Israel accused Tom Fletcher, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, of “libel” for a second time after the relief chief said there are 10,000 aid trucks on the Gaza border, cleared and ready to go.
“We’ve got 10,000 trucks on the border right now, cleared [and] ready to go, and we’ll do everything to get them in and save lives,” Fletcher told CNN’s Christine Amanpour on Monday.
When she repeated the number back to him incredulously, Fletcher nodded and replied, “Full of food.”
The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) posted the video on X/Twitter, saying, “Look, it’s @UNReliefChief with another libelous lie.”
“There are no 10,000 trucks waiting to go into Gaza. What there are, are hundreds of trucks’ worth of aid the UN hasn’t picked up from the Gazan side over the last few days after we gave you plenty of routes you can use to safely distribute the aid throughout Gaza.”
Hey look, it's @UNReliefChief with another libelous lie.We've been patient with your media circus, but your lies just keep coming: There are no 10 thousand trucks waiting to go into Gaza. What there are, are hundreds of trucks' worth of aid the @UN hasn't picked up from the… pic.twitter.com/qZzuKHYFB2
— COGAT (@cogatonline) May 26, 2025
This comes less than a week after Fletcher told the BBC that 14,000 Gazan babies would die within the next 48 hours unless aid reached them.
“There are five trucks just sitting on the other side of the border right now,” he said last Tuesday. “They have not reached the communities they need to reach. This is baby food, baby nutrition. There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.”
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs later retracted the statement when asked to verify by the BBC, saying it was rather about “the imperative of getting supplies in to save an estimated 14,000 babies suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Gaza.”
The IPC report's time frame was not over two days, but one year
UNOCHA also cited an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report that said 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition could occur among children aged six to 59 months between April 2025 and March 2026. The report’s time frame is one year, not two days.
This week, a New York Times investigation said Israel is set to transfer the responsibility of humanitarian aid distribution in the Gaza Strip to some newly formed private organizations, citing Israeli officials and others familiar with the plan’s conception.
Many of these private organizations are set to take the place of UN agencies and experienced aid groups, and also do not disclose any financial backers, the report added.
Fletcher himself said that the new aid mechanism is “a fig leaf for further violence and displacement,” which “makes starvation a bargaining chip.”