, the Emergency Relief Coordinator and Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the UN, attended a briefing on his 115th day on the job. He acknowledged the current unprecedented threats to the international system since World War II, highlighting the urgent challenges faced by the humanitarian community. Despite already being overstretched and under-resourced before, the sector has been further impacted by significant funding cuts, including an 83% decrease in USAID funding from the Trump administration. Fletcher explained that 300 million people currently need humanitarian aid, and funding cuts have forced the UN to prioritize saving 100 million lives with available resources. In response, Fletcher has written a ten-point plan to address these challenges, emphasizing the necessity of efficiency, sector reform, and shifting power towards local humanitarian leaders and affected communities. Fletcher also emphasized the importance of international solidarity and maintaining the values of humanitarian assistance. He mentioned visiting conflict zones like Gaza and Darfur to address key issues, improve aid delivery, and highlight the need for more cooperation from global and regional actors in ending conflicts. Lastly, with regard to allegations of United Nations staff involvement in inappropriate activities, he expressed a strong willingness to lead investigations should credible evidence arise.
Full Script
are involved. Mr. Fletcher, you’re up. Yep. We want to welcome Tom Fletcher for I think his inaugural appearance at this briefing in this room. Tom needs no introduction but I will introduce him. He is our Emergency Relief Coordinator and Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. So Tom, please, you have the floor and then we’ll take some questions. Well thanks very much, Steph, 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 SG 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 program which is 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 programs are being stopped right now. Staff are being let go right now, I think 10 percent 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 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 ten point plan on how we will respond to these challenges. I’ll spare you the whole ten 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 programs 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 at 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 cool 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 cool 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. So I’m looking forward to digging into those issues and country issues if you like in the time we have together. Thanks. Edie? Then Michelle? Thank you very much, Mr. Fletcher, on behalf of the United Nations Correspondence Association for doing this briefing. We hope you’ll come back often. My name is Edith Lettera from the Associated Press. I know that every person in this room would like some figures on how hard the United Nations programs itself have been hit by the cuts by the Trump administration to USAID programs. They said 83% 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? That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? 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. Now 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 these 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 are released in December. And that is 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 that we needed $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 that 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 a hundred 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, in 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 we’ll 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. Thank you. Michelle, then Ipta Sam, then Gabriel. Hi. Michelle Nichols from Reuters. Thank you for coming to Brifus. So is it fair to say, just going on the numbers that you mentioned then, if you were aiming to reach 190 and you’re now saying that’s 100, so you’ve halved the number of people that you think you might be able to reach this year, is that correct? Well, look, 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 of direst need. And those are many of the areas I’ve visited from Darfur to to Gaza and beyond, of course. So that’s what the effort is about. We we do an exercise every year that classifies, that breaks down those numbers. You can see it on the on the website, that breaks down within that 300 million where the direst need is. And so this is 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. And 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? So we’ve been in regular contact with the with the State Department as it is now and with colleagues there, particularly over specific programs, specific waivers, but also making that that broader case. And I was in Washington a couple of months ago doing that. Where does the funding come from? Now 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 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 to make it simpler for donors to target their funding to the programs that they really want to support. That’s 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. You know I don’t think anyone would pretend that we are perfect, but we’re doing this not because to the earlier question that you know the doge and others are looming in the 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 program I launched I launched on November the 18th on the first day when I took the when I took the job and this wider IASC, sorry to go back to the acronym again, sector reform program is being led by the agencies and the NGOs themselves. Are you seeing any increase in sort of grassroots fundraising coming in? 