The world hasn't found a way to step up. And I guess that's my my demand. My message really is like what would it take? We're in a world of strong men, aren't we? Of, of Putin and Trump. You never hear them talk about the UN. It's it's almost like a meaningless institution to them.
Well, there is a there is this risk that we end up feeling slightly orphaned by the international system because in a world of strong men, the last thing they need is an organization coming in that opposes this sense of sort of survival of the fittest. We seem to be in this age of indifference, of impunity, where people aren't being held to account. Hello and welcome to the Forecast. My guest today was recently described as having the toughest job in the world.
Tom Fletcher, the Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, is juggling humanitarian crises across the globe, from Gaza to Sudan, from Ukraine to Yemen. He is tasked with relieving the suffering of the displaced, the hungry and those in danger in a world that may not have the resources or the will to respond. Tom, thank you for joining us from Switzerland, your headquarters. I think we have to start with Gaza because it is such an
immediate crisis. You have been warning for weeks now that people are starving and and they still are today, aren't they? They certainly are, and that's why, Christian, you know, to your introduction, I don't have the toughest job in the world. The toughest job in the world is sitting there watching your kid having his arm cut off in a
hospital without an anaesthetic. The toughest job in the world is, of course, being a survivor of sexual violence somewhere like Darfur and having to go home to your family and not tell them what's happened because you're worried you'll be thrown out of your town. The toughest job in the world is being one of the 190 million lives that we need to get out there and save right now who are not getting the funding, not
getting the support we need. And of course, the epicenter of that need across the world right now is Gaza. And it's why there's such a tension on this crisis, and it's why we've been sounding the alarm for months now about this starvation crisis. The world simply hasn't stepped up though, has it? I mean, you. You've been sounding that alarm in the Security Council, in the media, and people are still today starving to death.
And that's the tragedy of this, is that we can see what's happening and OK, you can't get in, Krishna. The media can't get in. You need to be there telling the story. We are there. We're on the ground. We've got thousands of people inside Gaza who are telling us every day. And we're passing on that information through the Security Council, through the briefings, through interviews like this. And the world hasn't found a way to step up.
And I guess that's my my demand, my message really is like, what would it take? Why aren't we seeing that pressure that's necessary for this to stop, for the crossings to be open. We need all of those crossings open. We've got the means to get in the aid needed to save these lives, hundreds of thousands of lives at risk right now. And it we're being prevented. Can you explain what the situation is?
Because we're getting very confused messages from both Israel and the GHF who are suggesting that the UN is allowed to operate. So what? What are you allowed to do and what can't you do? Well, I'm afraid that for much of the recent months, and I, I was in Gaza myself in a period when things were operating more effectively and we were getting IN600700 trucks a day. Still not enough, but but enough to actually save lives at scale.
I'm afraid that what we've seen since then is that we've been set up to fail. So we're getting in maybe 100 trucks on a good day out of the 600 or 700 trucks that we need to to deal with the conditions that we face. But it's not a question of just driving those trucks through the
borders. And these are trucks that with baby food on, with anaesthetics on, with essential medical and food on. And you have to go through a hugely laborious process before you can get those trucks to the border crossing and through that border crossing. Then you have to unload those trucks onto pallets next to the crossing in those Israeli controlled areas.
You then need to get a different set of permissions for a different set of trucks, a different set of drivers to come and pick those up. On a good day, we might get half of those permissions. The rest are denied. You then have to hit a series of Israeli checkpoints. Often the trucks turn around because it's nightfall and they tell us we have to go back. Or they say the battle lines have moved and it's not safe for us to move.
And even then, when we get through, we then have to cross these areas where desperate, starving, hungry civilians will hit those trucks, understandably because they will do anything to feed their families. So when Israel says there are hundreds of trucks waiting to be, you know, driven into people and the UN is just not doing it, and we've offered to help, that's not true. It's just not true.
