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STORY: UN / GAZA UNMAS PRESSER
TRT: 02:52
SOURCE: UNIFEED
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 21 OCTOBER 2025, NEW YORK CITY / FILE
FILE - NEW YORK CITY
1. Wide shot, exterior UN Headquarters
21 OCTOBER 2025, NEW YORK CITY
2. Wide shot, press room dais, Luke Irving on screen
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Luke Irving, Chief, Mission in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS):
“As communities and humanitarian personnel now move for affected areas, explosive risk is incredibly high. We know from decades of experience, when many other conflicts end, explosive elements continue to maim and kill. Gaza is no exception. Just last week, we saw news reports of five children injured, two of them very seriously, while encountering explosive ordnance in the rubble. UNMAS is following up to confirm the details of these reports. But it is one of hundreds of stories of people, often children, killed and suffering life-changing injuries at the hands of these dangerous items.”
4. Wide shot, dais, Irving on screen
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Luke Irving, Chief, Mission in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS):
“Since March 2025, we have produced over 400,000 risk education materials, including flyers, stickers and safe messaging on explosive ordnance for victims and incident reporting. 308,000 of which are already pre-positioned with our humanitarian partners ready to distribute to communities they reach. We need to reach the entire population of Gaza with these messages to mitigate the risk of these explosive items.”
6. Wide shot, dais, Irving on screen
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Luke Irving, Chief, Mission in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS):
“Our explosive ordnance disposal experts conduct technical assessments of roads and sites like WASH facilities, health centres, shelters, agricultural areas, bakeries. These enable our partners to proceed safely with a critical humanitarian response, rehabilitating hospitals, delivering food aid to those in need. And we conduct those need assessments across Gaza. We also support recovery efforts to enable partners to safely place an estimated 50 to 60 million tonnes of debris, which may have been contaminated with explosive ordnance.”
8. Wide shot, dais, Irving on screen
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Luke Irving, Chief, Mission in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS):
“The prioritization would always be critical infrastructure access, roads opening up. Basically, the services that could stave by the situation, allow people to return to a normal way of life, lifesaving infrastructure. That's always, that's the priorities, we put those in first. I absolutely welcome - and we hope as a sector, and I speak on behalf of the mine action sector - that we can expand and scale up. Other partners will come in; other international organisations will come in, I hope, in the in the coming weeks, and we absolutely welcome this, and we can expand collectively as a unified sector to address these needs.”
10. Wide shot, dais, Irving on screen
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Luke Irving, Chief, Mission in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS):
“As expected, we're now finding more items because we're getting out more; the teams have more access to conducting more missions. During the conflict phase we weren't able to do that. No civil actor was able to do that. So just to answer your question, we have identified around 560 items since October 23, 560 items.”
12. Wide shot, end of briefing
The Chief of the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Luke Irving, today (21 Oct) told reporters in New York that as communities and humanitarian personnel are no moving into war affected areas in Gaza, “explosive risk is incredibly high,”
Briefing virtually from Jerusalem to discuss the situation of unexploded ordnance in Gaza, Irving said, “just last week, we saw news reports of five children injured, two of them very seriously, while encountering explosive ordnance in the rubble. UNMAS is following up to confirm the details of these reports. But it is one of hundreds of stories of people, often children, killed and suffering life-changing injuries at the hands of these dangerous items.”
Since March 2025, he said, UNMAS has produced “over 400,000 risk education materials, including flyers, stickers and safe messaging on explosive ordnance for victims and incident reporting. 308,000 of which are already pre-positioned with our humanitarian partners ready to distribute to communities they reach.”
Irving said, “we need to reach the entire population of Gaza with these messages to mitigate the risk of these explosive items.”
He said, “our explosive ordnance disposal experts conduct technical assessments of roads and sites like WASH facilities, health centres, shelters, agricultural areas, bakeries. These enable our partners to proceed safely with a critical humanitarian response, rehabilitating hospitals, delivering food aid to those in need.”
50 to 60 million tonnes of debris are estimated to have been contaminated with explosive ordnance.
The mine action official said, “prioritization would always be critical infrastructure access, roads opening up. Basically, the services that could stave by the situation, allow people to return to a normal way of life, lifesaving infrastructure.”
He welcomed the participation of other partners and international organisations from the mine action sector mine expected in the coming weeks, in order to “expand collectively as a unified sector to address these needs.”
Responding to a journalist question Irving said 560 unexploded ordnance items have been recovered, pointing out that, “as expected, we're now finding more items because we're getting out more; the teams have more access to conducting more missions. During the conflict phase we weren't able to do that. No civil actor was able to do that.”
UNMAS has been supporting mine action activities throughout the OPT since 2009. However, since the escalation of hostilities on 7 October 2023, UNMAS operations have considerably evolved to adapt to the emerging needs of local populations and humanitarian partners in both Gaza and the West Bank
