“Gaza is a hotspot of human rights violations”

September 5, 2025 – On Friday, 22 August, the United Nations declared a state of famine in Gaza, where more than half a million people are in a “catastrophic” state. The global majority, powerless, is outraged, while the West remains inert. Prisoners of their sense of guilt over the Holocaust, the Western powers remain passive in the face of Israeli atrocities, while a new genocidal process is under way. A confidential Israeli army report, made public on 21 August in “The Guardian” (https://share.google/iEaY12iUJP0cGg0Bh), confirms that 83 per cent of the 62,000 people so far killed in Gaza have been innocent civilians.
  Philippe Lazzarini has led the UN Relief and Works Agency, which was established in 1949 to provide for the welfare of Palestinians displaced when the state of Israel was founded the previous year, for the past decade, and he will continue to serve as the director of UNRWA for seven more months. Lazzarini, a Swiss citizen born in La Chaux-de-Fonds to an Italian father and a Swiss-German mother, lives in Geneva with his family. He has no intention of remaining silent or sitting back. He reflects on this humanitarian disaster and its consequences for the people of Gaza, and also for the future of humanitarian law and human rights.

Guy Mettan: You have some very harsh words for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), established by the Americans to help Gazans. You called the employees of this foundation, briefly registered in the Geneva Trade Register, mercenaries. That’s a bit excessive, isn’t it?
Philippe Lazzarini: They don’t hide it! The GHF’s employees are highly paid former soldiers who come to Gaza to carry out so-called humanitarian activities without knowing what humanitarian work is. The goal of this organization was to force the Palestinian population in the north and centre of the Gaza Strip to go south to get food. The number of local distribution centres went down from 400 to just a few, forcing the most vulnerable to move. How can we talk about humanitarian aid when the wounded, the disabled, the sick, children, and mothers are forced to travel miles to get food? Moreover, it has become a death trap for most people. Since it began operating last May, more than 1,500 people have been killed while looking for food because the centres are located right next to Israeli military positions, and the army has begun shooting at crowds as soon as an opportunity arose.
  Under the pretext of preventing any diversion of aid to Hamas, the Israeli army’s goal is to get rid of the aid organisation [UNRWA] established and supported by the entire international community and replace it with a private company founded by them with American support. This focus on Hamas is quite surprising, as the argument has suddenly surfaced, even though it had never been expressed by Israeli authorities to UN bodies, or even to American authorities, before this spring. It seems as if this is a fig leaf intended to conceal Israel’s political and military objectives.
  Furthermore, since the replacement of UNRWA by the GHF, the population of northern Gaza has entered a phase of famine, as the UN has just declared. According to international standards, there are five stages before reaching a state of famine. This final level has now been reached in the north and should be reached in September in the centre and south, where the majority of the population is located.
  This is the result of the GHF and its policies, while it is one of the easiest famines to stop, since it only takes a simple political decision to combat it by letting in the thousands of food trucks massed at the gates of the enclave. The starving Gazan population is less than thirty minutes from hundreds of perfectly stocked stores and feeding centres.

The LinkedIn profile of GHF Director General John Acree shows that he has in fact spent his entire career at USAID working with the US military. Have you met him? [The Trump administration dismantled the US Agency for International Development earlier this year.]
No, I don’t know him. The GHF is run by two men. The second, the executive chairman, is Pastor Johnnie Moore, an American businessman and reverend who is messianic and blindly pro-Israel.

By declaring a famine, isn’t the UN running the risk of playing into the hands of the GHF, which could use this to justify evacuating the Palestinians to better distribute its food?
Famine is not eliminated by evacuating people, as the southern Gaza Strip also suffers from food shortages. Since the beginning of the war, Israel has been continuously moving the population back and forth. Since October 2023, every resident of Gaza has been relocated an average of two to three times.
  Furthermore, it is a terrible and cynical joke to pretend to want to settle Palestinians in South Sudan, when this country is one of the poorest in the world, ravaged by war, underdeveloped due to decades of underinvestment, and culturally unsuitable, as its population is Christian or animist. The same applies to Libya, whose name has also been mentioned. How would millions of Muslim Palestinians be integrated into South Sudan? Would people be arrested and deported thousands of kilometres from their homes? This cannot be taken seriously; it is complete dystopia.

