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. Advertisement
Describing his visit to Gaza last month, Fletcher said one of the “first shocking things I saw drivin …