And you know, we, we have to soak up a certain amount of this, but you know, we are humanitarians. This is our day job. Our work is to move those trucks. We've got the distribution networks, we've got the community relationships to get them to where they're needed to flood the market with aid, which is the only way you'll deal with the starvation crisis.
It's the only way to deal with the looting, with the fact that there is that food is being sold on the in the on the black market because there's so little getting in. We can do all that. The idea that we'd be sat there refusing to move aid, you know, it's just offensive. Well, I mean, you know, as you know, the Israel says that the reason that they, you know, replaced the previous operation was because all, you know, most of the aid was being stolen by Hamas. How how much aid was being
stolen by Hamas? How much was were you just getting through normal normal channels? I'm afraid, you know, as as the people we work with at a technical level understand on the ground, you know, this is just nonsense. The idea that that Hamas were stealing his aid at scale. If there was evidence of that, do you not think with that immense communications machine out there trying to discredit our work, we wouldn't have seen
more of that evidence? The vast, vast majority of the aid we were getting through when we were allowed to deliver without these impediments, without these obstacles, was getting to the civilians who so badly, badly need it. Now. Does that mean that there isn't a grain of rice or a sack of wheat that gets stolen, sold on the market, on the black market and that Hamas get some of that?
It's impossible to guarantee that that doesn't happen in a in such a chaotic environment when Hamas have a lot of the power and the weapons on the ground. But this is a tiny fraction of what we were able to get through to civilians, and that we would be able to get through again if we were allowed to genuinely operate. If a fraction of the energy and money that was being spent on perpetuating this conflict was actually spent on allowing us to save lives, we could do this at
scale. What is really at stake here though? Because I can't really remember a time in my career where the UN has been so undermined openly by governments and you really thought well is this the is this the beginning of the end of these big international rules and international organisations having any authority? So there is a broader sustained attack actually on our values and principles, on this whole international system. And look, take it from me, I've been doing this job 8-9 months
now. This is not a perfect system. It has its flaws, but we have the most committed people in the world, the experts. People are busting a gut, working around the clock. Our own people are starving inside Gaza. We will do everything to get that aid through, but we are facing this much more sustained public attack. Now. Some of that is just to distract from what's going on. Some of it is also because we have a dual mandate here.
We have a mandate to deliver aid and we also have a mandate to come and talk to people like you and the Security Council and tell you what we're seeing to bear testimony to what is happening in Gaza, just as we bear testimony in Sudan, in Afghanistan, in Haiti and Yemen, in all of these conflicts. And it's that role which is really under attack.
And I get told explicitly that unless we dial down the reporting, unless we dial down the conversations with people like you, that we will face further restrictions. And just recently, the head of office for my team, the person coordinating this aid delivery, was basically told he no longer had access because he's been out there reporting on what he's seeing. And told by by the. Israeli government, that's right.
So they control the visas and there is always a back and forth over the visas for our aid workers. And he was basically told that's it, you won't get a visa from now on because you've been speaking out about the humanitarian situation, the crisis that you're witnessing. Israel says you're biased. You know that you are basically against them, that you spell Hamas propaganda. I will not buy it. We it is in our DNA.
It's in our charter, it's at the heart of what we do, that we must be independent, impartial, neutral. We cannot be biased. It would completely undermine everything we do everywhere if we were to show that bias. And I've, you know, from the start of this crisis, from my first day in this job, I've been calling for the hostages to be released. That call should be unequivocal, unconditional. We've got to get the hostages
home. I visited near Oz, one of the kibbutz that was hit on October the 7th, where one in four people were either killed or taken hostage. I'm in regular contact with the families there, desperate to get their loved ones home. Desperate, by the way, they tell me for a ceasefire as well. And also desperate, importantly, because it this isn't a key message to get out as well. They tell me that they want the aid to get in. They do not want to see people starving on the other side of
that of that fence. So we will always be neutral. We will be independent. You know, we will fight to defend the values of the UN Charter and that means we'll be neutral. So again, absolute nonsense. And I just will not take it that when we're accused of not being
neutral. You see around 100 aid agencies have come out and been fiercely critical of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, this new organization that is handing out aid in Israel and is accused of sort of being an instrument of Israeli policy now in Gaza because people are being killed either going there or leaving it, but mostly by Israeli forces. Now they they say that these GHF distribution points are effectively, you know, sort of the bait in a, in a death trap for people in Gaza.
