UN says Israel has refused to renew visas for heads of at least 3 agencies in Gaza

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Israel has refused to renew visas for the heads of at least three United Nations agencies in Gaza, which the UN humanitarian chief blames on their work trying to protect Palestinian civilians in the war-torn territory.

Visas for the local leaders of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, known as OCHA; the human rights agency OHCHR; and the agency supporting Palestinians in Gaza, UNRWA, have not been renewed in recent months, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric confirmed.

Tom Fletcher, UN head of humanitarian affairs, told the Security Council on Wednesday that the UN’s humanitarian mandate is not just to provide aid to civilians in need and report what its staff witnesses but to advocate for international humanitarian law.

“Each time we report on what we see, we face threats of further reduced access to the civilians we are trying to serve,” he said. “Nowhere today is the tension between our advocacy mandate and delivering aid greater than in Gaza.”

Fletcher alleged, “Visas are not renewed or reduced in duration by Israel, explicitly in response to our work on protection of civilians.”

Israel’s UN Mission said it is looking into the issue. Israel has been sharply critical of UNRWA, even before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror assault in southern Israel — accusing the agency of colluding with Hamas and teaching anti-Israel hatred, which UNRWA denies.

Since then, the Israeli government has asserted that UNRWA is deeply infiltrated by Hamas. Some of the agency’s staffers participated in the October 7 attacks. Israel formally banned UNRWA from operating in its territory, and its commissioner general, Swiss-Italian humanitarian Philippe Lazzarini, has been barred from entering Gaza.

The UN identified the other two local leaders affected as Jonathan Whittall, a South African humanitarian expert for OCHA, and Ajith Sunghay, a British-educated international lawyer for OHCHR.

At Wednesday’s Security Council meeting, Fletcher called conditions in Gaza “beyond vocabulary,” with food running out and Palestinians being shot while seeking something to eat. He said Israel, the occupying power in Gaza, is failing in its obligation under the Geneva Conventions to provide for civilian needs.

In response, Israel accused OCHA of continuing “to abandon all semblance of neutrality and impartiality in its statements and actions, despite claiming otherwise.”

Reut Shapir Ben-Naftaly, political coordinator at Israel’s UN Mission, told the Security Council that some of its 15 members seem to forget that the Oct. 7 attacks killed about 1,200 people and some 250 were taken hostage, triggering the war in Gaza and the humanitarian situation.

“Instead, we’re presented with a narrative that forces Israel into a defendant’s chair, while Hamas, the very cause of this conflict and the very instigator of the suffering of Israelis and also of Palestinians, goes unmentioned, unchallenged and immune to condemnation,” she said.

More than 58,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants. It claims more than half of the dead are women and under-18s.

Ravina Shamdasani, chief spokesperson for the Geneva-based UN human rights body, confirmed Thursday that the head of its office in the Palestinian territories “has been denied entry into Gaza.”

“The last time he tried to enter was in February 2025, and since then, he has been denied entry,” she told The Associated Press. “Unfortunately, this is not unusual. Aid workers, UN staff, journalists and others have been denied access to Gaza.”

Israel has accused a UN-backed commission probing abuses in Gaza, whose three members just resigned, and the Human Rights Council’s independent investigator Francesca Albanese of antisemitism.

Albanese, an Italian national, regularly accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza and has said that the October 7 attacks by Hamas must be put in a” context of decades of oppression imposed on the Palestinians.”

She has said that the “Jewish lobby” controls the US, repeatedly compared Israelis to Nazis, rejected antisemitic motivations for Hamas’s October 7 attack, blamed Israel for the invasion, rejected Israeli security concerns, condemned Israel’s killing of Hamas terror chief Yahya Sinwar and denied Israel’s right to self-defense, among other inflammatory statements.

The Trump administration recently issued sanctions against Albanese.

Fletcher, the UN humanitarian chief, told the Security Council that Israel is also not granting “security clearances” for staff to enter Gaza to continue their work and that UN humanitarian partners are increasingly being denied entry as well.

He noted that “56 percent of the entries denied into Gaza in 2025 were for emergency medical teams — frontline responders who save lives.”

“Hundreds of aid workers have been killed; and those who continue to work endure hunger, danger and loss, like everyone else in the Gaza Strip,” Fletcher said.

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