Cuts to humanitarian relief could mean less help for people in Gaza, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and more countries, UN aid chief said.
Tom Fletcher, the head of the United Nations office for humanitarian affairs, has told reporters that with 300 million people in need of assistance, recent cuts to humanitarian aid funds are causing a “seismic shock” globally.
“Many will die because that aid is drying up,” Fletcher, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, said at a news briefing at the UN headquarters in New York on Wednesday.
“Across the humanitarian community, programmes are being stopped right now,” Fletcher said. “Staff are being let go right now. I think 10 percent of NGO colleagues were laid off in the course of February,” he said, referring to people working for nongovernment aid organisations.
Fletcher also spoke specifically of his recent visit last month to Gaza, saying “supplies are clearly running out very, very fast” amid Israel’s renewed blockade on all food, medicine, fuel and other goods entering the strip.
“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,” he said.
Describing his visit to Gaza last month, Fletcher said one of the “first shocking things I saw driving in is the dogs going through the rubble”.
“I don’t think anything can prepare you for that,” he said, referring to the spectacle of stray dogs in Gaza looking for dead bodies of people trapped beneath bombed-out buildings.
A ‘humanitarian superpower’
Fletcher’s news conference came just days after United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the US had concluded it would be cancelling 83 percent of US Agency for International Development (USAID) programmes worldwide.
While the US cuts to aid have been the most drastic, Fletcher pointed out other countries have also been slashing their relief budgets.
“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,” he said.