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 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 we can’t keep reciting the same platitudes or running the same campaigns and hope that we can 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. Ibtisam Gabriel Ninshrawan. Hi my name is Ibtisam Azim Al-Arabil Jaleed newspaper. I have first question if I’m not if I remember that right you went together and 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. Thanks Ibtisam. So yes I was in Gaza in in January. I’d hope to get there much earlier. I went to Darfur in the first and the first week in the job. I’d hope 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’d been signed up to deliver massive amount of vital vital lifesaving aid but we did that. We delivered over 20 000 trucks. We delivered those six 700 trucks a day fed two million people and at every moment when partners or those on the ground sought to find a humanitarian alibi for breaking the ceasefire 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 I mean some of you may have been in probably not because of the restrictions placed on the international media. It was much much worse than I’d anticipated and I’d really prepared myself for the worst and bear in mind that by this stage I’d you know I’ve been in Darfur I’ve been in Kupiansk on the on the front lines there and I’d driven from the Lebanese border to the Turkish border all the way through Syria in the weeks after the change of government there the Kehrtegr authorities arrival in Damascus. Gaza was on a completely different level and I drove in through I’d been in Neroz one of the kibbutz that was hit on October the 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 areas crossing into into the north of Gaza and in a way the shock is even greater than because the devastation or desolation in northern Gaza is even greater than it than it is in the south and for miles and miles it’s just rubble you know my staff trying to find their way back to their homes using GPS because there were no landmarks to to navigate by you couldn’t see what was a school or what was a 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 is the dogs going through the rubble and I said to the my colleague who was with me why the dogs so fat and he said 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 and I don’t think anything can prepare you for that and every single person I spent 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 and 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 that we’re 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. Thank you. Your second question. Accountability sorry I’ll be quicker on that. Of course absolutely there should be accountability for anyone who is who is blocking aid getting to civilians it’s extraordinary that we’re even that you’re even having to ask the question and that I’m you know that I’m having to give an answer and with any suggestion there might be any other answer but this is an an example of this age of impunity that we’re living through that these these the basic foundations of international humanitarian law within which we operate as humanitarians are being challenged on all sides you know I mentioned that number of over 300 humanitarian workers killed last year doing the work that 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 you know that accountability and we want to see that protection for civilians and we want to be allowed to do our job Gabriel and then showing them a million them thanks mr. Fletcher Gabriel azando 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 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 well I’d say 11 days is already 11 days too long to prevent aid reaching civilians who so badly need it now I met I talked about you know 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 you know Steph touched on this earlier on the fact that we’re not getting fuel and means that incubators are being switched off so this is this is real already and will quickly become a humanitarian crisis again the supplies are clearly running out very very fast and so yes this is you know 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 from my fantastic colleague Sigrid and my fantastic colleague Mahanid Hadi as well about the efforts that they’re making to to get those supplies through you’ll have seen Mahanid’s statement on that in the last couple of days. Sherwin and I’m going to speak to Sherwin Bryceby 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 responsibilities that is at 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? Absolutely and but while 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 you know drive the ambulance back towards these wars in order to help the the survivors and 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 is doesn’t have enough water in the tank and is literally under attack is 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 whose job is it to then end those conflicts? Well I think there’s a collective responsibility for the international community to to get much better at switching off conflict 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 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 this conflict I think one interesting dynamic at the moment that we’re seeing though is that in you know 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 which I’ve just come off a call with our humanitarian coordinators in all the in all of Syria’s neighbors 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 to respond to those crises I hope so Amelie then Abdelhamid then Sinan Hi thank you very much for for your briefing Amelie Boutolier 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 the rest of the country so could you give us an update of the humanitarian situation especially in Darfur around Al-Farsha’a and in some of the refugee camps where we knew that we know that they are already famine and risk of famine spreading thank you so I’m reaching for my paper here because the 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 raise 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 the 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 Adjurei 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 already one for that visit was just to raise the visibility of the crisis to get to get it into the media more widely and and least you said from the BBC was with me and did an extraordinary job at telling those stories and getting that 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 to be the idealist in the system talking about international humanitarian principles but also do the deals on the crossing points and the and the check points and and you know truck by truck and so I spent three days and talking to the SAF and the RSF about those very specific deals to 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 that we can deliver but it’s still nothing like enough we’re getting more international missions including into Darfur I think one mission last stayed almost two weeks in Darfur which is very important our humanitarian teams are the people who are pushing as hardest to get in and stay and 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 five and 10 