How do you explain the passivity of the West, and particularly the passivity of Europe, even when Europe has already witnessed a genocide without being offended, and continues to proclaim human rights as its new gospel?
Human rights should be our benchmark. The order that emerged after the Second World War, the multilateral system, the Geneva Conventions – all of this is being called into question by policies that, outside of Europe, are perceived as double standards. The Global South now tends to view human rights and international law as the result of the law of the strongest. In its eyes, these do not apply equally to everyone, or even at all in Palestine, where cycles of impunity have been observed that have only fuelled flagrant systematic violations of these rights.
  In Gaza we’ve seen it all: the military use of hunger, forced displacement, the destruction of the health system and the education system and various places of worship – a concentration of all possible human rights violations. And all of this has taken place, and continues to take place, right before our eyes, continuously. We can never say we didn’t know.
  It’s also a context where narratives clash. There’s an environment of propaganda but also of absolute censorship, with all international media having been banned from Gaza since day one. This allows us to say, if something doesn’t suit the occupier, that the information has been biased, without us being able to contradict it since access to the field has been denied. We ourselves have been the target of all sorts of grievances. But it would be enough to let the media into Gaza to see the horrible reality and the futility of the accusations against us.

How can you prove that UNRWA was not complicit with Hamas, as you are so often accused?
Since the beginning of the war, people have said: Gaza equals Hamas. Its entire population is Hamas. All the deaths in Gaza are justified by saying those victims were members of Hamas. We saw this two weeks ago with the assassination of the famous Al Jazeera journalist, Anas al-Sharif, who allegedly worked for Hamas.  Everything is justified behind the label “Hamas”. [On Monday, 25 August, five other journalists were killed for the same reasons.]
  Our agency has been accused of having hired collaborators who were members of Hamas, and that some even participated in the atrocious October 7 attack against Israel. We conducted an independent investigation into each of these accused persons, the findings of which were made public in July of last year.
  For half of the accused – a total of 19 people out of 13,000 employees – 10 were cleared, while for nine others, several of whom were killed, it was concluded that if information about them could be accessed, there might be grounds for an investigation. Their contracts were terminated. All our donors and the vast majority of UN member states accepted these conclusions and resumed their support for UNRWA.
  Subsequently, we faced systematic accusations of Hamas infiltration within the agency. Israel cited 500 names, 1,000 names, then 3,000 names. Each time, these names appeared on lists, and Israel claimed to have proof of their membership in Hamas. But simply putting a name on a list is not enough to provide evidence against that person. We have repeatedly asked the Israeli authorities and anyone who might have information if they had any evidence that would allow us to open an investigation. Each time the answer has been negative.
  Israel has never launched a criminal investigation. For more than twenty years, UNRWA has been submitting its employee list to the host country, the Palestinian state, and to the Israeli authorities. Neither has ever expressed concern. I reminded the Israeli foreign minister of this, but I never received a response. We remain available and are ready, both the United Nations and UNRWA, to open an investigation as soon as a suspicious case is reported to us.
  Other UN entities, such as OCHA [the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs], have been targeted. There is also no evidence. The “Hamas” label is constantly used to try to discredit them. UNRWA is targeted because our agency symbolizes Palestine and its history and embodies the creation of a future Palestinian state. It also symbolizes the right of return, which is crucial for Israel. This is why our agency, in the eyes of many Israeli politicians, must disappear.
  In his film on UNRWA, Swiss filmmaker Nicolas Wadimoff expresses this question very well. He interviewed a former Israeli far-right politician who is leading a crusade to dismantle our agency. She clearly explains her motivations, they have nothing to do with Hamas, but rather with the Palestinians’ right to return to their land.
  And we must not forget that Hamas was supported at the time by this same Israeli government and this same far-right, who wanted to discredit and weaken the Palestinian Authority and the PLO [the Palestine Liberation Organisation] to ensure that Israel would not have a credible partner to conduct peace negotiations, and thus prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu has said this publicly in speeches to his own party.

Yet you refrain from using the word “genocide”. Why?
I spoke of genocidal behaviour because the word “genocide” is a legal term that has not yet been confirmed by the International Criminal Court (ICC). There are all the indications that a genocidal process is under way, as we have seen. The ICC has already taken provisional measures, but it still needs to examine the evidence, and we must await its judgment before the term genocide becomes legal and can be used to describe what is happening.
  Moreover, we are hearing more and more voices, including in Israel, such as B’Tselem, speaking of a situation of genocide, in addition to those of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. For me, it is important to describe and capture as closely as possible the suffering endured by the Palestinian population. As our colleagues say, “We are neither alive nor dead; we are only corpses that are still walking”. The atrocious reality of life in Gaza cannot be captured by an abstract legal concept.

