The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) plays a significant role in documenting humanitarian crises worldwide. However, in the practices of their office in Israel, OCHA has exhibited systematic bias, methodological inconsistencies, and flawed data collection methods causing enormous damage to Israel’s reputation.
This report, drafted by COGAT, Israel’s official humanitarian aid organization, examines 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's activities, 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 organization 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 7/10, when Israel was forced to react to Palestinian Arab barbaric attacks against Israeli citizens, keeping them hostage and refusing to return them, clearly reveals a significant bias in the organization's reports in favor of the Palestinian Arab side.
Many diplomatic and media entities look on UN’s OCHA as the authoritative source of information on the reality of the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria. They are unaware of the degree to which OCHA's reports are one-sided and selective.
Omissions:
OCHA has not, for example, monitored nor reported the systematic and deadly violence by Palestinian Arabs against Israeli civilians, nor the numerous violations by Palestinian Arab armed groups against Palestinian Arabs such as the use of human shields, abuse of civilian facilities and obstruction of humanitarian assistance in Gaza by Palestinian Hamas.
To date, OCHA has not 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 organization.
All these acts are self-evident war crimes.
In contrast, OCHA exclusively reports on actions done by Israel, all of which are couched in negative terms as if there were no mitigating factors.
Sources:
The reliance on sources with questionable credibility further erodes the organization’s impartiality. OCHA frequently cites information without specifying its source or underlying methodology, often referring to them as unspecified "UN assessments."
This practice is seen particularly 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 October 7, 2023, OCHA initially acknowledged Hamas as the source of casualty figures but later removed these attributions, only reinstating their sources following Israeli intervention.
Additionally, when reporting on conflicts around the world, OCHA does not consider any other entity in conflict zones reliable enough to regularly cite for their casualty figures in its reports (for example, in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, etc.). However, Hamas, on a regular basis, is their source of information. By doing so, OCHA grants the Hamas terror organization credibility.
When quoting casualty figures, OCHA does not 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 its Gaza case, OCHA created the misleading impression that the figures refer only to civilians.
The casualty numbers adopted by OCHA also don’t account for natural deaths and deaths, deaths by accident, or the result of crimes and violence inside the Gaza Strip, such as violence between clans and other criminal violence, of which there are many.
OCHA adopted Hamas sources as credible over the war, giving credibility to the Gaza Ministry of Health an accepted fully credible source. Much of the Western media fed off their inaccurate information. The result was that Israel was constantly cast in a bad light leaving Hamas unblemished.
OCHA, therefore, was an active partner of the Hamas psychological warfare and disinformation campaign against Israel.
Humanitarian Aid:
OCHA only tracks humanitarian goods entering Gaza by the UN and partial information on other INGOs, 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 of aid than actually entered Gaza.
OCHA's counting methods also ignored security-screened goods that were introduced into the Gaza Strip but were left uncollected.
Egregiously, OCHA also does not acknowledge the presence of another (and more extensive) set of data managed by COGAT, Israel’s official humanitarian aid organization, preferring to extensively use Hamas-run ministries as information sources.
This selective reporting and lack of transparency provided governments, officials, and the media, which relied on OCHA's data, with a distorted picture of the overall humanitarian situation and the necessary actions to address it.
OCHA’s reports also contain misleading food insecurity projections.
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 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 citing its incorrect figures, fueling 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 organizations, international organizations, 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 to this was the claim that Gaza has the “largest population of child amputees in modern history” a lie that has been widely circulated by international organizations based on flawed extrapolations. This misrepresentation further misguides global discourse on the conflict, putting pressure on the government of Israel without any justification.
Ignoring the 7 October atrocities.
Despite extensive documentation of Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, 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, OCHA 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 their reports since 7 October 2023.
They 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 for ensuring that OCHA’s humanitarian efforts genuinely serve all affected populations, honestly and without bias.
Barry Shaw is at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.