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STORY: UN / GAZA HUMANITARIAN
TRT: 06:43
SOURCE: UNIFEED
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGES: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 16 JULY 2025, NEW YORK CITY / FILE
FILE - NEW YORK CITY
1. Wide shot, exterior United Nations Headquarters
16 JULY 2025, NEW YORK CITY
2. Wide shot, Security Council
3. Med shot, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher addressing Council
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator:
“Israel, as the occupying power, is obligated to ensure that people have food and medical supplies. But that is not happening. Instead, civilians are exposed to death and injury, forcible displacement, stripped of dignity. It is for you to draw your own conclusions. But surely, we do not need to debate whether killing civilians waiting in line for life’s essentials meets the responsibility to provide for civilian needs.”
5. Med shot, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell, and Israeli representative
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator:
“We are awaiting the outcome of Israel’s investigation into this, and numerous earlier incidents. I hope that you will consider whether Israel’s rules of engagement incorporate all feasible precautions to avoid and minimize civilian harm, in all circumstances. This means – here and elsewhere - verifying targets, giving effective advance warnings, carefully choosing tactics and weapons, and cancelling or suspending an attack if it would cause disproportionate civilian harm.”
7. Med shot, Fletcher addressing Council
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator:
“Each time that we report on what we see, we face threats of further reduced access to the civilians we are trying to serve. We face that tension everywhere but nowhere is that tension between our advocacy mandate and delivering aid greater than in Gaza. Visas are not renewed or reduced in duration, explicitly in response to our work on protection of civilians. Security clearances are not granted for staff to enter Gaza to continue their work and humanitarian partners are increasingly denied entry to Gaza.”
9. Med shot, Fletcher addressing Council
10. SOUNDBITE (English) Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator:
“We have a plan that works. It requires predictable aid, of different types and at scale, entering multiple crossings where people do not come under fire, travelling on routes that we choose, without long delays, being delivered to our warehouses and distribution points according to established UN aid mechanisms and humanitarian principles – the principles that you have given us the mandate to uphold.”
11. Wide shot, Russell addressing Council
12. SOUNDBITE (English) Catherine Russell, Executive Director, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF):
“Over the past 21 months of war, more than 17,000 children have reportedly been killed and 33,000 injured in Gaza. An average of 28 children have been killed each day – the equivalent of an entire classroom. Consider that for a moment. A whole classroom of children killed every day for nearly two years. These children are not combatants. They are being killed and maimed as they line up for lifesaving food and medicine.”
13. Wide shot, Russell addressing Council
14. SOUNDBITE (English) Catherine Russell, Executive Director, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF):
“Children who survive the war in Gaza will be forever affected by the deprivation and exposure to traumatic events they have experienced. Even before the war began, half of Gaza’s child population needed mental health and psychological support. Today, all of Gaza’s children need these services.”
15. Wide shot, United States Ambassador Dorothy Shea addressing Council
16. SOUNDBITE (English) Dorothy Shea, Acting Representative to the United Nations, United States:
“We would urge Member States and the UN to support the GHF and stop echoing incorrect information that benefits Hamas and undermines the secure delivery of aid to civilians in Gaza. It is unconscionable that Members of this Council have focused on criticizing the GHF rather than condemning Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for their continued abuse of the Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The result is an ever-growing credibility gap for the United Nations.”
17. Wide shot, Palestinian Ambassador Majed Bamya addressing Council
18. SOUNDBITE (English) Majed Bamya, Deputy Permanent Observer to the United Nations, State of Palestine:
“They want to say, we chose to leave. We chose to be occupied. We chose to be oppressed. It is our fault. It's always our fault. That has been the narrative since the beginning. Didn't they say we were responsible for our own Nakba? That we left on our own? Forgetting the massacres and the towns and villages destroyed. Let them leave, they say. This is Israel’s solution for the Palestine question; a right to further and definitive exile rather than a right of return or the right to life and liberty in our ancestral homeland.”
19. Wide shot, Bamya addressing Council
20. SOUNDBITE (English) Majed Bamya, Deputy Permanent Observer to the United Nations, State of Palestine:
“It is a genocide. Many observers say it. Many independent organizations say it. Many scholars say it from Israel and the rest of the world. And we blame Israel for these actions, not Israeli civilians, not Jews around the world. They're not responsible for what Israel is doing. And many Jews around the world stand for justice, in Palestine and elsewhere. They call it a genocide, and they fight to stop this genocide, and they fight for a future of peace.”
21. Wide shot, Israeli representative Reut Shapir Ben Naftaly addressing Council
22. SOUNDBITE (English) Reut Shapir Ben Naftaly, Minister Counsellor, Permanent Mission to the United Nations, Israel:
“The glaring silence of this Council about Israeli children, about hostages, murdered toddlers like the Bibas boys, on traumatized survivors who will never see their parents again, on children running for shelter as Iranian missiles rained down on civilian population centres, is more than a technical mission. It is a moral failure.”
23. Wide shot, Naftaly addressing Council
24. SOUNDBITE (English) Reut Shapir Ben Naftaly, Minister Counsellor, Permanent Mission to the United Nations, Israel:
“We are 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 suffering of Israelis but also of Palestinians, goes unmentioned, unchallenged and immune to condemnation.”