Are they right? So I've I've seen that statement, it's a very powerful statement from our our allies in the humanitarian movement, in the humanitarian community who know the situation incredibly well on the ground and who stand for the principles and values as as we do of impartiality and independence and neutrality in the delivery of aid. The key thing for us here is that aid has to be delivered in
a in line with those principles. We have real concerns about militarized hubs, about security contractors. We have concerns, as I've said out in the Security Council consistently, about anything which displaces people and which risks dehumanizing people. Now we want aid to get through. We want starving people to get food, but we desperately want that to be done in line with these principles and in ways that protects civilians and doesn't harm them.
Is there, is there some disagreements in the UN around this? Because it's being reported that some of your staff have met the GHF. In fact, the GHF told us that today that they've had meetings with UN staff. They didn't say from which UN organization. And there is this leaked letter from UNRWA, the the, the, the Palestinian Refugees Organization chief, you know, sort of basically saying they
want you to take a harder line. So there have been meetings with GHF on the ground, but also in in New York there was a meeting last week with several UN agencies present. For us, we'll go anywhere. It's the nature of our job. I've been recently in Afghanistan talking to the Taliban. I was in DRC recently talking to M23. When I was in Israel, I was talking to the Israeli authorities. We go anywhere, talk to anyone in order to try to get
humanitarian aid through. That doesn't mean that we are working together some somehow or that we align ourselves with the approach of any of those organisations, including the contractors that you mentioned. We have to have this principled approach, but we also need to talk to anyone. So. So could you imagine UN staff working with the GHF? No, I can't imagine that. I mean, we, we couldn't work through a militarized system in that way. We have to have a system which
is independent and impartial. That's in our DNA as, as, as humanitarians. I don't wish them to fail. If they can get food through, that's a good thing. But I just wish they would do it in a principle humanitarian way. And that that's a view shared, by the way, across the the UN system. There isn't a division among UN agencies on this. We're speaking as one.
There's also a report that there is a, there's a plan to possibly move Palestinians in Gaza to South Sudan, another area where your organization has been very active in tackling Humanitarian Affairs. I mean, you know, it's not been confirmed, but if this were to be a real plan as part of sort of either as the temporary reconstruction of Gaza and temporary emptying or something more permanent, what would your
view of it be? Anything that involves forced displacement, ethnic cleansing of a civilian population breaks all the rules. And, you know, you hear a lot of preposterous, atrocious ideas again and again coming out of this conflict. And I'm afraid this is just one more of those, you know, Christian, you know, South Sudan, you know, the conditions there. You know, we operate there. We try to deliver civilian for civilians there, humanitarian aid to support those
populations. Displacing the Palestinians somewhere else is not the answer. I was in Gaza recently. They want to stay, and they have a right to stay in their homeland, in their homes, which
have been reduced to rubble. But everyone I spoke to there said that when the guns fell silent, and as we must hope that they will, they would rebuild, that they would stay and rebuild their communities again in Gaza. I mean, a big part of your job, as you say, is going to these places yourself, seeing it and then reporting back on it. How, how do you, how do you cope with that? I mean, I, I read, I think an interview with you in which you talked about having taken on a
therapist because of this job. So, you know, as you started, I mean, this is a very tough job in terms of the, the travel schedule, but, but more in terms of, of, of what you're seeing and experiencing and the, and the sense of responsibility you have to come out and tell those stories from people who otherwise aren't being heard. Because often this will be in places. And I went to Darfur in my first week, places where the international media can't
necessarily get. Gaza was another classic example of that. But also I got across, I went, I travelled across Syria just after the fall of the Assad regime and met many communities there, you know, who, who were telling their stories for the first time. So, you know, my job does feel hard at times, but it's much, much easier than being one of those civilians who we serve.
