UN agency’s bias skews data, damages Israel’s reputation

The United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) plays a significant role in documenting humanitarian crises worldwide. However, its Israeli office has exhibited systematic bias, methodological inconsistencies, and flawed data collection methods, causing enormous damage to Israel’s reputation.

COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories), Israel’s official humanitarian aid organisation, has drafted a report examining OCHA’s reporting, its reliance on questionable sources, and its role in shaping international narratives based on distorted information with numerous egregious cases in Gaza.

According to UN guidelines, OCHA, as an agency operating on its behalf, must adhere to the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, humanity, and independence. This obligation is anchored in UN General Assembly resolutions.

The organisation defines these principles and explains that, “Humanitarian actors must not take sides in hostilities or engage in controversies of a political, racial, religious, or ideological nature,” as well as refrain from “making distinctions based on nationality, race, gender, religious beliefs, class, or political opinions”.

However, an examination of OCHA’s reporting practices in general and during the conflict in Gaza since the Hamas-induced war of 7 October, when Israel was forced to react to Palestinian barbaric attacks against Israeli citizens keeping them hostage and refusing to return them, clearly reveals a significant bias in the organisation’s reports in favour of the Palestinian side.

Many diplomatic and media entities look on the UN’s OCHA as the authoritative source of information on the reality of the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria. However, they are unaware of the degree to which OCHA’s reports are one-sided and selective.

OCHA hasn’t, for example, monitored nor reported the systematic and deadly violence by Palestinians against Israeli civilians nor the numerous violations by Palestinian armed groups against Palestinians such as the use of human shields, abuse of civilian facilities, and obstruction of humanitarian assistance in Gaza by Palestinian Hamas.

To date, OCHA hasn’t reported on the existence of a single Hamas tunnel used for terrorism or any launch of rockets from the densely populated area in Gaza, many of them short-falling and killing the local population, at least one of which hit a hospital killing and injuring at least 400 people, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, aka the Hamas terror organisation.

All these acts are self-evident war crimes.

In contrast, OCHA exclusively reports on actions by Israel, all of which are couched in negative terms as if there were no mitigating factors.

The reliance on sources with questionable credibility further erodes the organisation’s impartiality. OCHA frequently cites information without specifying its source or underlying methodology, often referring to them as unspecified “UN assessments”.

This practice was particularly evident in its weekly (previously daily) reports on Gaza and the West Bank, where reports have repeatedly relied on information from Hamas-controlled institutions such as the Gaza Ministry of Health and the Government Media Office, again Hamas, without proper verification.

Notably, after 7 October 2023, OCHA initially acknowledged Hamas as the source of casualty figures but later removed these attributions, reinstating them only after Israeli intervention.

Additionally, when reporting on conflicts around the world, OCHA doesn’t consider any other entity in conflict zones reliable enough to cite regularly for casualty figures in its reports, for example in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, etc. However, Hamas is its source of information on a regular basis. In doing so, OCHA gives the terror organisation credibility.

When quoting casualty figures, OCHA doesn’t clearly state that these figures include members of armed groups, contrary to the UN’s standard practice elsewhere in the world, distinguishing between civilians and non-civilians in casualty reports. In the case of Gaza, OCHA has created the misleading impression that the figures refer to civilians only.

The casualty numbers adopted by OCHA also don’t account for natural deaths and deaths by accident or as a result of crimes and violence inside the Gaza Strip such as violence between clans and other criminal violence, of which there is much.

OCHA adopted Hamas sources as credible during the war, giving credibility to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Much of the Western media fed off its inaccurate information. The result was that Israel was constantly cast in a bad light, leaving Hamas unblemished.

OCHA, therefore, has been an active partner of the Hamas psychological warfare and disinformation campaign against Israel.

OCHA tracks only humanitarian goods entering Gaza by the UN and partial information on other INGOs (international nongovernmental organisations), excluding private-sector aid.

This leads to a skewed picture of the full amount of aid that entered the Gaza Strip throughout the war, showcasing significantly lower amounts than actually entered Gaza.

OCHA’s counting methods also ignored security-screened goods that were introduced into the Gaza Strip but left uncollected.

Egregiously, OCHA also doesn’t acknowledge the presence of another, more extensive, set of data managed by COGAT, Israel’s official humanitarian aid organisation, preferring to use Hamas-run ministries extensively as information sources.

This selective reporting and lack of transparency gave governments, officials, and the media, which relied on OCHA’s data, a distorted picture of the overall humanitarian situation and the necessary actions to address it.

OCHA’s reports also contain misleading food insecurity projections.

In weekly reports after the hostage-release deal began, OCHA still claimed that 91% of Gaza’s population faced extreme food insecurity. This was based on outdated IPC (integrated food security phase classification) estimates from November 2024, and ignored the fact that hundreds more trucks of food entered Gaza daily.

These reports failed to incorporate food aid deliveries post-ceasefire despite acknowledging the ceasefire itself.

The Israeli government challenged the report’s credibility, yet OCHA continued to cite its incorrect figures, fuelling misleading famine narratives that misrepresented the situation on the ground and badly tarnished Israel.

OCHA is also guilty of data washing.

Unverified statistics and information are often reported by OCHA without quoting a source or a verification but often with an appropriate disclaimer. Other UN organisations, international organisations, and governments quote OCHA reports, using OCHA as its source. The original disclaimers disappear when other entities quote OCHA’s reports and are quoted as verified information by the UN.

An example was the claim that Gaza has the “largest population of child amputees in modern history” a lie that has been widely circulated by international organisations based on flawed extrapolations. This misrepresentation further misguides global discourse on the conflict, putting pressure on the government of Israel without any justification.

Despite extensive documentation of Hamas’s atrocities on 7 October, OCHA has yet to publish a single report detailing these war crimes. The suffering endured by Israeli society, including rocket attacks, extensive displacement, and trauma, let alone the murder, torture, rape, and hostage taking, is barely mentioned, if at all.

This selective emphasis creates an imbalance that compromises OCHA’s humanitarian principles of neutrality and independence.

In light of OCHA’s mistakes and omissions, it has an obligation to take immediate corrective measures and actions to demonstrate its supposed commitment to reliable, credible, and verified information including correcting incorrect information, inaccurate data, and unsubstantiated claims in its reports since 7 October 2023.

It must clearly state that reported fatalities and injuries include the large numbers of members of armed groups and individuals involved in violent attacks against Israelis.

Addressing these issues is critical to ensure that OCHA’s humanitarian efforts genuinely serve all affected populations honestly and without bias.

• Barry Shaw is international public diplomacy associate at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.