25. Wide shot, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Türkiye, Hakan Fidan, addressing Council
26. SOUNDBITE (English) Hakan Fidan, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Türkiye:
“Israel is trying to implement its strategy of aggression not only in Palestine, but also in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. There is a clear pattern here. If left unchecked, this pattern risks wider destabilization. This is exactly what's going on in Syria. Israeli aggression is threatening the fragile peace that Syrian people pay the high price to reach. These attacks are deepening the fault lines across the region. It should be clear to all of us by now, Israel doesn't want peace, Israel doesn't want stability.”
27. Wide shot, end of Council session
Addressing a Security Council meeting on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher today (16 Jul) said, “surely, we do not need to debate whether killing civilians waiting in line for life’s essentials meets the responsibility to provide for civilian needs.”
Fletcher said, “Israel, as the occupying power, is obligated to ensure that people have food and medical supplies. But that is not happening. Instead, civilians are exposed to death and injury, forcible displacement, stripped of dignity.”
Following reports of dozens of people killed or injured at one of the Israeli-militarized food distribution hubs this morning, he said, “we are awaiting the outcome of Israel’s investigation into this, and numerous earlier incidents” and asked Council Members to consider “whether Israel’s rules of engagement incorporate all feasible precautions to avoid and minimize civilian harm, in all circumstances.”
Fletcher told the Council that “each time that we report on what we see, we face threats of further reduced access to the civilians we are trying to serve. We face that tension everywhere but nowhere is that tension between our advocacy mandate and delivering aid greater than in Gaza. Visas are not renewed or reduced in duration, explicitly in response to our work on protection of civilians. Security clearances are not granted for staff to enter Gaza to continue their work and humanitarian partners are increasingly denied entry to Gaza.”
The Under-Secretary-General said, “we have a plan that works. It requires predictable aid, of different types and at scale, entering multiple crossings where people do not come under fire, travelling on routes that we choose, without long delays, being delivered to our warehouses and distribution points according to established UN aid mechanisms and humanitarian principles – the principles that you have given us the mandate to uphold.”
UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell for her part told the Council that “over the past 21 months of war, more than 17,000 children have reportedly been killed and 33,000 injured in Gaza. An average of 28 children have been killed each day – the equivalent of an entire classroom.”
Russell said, “these children are not combatants. They are being killed and maimed as they line up for lifesaving food and medicine.”
The Executive Director said, “children who survive the war in Gaza will be forever affected by the deprivation and exposure to traumatic events they have experienced. Even before the war began, half of Gaza’s child population needed mental health and psychological support. Today, all of Gaza’s children need these services.”
United States Ambassador Dorothy Shea urged Member States and the United Nations to support the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) “and stop echoing incorrect information that benefits Hamas and undermines the secure delivery of aid to civilians in Gaza.”
Shea said it was “unconscionable that Members of this Council have focused on criticizing the GHF rather than condemning Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for their continued abuse of the Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The result is an ever-growing credibility gap for the United Nations.”
Palestinian Ambassador Majed Bamya said, “they want to say, we chose to leave. We chose to be occupied. We chose to be oppressed. It is our fault. It's always our fault. That has been the narrative since the beginning. Didn't they say we were responsible for our own Nakba? That we left on our own? Forgetting the massacres and the towns and villages destroyed. Let them leave, they say. This is Israel’s solution for the Palestine question; a right to further and definitive exile rather than a right of return or the right to life and liberty in our ancestral homeland.”
Bamya said, “it is a genocide. Many observers say it. Many independent organizations say it. Many scholars say it from Israel and the rest of the world. And we blame Israel for these actions, not Israeli civilians, not Jews around the world. They're not responsible for what Israel is doing. And many Jews around the world stand for justice, in Palestine and elsewhere. They call it a genocide, and they fight to stop this genocide, and they fight for a future of peace.”
Israeli representative Reut Shapir Ben Naftaly said, “the glaring silence of this Council about Israeli children, about hostages, murdered toddlers like the Bibas boys, on traumatized survivors who will never see their parents again, on children running for shelter as Iranian missiles rained down on civilian population centres, is more than a technical mission. It is a moral failure.”
Naftaly said, “we are 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 suffering of Israelis but also of Palestinians, goes unmentioned, unchallenged and immune to condemnation.”
Türkiye’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Hakan Fidan told the Council that “Israel is trying to implement its strategy of aggression not only in Palestine, but also in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. There is a clear pattern here. If left unchecked, this pattern risks wider destabilization. This is exactly what's going on in Syria. Israeli aggression is threatening the fragile peace that Syrian people pay the high price to reach. These attacks are deepening the fault lines across the region. It should be clear to all of us by now, Israel doesn't want peace, Israel doesn't want stability.”
In the past week, severe injuries continued to be reported among people seeking aid. The World Health Organization reported one instance where a 21-year-old man was paralyzed for life after being shot while trying to collect a bag of flour from one of these militarized food distribution hubs.
Meanwhile, months of escalating hostilities have increased risks for the most vulnerable, including people with disabilities and older people, who struggle to access what they need to survive and become even more isolated.