And, and my job, your job, our collective job, is to make sure their stories are heard and that the world responds with much greater compassion and kindness to those realities for those
people. Because the reality at the moment is that we seem to be in this age of indifference, of impunity, where people aren't being held to account for what's happening to these civilians and where this less generous approach is becoming somehow fine to say we should cut aid budgets at a moment when the needs are actually going in the opposite direction. All I'm asking for here is 1% of what the world spends on defence and we could save over 100
million lives. I can't believe, I mean, Can you believe? I can't believe that's too much to ask. Britain is cutting its international aid budget and transferring the money into defence. America has slashed USAID. What kind of effect are these cuts having? The effect of these cuts internationally, it's not just the Americans and the Brits, many others, is brutal choices. And my teams are every day making the toughest choices you
can imagine. Life and death decisions, which program to shut down, which program to save, which basically means which lives to save and which lives not to save. And I see that all the time on my missions. I mean, recently in Afghanistan, I saw just after the funding cuts there started to really bite. I sat with Afghan mothers who'd lost their children because they'd had to cycle 3 hours on bumpy roads to get to the nearest clinic to try to give birth.
So these are really biting right now, these cuts, and they have a a life and death impact and it's why we have to get out there and make the case as effectively as we can that 1% of what we're spending on defence would actually save 100 million lives. Surely that is a mission that we can all get behind. How, how do you persuade a public at home that is skeptical, that is struggling, that they do need to spend more
on the crises that you go to? Well, that's the $1,000,000 question, Christian. In fact, you know, it's the $20 billion question because that's what it would take to, to reach these 100 million lives that we need to, to save. I think, you know, it starts with empathy. I think we've got to understand that people are anxious at home. They're worried about their own families getting hospital appointments, about their their kids education. This is a moment of anxiety and distraction.
And that doesn't mean that people are somehow lacking compassion for those on the other side of the world. I think then there's a set of arguments around self-interest. And it's, I'm sorry to put it in that more cynical, crude way that will upset a lot of people who, like me, are driven by this
sort of humanitarian mission. But there is a self-interest point, a pragmatic point here, that unless we deal with epidemics, conflicts, inequality, poverty on the other side of the world, then actually these problems will come in our direction. You can't put a tariff on a pandemic and you can't stop the migration that will be caused by an explosion of these conflicts and actually will be driven by climate change in the next 5-10 years as well.
And then I think perhaps most importantly, we've got to get back to the human story at the heart of this. We probably don't win the argument by just talking about the defence of institutions. And here I am standing in front of this picture of of flags. We probably don't win the argument by just talking about our values and principles.
We've got to be talking about those individuals and those lives, people who are just like us but are facing these immense, immense obstacles and for whom this small amount of support can be life changing. We've got to get their stories told. Now, obviously Gaza has been getting a huge amount of attention, but in terms of lives and suffering, you know, Sudan is absolutely terrible. There are, you know, Yemen is still very, very difficult.