percent funded so far the Great Philippe Grande and I launched it in 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 are safe thank you abdel hameed then Sinan thank you mr. Fletcher my name is abdel hameed sayam from the arabic daily al-Qudsil arabi I have to interrelated question on personal note I appreciate your comments about your observation after visiting Gaza my question first about the wisp bank do you see what’s happening in Gaza is copied now carbon copy of what happened in Gaza happening now to the wisp bank and the second sir weaponizing humanitarian aid is a war crime fourth Geneva convention is very clear about it the security council the g aid the humanitarian officials 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 shun off all these calls and yet continue day in and day out weaponizing humanitarian aid in Gaza and the wisp bank what could be what else could be done other than appealing to the killer to be a little bit merciful thank you thank you um so I’m really concerned about what’s happening in the the wisp bank and I spent a day driving around observing it myself and talking to people who had been displaced uh or were facing displacement uh forcibly uh and clearly the the facts on the ground are being changed very rapidly and that is a a tragedy at the human level of course for those involved but it’s also a tragedy you know for the for the prospects for the two state solution which you know call me old fashioned by in the fact I still use the phrase uh 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 dear 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 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 in the west bank alongside of course that work on on Gaza you know I think I refer you to Steph’s answer earlier on um referring you to his answers in the past uh on on war crimes I mean what I would say and I think I said this earlier on is that you know international humanitarian law is very clear that we must be allowed to deliver aid to civilians wherever they are uh and clear that there must be accountability if anyone stops us doing that and the rest I think I’ll leave to to lawyers and other parts of the system to comment on Sinan then if the car thank you mr. Fletcher my name is Sinan Tunjdemir I’m with the Rudov media network I have a question on Syria if I am wrong please correct me you were in the masques last December and you met with the transitional government to discuss the humanitarian coordination or scale up the humanitarian assistance in the country so I wonder since then according to your observation anything has changed is it easier to reach out to like especially minorities to like help out and and secondly have you ever been to in north east Syria or are you planning to be like visit there to watch the or observe the humanitarian situation there thank you very much thank you um so yes I was there in uh in December I spent a week a week in Syria as a as I say drove up from the Lebanese crossing all the way to the to the Turkish border and so saw Idlib Homs Aleppo Damascus saw the reconstruction effort that lies ahead of us spend a lot of time with communities who’ve been displaced you know as I say over 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 need to as high as ever and in particular people tell me they they need the unexploded munition cleared so they can head home start to rebuild their lives they need food and water and medicine and they need caraba they need electricity consistently people talk 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 neighbors 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 Latakia across into 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 they were pretty freshly arrived it’s fair to say in Damascus still building up capacity we knew them of course from Idlib already we’d been working with them on aid delivery there and so far every time we’ve hit a roadblock a problem in the delivery of aid I’ve been able to raise it with the authorities with the foreign minister Shabani 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 the challenges which remain including as you say in the northeast 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 thank you we’ll go to Iftikar then Rachel and I’m afraid we’ll have to close it but we’ll Mr Fletcher will come back if the car please I have pardon go ahead go ahead can you hear me go ahead and this is if the hardly from associated person Pakistan my question has been asked but I’ll 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 this see the situation yourself and come face to face with the Taliban leaders April in a few weeks time third week of April thank you thank you uh Rachel hi Rachel will Fox News Digital um 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 you and workers were involved or they were held in UN facilities such as Emily Damari who said she was held in an UNRO facility are you planning on investigating those claims yeah I discussed um at this point actually with the Israeli authorities as well in Tel Aviv and um and obviously with my colleagues um from different UN agencies operating in Gaza you know of among whom we’ve we’ve lost hundreds of our own people by the way during this conflict um and utterly clear if we 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 can investigate uh and I’ll you know I’ll happily lead that investigation myself I mean this is that would be an appalling thing for UN workers UN colleagues to be involved in um and so absolutely uh if we get that evidence and I’m constantly asking for uh for that evidence um it was raised with me as well while I was there um the allegation that hostages had been held and it was actually I think a British Israeli hostage um 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 uh when we had to flee for parts of it for our own uh 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 uh ourselves um but I’ve not seen a shred of evidence so far and I’ve asked for it that suggests that UN that there was any UN acquiescence in there or involvement in using UN buildings or UN staff being involved in in in holding those hostages and I’d be utterly horrified and I know that is shared throughout the organization if that was the case great thank you Tom thank you I’m sorry you didn’t get to answer every question but I know now you’ve been here you know where to find the press briefing room so we do expect you back thank you very much
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