UN’s Tom Fletcher, Serial Liar, Needs to Resign

Tom Fletcher is the UN’s Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Aid. He has recently been caught making false accusations against Israel so grotesque and so dangerous that he must be forced to resign. More on his mythomania can be found here: “Tom Fletcher’s continued falsehoods on Israel prove he needs to resign – editorial,” Jerusalem Post, June 1, 2025:

Tom Fletcher must resign. The UN’s under-secretary for humanitarian aid, tasked with supposed impartiality and accuracy in global crises, has proven himself yet again unworthy of the post he holds. His recent inflammatory accusations against Israel, specifically that it is subjecting Gaza to “forced starvation,” a war crime, are not only unsubstantiated but dangerously irresponsible.

In a BBC interview published on Friday, Fletcher claimed that Israel is deliberately starving the population of Gaza, implying intentional war crimes. “It is classified as a war crime,” he said, adding that courts and history will ultimately judge. These are no small words. They carry weight. They can inflame conflict. They can distort international discourse. And they must be based on facts, not ideological fervor or personal agendas.

Fletcher made this claim about Israel “deliberately starving” the people in Gaza several days after truckloads of food — now up to 200 a day — were entering Gaza from Israel, and were being distributed under guard, both by the IDF and by private American contractors, to prevent Hamas from stealing much of the aid as it has always done in the past. Does that show an intent to “deliberately starve” the people of Gaza?

Fletcher is not new to exaggeration. Just last week, he was forced to walk back a false and hysterical claim that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours if aid was not allowed into Gaza. The UN itself later clarified that the figure, taken from a year-long projection on malnutrition, was grossly misrepresented. Fletcher admitted they were “desperate to get that aid in,” and thus loosened their standards of accuracy. That is not desperation. That is deception.

Fletcher justified his wild claim — that “14,000 babies in Gaza will die within the next 48 hours” — because, he said, it was the only way to put enough pressure on Israel to let in aid, even though by the time Fletcher made his crazed remark, Israel had already started to renew aid deliveries with first tens, and then with hundreds, of truckloads of food being distributed each day.

Even as Israel has opened aid corridors and worked with the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to allow supplies through, Fletcher has refused to acknowledge any progress. Nor has he uttered a single word about the very real obstacles posed by Hamas. The terrorist group routinely hijacks aid convoys, reroutes them to its own warehouses, and sells food at extortionate prices to a starving population. This is a humanitarian catastrophe created by Hamas, but Fletcher has yet to acknowledge it….

Hamas relies on the aid it steals and then sells to Gazans who were supposed to receive that aid for free, to provide it with the money it needs to pay its combatants. The IDF is trying to keep Hamas from stealing that aid, by guarding trucks of aid from being hijacked, and under its guard unloading that aid at designated distribution points, where crowds have been rushing to grab those boxes full of food and other humanitarian aid. The first days have been chaotic, because many in the crowd feared that, as has happened in the past, Hamas would manage to steal so much of the aid. But as they have come to realize, Hamas is being successfully kept out, and their initial panic is subsiding. They now feel more confident that the IDF and American security contractors will be able to distribute the aid without Hamas stealing it. Tom Fletcher never mentions either Hamas’ massive theft of aid in the past, or the IDF’s determination to prevent such theft now.

Fletcher even went so far in his BBC interview as to call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “disavow” the words of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who suggested that people in Gaza might be inclined to relocate to other countries. That comment, crude and unhelpful as it may be, is now used by the humanitarian aid under-secretary as “evidence” of a policy of forced displacement, another supposed war crime. But where is the same righteous fury for Hamas’s actual, documented war crimes? Where is Fletcher’s voice when it comes to the 1,200 Israelis and others butchered on October 7, or the hostages still being tortured in Gaza?

Bezalel Smotrich’s comment about Gazans who might want to leave the Strip has been taken to mean that the Israeli government is going to force the Gazans to leave. Two points: first, Smotrich is only one member of Netanyahu’s cabinet, and speaks only for himself. His words neither represent, nor bind, the government of Israel; second, he did not speak of forcing Gazans out of Gaza, but only observed that some Gazans, unsurprisingly, would voluntarily wish to leave the rubble-strewn Strip. That is not “forced displacement,” but rather, a policy of helping Gazans who wish to leave to do so.

In all of his talk about Gaza, Tom Fletcher has said nothing about the 1,200 Israelis who were raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered on October 7, 2023, nor has he expressed a syllable of sympathy for the hostages — more than half of them murdered by Hamas, while those still alive are subject, we know from the hostages who have been released, to every sort of torture.

Tom Fletcher must resign. He won’t do so, of course. He’ll try to brazen it out, resist calls for his resignation, secure in the knowledge that most of member states of the UN are not offended by, but share his anti-Israel animus. There is only one way to force him out: that is for the member-states of the West, led by the United States, to threaten to reduce or withhold altogether their “dues” to support the UN, as long as Tom Fletcher remains on its staff. That should get the attention of Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Already the UN has announced it will have to cut its budget by 20%, and will be forced to lay off 6,900 members of its worldwide staff. It cannot sustain a further cut in financial support. Fletcher is too expensive to keep on the staff. He will have to resign, or be forced out.