There are lots of places around the world where there is terrible human suffering that doesn't get the attention and therefore doesn't get that cut through. How, how do you decide, you know, where you try and shine the light? Or are you just, you know, do you just have to go where the media attention goes
effectively? This is a really difficult challenge for us. We're desperate to get more attention for Sudan, for Yemen, for DRC, and for many of these conflicts which which seem to be forgotten by the mainstream media. A big part of this, I think, is to get journalists in. And I know you, Christian, that you do this as well, to get them in behind the battle lines, telling the story way more effectively than we can. But we've also had to massively prioritize among these different
crises. When I came into office, we prioritised 28 country crises and one of the very, very tough decisions as part of our, what we call the hyper prioritisation, we've had to do is now to focus on just 21. So that means there are country crises which just won't be getting the same attention, the same resources that they need. It doesn't mean these needs have gone away. It's just mean. It just means that we've had to take these brutal, brutal choices about where to
prioritise. Yeah. I mean, particularly in the Western world as well, though obviously the whole question of waste and, you know, lavish headquarters and expenses and highly paid officials and all the rest of it is also a big political issue. I mean, as you say, you're standing there in front of an image of a very lavish looking UN building. I mean, how much does the UN need to reform and cut its cloth do you think? It's a big part of the answer to
this. And so as part of what what I call the humanitarian reset, we're doing 4 big things. One is to define much more clearly the mission around those hundred 114 million lives that we know we can save this year if we get the resource. The second thing is to devolve much more power in this system to give power away to local
communities. Power shouldn't be with people like me standing in front of flags in a, in a suit and tie in Geneva. It should be with those local community organizations that really know what the needs are, so pushing more resource, more authority to them. And then thirdly, you're right, this massive area around
delivery and efficiency. And I've been doing this since the first day when I came into office before Elon Musk started waving a chainsaw around, finding ways, very practical ways, to make sure that we are delivering in the most efficient way possible. And we're really driving that program of reform and efficiency right now. The 4th area that's really important is then defend
defending international law. As you said earlier, these are the values and principles which are under sustained attack right now. And we've got to hold the line here. We've got to defend this hill. We've got to defend the Charter. We've got to defend the United Nations. It's imperfect, but it is the best idea we've had in our history for promoting global
coexistence. And if anyone can tell me that a world without the United Nations is a better world than bring on that argument because we're out there trying to stop those conflicts, trying to save those lives. And I, you know, that to me feels like a pretty important mission. I mean, The thing is, we're, we're in a world of strong men, aren't we?
Of, of Putin and Trump and you know, in different ways, Modi and India and XI in China, you know, they, they, you never hear them talk about the UN. It's it's almost like a meaningless institution to them. Well, there is, there is this risk that we end up feeling slightly orphaned by the international system because in a world of strong men, the last thing they need is an organization coming in that opposes this sense of sort of survival of the fittest.
You know, I've always read, written and and said that, you know, we have these two human instincts. 1 is to compete for resource and one is to collaborate and work together for resource. And the UN is unequivocally looking for that collaboration, looking for that cooperation. And that doesn't suit strong men who want a more transactional might is right approach to the world.
But that's where you need us as, as humanity, because we were invented, remember, because of an age of strong men, because we'd seen what happened to the world when we went too far down that track of the strongman, of the autocrat, of fighting for resource in that way. And we've learnt a lot over those 80 years. We're just coming up to that 80th anniversary. We're constantly reforming.
But at the heart of all this must be our charter and this work we do to, to stop those wars and to to save lives. And as I say, there cannot be a more important mission. So, so who, who can stand up to them? I mean, I guess it's quite hard for you, you know, you're, you know, a senior official in a, in a organization that's supposed to be impartial, as you say. Is it for the is it for the secretary general to stand up to Donald Trump and say you need to
respect the rules based order? Well, an organization which I'd stress is impartial, not just supposed to be impartial, but we are impartial. I think what you're seeing in this moment actually where some of the more traditional supporters of the UN are being a bit more critical, a bit more sceptical. You are seeing other countries step forward and say, look, this is not AUS LED organization.
This is not just about the big powers, about the permanent members of the Security Council. This is our organization.
It belongs to all of us. And so many of those smaller states, medium sized states, emerging economies, they're the ones right now who are saying we've got to defend the values and the institution of the UN. And of course, then it is also for the SG, as he does to go out there and make the case repeatedly, consistently, powerfully, as he, as he does, always saying that we can be better.
And he's launched the UNAT Reform program, which is all about making sure that we really are fit for purpose and that we're constantly improving, but defending those values that that are at the heart of what we do. We must. Leave it there. Tom Fletcher, thank you very much indeed for your time. Many thanks, Christian. Thank you. Well, that's it for this episode of The Forecast. Until next time, bye bye.