You mentioned the incredible rescue of the UNRWA archives. Why was it so important to preserve them?
These archives represent the entire history, memory, and identity of two million Palestinians, their families, their family trees, and their displacements since the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1946–1948. They are part of the future national heritage of the future Palestinian state.
  Luckily, they hadn’t attracted much attention. We were able to get them out of Gaza at the start of the war, in November 2023, when we had to evacuate our headquarters. This was thanks to some of our employees who had made it their raison d’être and told themselves they wouldn’t die before doing so. We were able to store them in Rafah, where they were safe until the Israeli army attacked the city. I then wanted to negotiate with the Egyptians, but I thought that it would take too long, so we decided to evacuate them box by box, hiding them in our armoured vehicles, which could still be driven at that time towards Jerusalem and from there to our new headquarters in Amman. They were able to be fully extracted in a few weeks. Since then, they have been digitized and can no longer be destroyed.

And on returning to Switzerland, you said that Switzerland could do better. How?
Of course, Switzerland could do better. Many parliamentarians have taken at face value the propaganda coming from pro-Israeli lobbies, which is the result of the extreme polarization that this conflict provokes far beyond its region of origin. I am pleased that Switzerland has maintained some of its funding, and that recent debates have taken a less-dogmatic turn. At the beginning, the debate was not rational and did not represent the humanitarian, impartial, and independent Switzerland to which we are accustomed.
  Following the failure of the Conference of the Contracting Parties, called for by the UN General Assembly, Switzerland could return to the drawing board and request a new mandate from the Assembly. It would be worth it because so much is at stake. The Geneva Conventions must apply everywhere, not just in Gaza. On the other hand, Gaza cannot be considered an isolated situation, separated from the rest of the world. What is tolerated in Gaza sets a precedent that others will be quick to claim.
  We must prevent Gaza from becoming the new “normal”. That is the real issue. I believe that a country such as Switzerland, which has always positioned itself as the guarantor of international law and humanitarian law, should be deeply concerned and take initiatives to protect the spirit of this law and the Geneva Conventions. It is in this regard that it could and should do more.
  Now that we are talking about famine, I hope that Switzerland will reconsider its position and realize that allowing an obvious famine will be considered as an indelible stain. I hope that UNRWA and other private and public agencies will once again be granted permission to resume deliveries of food and medical assistance without restriction, and that they will be given the necessary resources.

In addition to the GHF?
If we consider the GHF as an agency that contributes to humanitarian aid and the distribution of essential goods, why not? We have always believed that we must work together and that no single organization can claim to solve all the Palestinians’ problems. We need this complementarity. But we cannot work hand-in-hand with an agency that collaborates with the army and allows people who come seeking its help to be shot like rabbits. Yet this manhunt is tolerated, openly tolerated, and encouraged by the GHF. If the GHF brings food, fine. But not by playing the “Hunger Games”. •

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Philippe Lazzarini is a Swiss national with 40 years of professional experience, including leadership positions at the United Nations, the private sector, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. He has extensive experience in humanitarian assistance and international coordination in conflict and post-conflict areas at senior levels. On 18 March 2020, Philippe Lazzarini was appointed Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East by UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Prior to this, he served as Deputy Special Coordinator of the United Nations (UNSCOL) and Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Lebanon since 2015. Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1964, he studied economics and business administration. From 1989 to 1999, he worked for the ICRC as Deputy Head of the Communications Department in Geneva, as Head of Delegation in Rwanda, Angola and Sarajevo, and as Delegate in South Sudan, Jordan, Gaza and Beirut.  After three years at Union Bancaire Privée in Geneva, Philippe Lazzarini joined the United Nations in 2003, where he held various senior positions in the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Iraq, Angola, Somalia and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.  From 2013 to 2015, he was Deputy Special Representative, Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator with the United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia. Philippe Lazzarini is married and has four children.

** Guy Mettan is a political scientist, freelance journalist, and author. He began his journalistic career in 1980 at the “Tribune de Genève”, where he was director and editor-in-chief from 1992 to 1998. From 1997 to 2020, he was director of the Swiss Press Club in Geneva. He has been a member of the Grand Council of Geneva for 25 years.