The Hurdles Keep Climbing for the UN’s New Gaza-Aid Troubleshooter

Sigrid Kaag, a former Dutch politician, was named to the new post of senior humanitarian coordinator for Gaza late last year. Since arriving on the job on Jan. 8, the enormous hurdles to delivering food and other essentials into the Palestinian enclave have worsened as famine alarms are being sounded by UN officials. MANUEL ELIAS/UN PHOTO

By Damilola Banjo via Passblue

Sigrid Kaag, a Dutch diplomat and former politician appointed in December by the United Nations as senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, has been meeting leaders since she began her job in January. She has gone to various points in the Mideast — Egypt, Israel, Jordan — as well as to Washington, Brussels and elsewhere, in line with her responsibility to oversee humanitarian relief consignments to the Israeli-besieged Palestinian enclave.

Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for Secretary-General António Guterres, who named her to the post, told PassBlue that Kaag is “continuing to work with key interlocutors” and is expected to brief the Security Council and Guterres for a second time, in March, on her progress. (She first briefed in late January.) Yet the enormous complications she faces in her new role just grow more tangled.

“Kaag moved very quickly to start her shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East,” said Richard Gowan, the UN specialist at the International Crisis Group in New York City. “I think UN officials hope that she can maintain better relations with the Israelis than Guterres and other leading UN figures who clashed with the Netanyahu government in late 2023.”

From the start, expectations for Kaag have been high for her to speed up lifesaving food, medical supplies and shelter materials into Gaza as civilians contend daily with ferocious bombardment by Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, in retaliation for the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7. The Israeli attacks have killed nearly 30,000 people, mostly children and women, according to the Gaza health ministry.

Kaag, 62, is a Mideast expert who speaks Arabic and five other languages. She is married to Anis al-Qaq, a former Palestinian diplomat and senior adviser to Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization leader. Most recently, Kaag was finance minister in the Netherlands and previously a trade and foreign minister. She left Dutch politics last summer, citing a “toxic” environment, she said, involving threats and slurs directed at her personally.

In her new role at the UN, Kaag and her team have no dedicated website detailing their work, and Dujarric announces her trips sporadically, so it is challenging to track her goings-on. Kaag’s movements are sometimes found on X/Twitter, and one member of her team is an Israeli who works for Unicef.

When asked who is working with Kaag, Dujarric said it’s “a team of experts from the UN system,” but he did not give names. “We have been as transparent as possible regarding Ms. Kaag’s travels and who she’s meeting with in light of the nature of her discussions,” he added. Kaag is based in Amman and paid through the UN Office for Project Services.

Yahav Lichner, a senior adviser to Unicef based in London, recently tweeted that he joined Kaag’s team. He describes himself on LinkedIn as an “international affairs and government relations expert with 20+ years of diverse experience at the intersection between the UN, Governments and other stakeholders at the global and national levels. Focused on policy formulation and designing strategies to build and grow trusted partnerships to advance corporate priorities.”

He also says he is a corporate lawyer “by training” and has “lived, loved and worked in Tel Aviv, London and New York.” In addition, he has been an adviser to the Israeli mission to the UN and served in the Israel Defense Forces from 2000 to 2006.

Kaag presented a report of her first 20 days as aid coordinator to the Security Council on Jan. 30, but it was not made public. She told the media on the same day that her focus so far was on streamlining aid supply routes into Gaza, easing the distribution challenges in the strip and creating a mechanism to track all relevant data, suggesting she is also a technocrat at heart.

Nevertheless, her work has yet to yield major results as civil chaos is mounting inside Gaza and at the border crossing from Israel into the enclave. According to the UN Relief and Works agency, UNRWA, more than 2,300 trucks have entered Gaza this month, a nearly 50 percent drop compared with January.

This week, Kaag was part of a group meeting with Samantha Power, the USAID chief, on her visit to a World Food Program warehouse in Amman, Jordan, that is full of food for Gaza. At the meeting, aid workers described the increasing logistical barriers and dangers of moving aid into the enclave amid Israeli military operations, general criminal thuggery and starving people clamoring for the goods packed in UN convoys. The World Food Program has paused its deliveries into northern Gaza because of these dangers.

While in Amman, Power announced a $58 million injection from the United States to the UN agency and other aid groups for Gaza and the West Bank.

Meanwhile, numerous UN agencies are warning of impending famine. “Here we are, at the end of February, with at least 576,000 people in Gaza — one-quarter of the population — one step away from famine,” Ramesh Rajasingham, the deputy chief of the UN humanitarian agency (UNOCHA), told the Security Council on Feb. 27.

One of Kaag’s trips recently included going to Cyprus to discuss a possible maritime corridor to Gaza through Israel. Cyprus is about 265 miles from Israel, potentially creating an important sea access to Gaza. Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides proposed such a route last year to deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestinian enclave, but Kaag has not provided a public update on the idea.

She also forayed briefly into Gaza to assess the human catastrophe there. In addition, this month she met with leaders in the United Arab Emirates and secured a $5 million pledge from the country to fund her work, traveling there with Lichner. It is unclear if the UAE pledge has been redeemed. Kaag’s post originated in a UAE-led Security Council resolution in late December.

A few diplomats told PassBlue that Kaag was hand-picked by the US for the job. One person familiar with the situation suggested that the US, which especially respected her work in 2013 as special coordinator for dismantling Syria’s chemical weapons program, may be positioning her for a postwar envoy role in the Mideast.

“The Security Council effectively shoe-horned Kaag into the existing UN humanitarian framework for Gaza,” Gowan said. “But I think she has handled the sensitivities around it quite deftly, and been careful to avoid trespassing on other UN officials’ turf. She does enjoy an unusually high degree of respect around the UN system.”

The US praises Kaag often since she was named in December. On Jan. 30, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said of Kaag’s position that it was “created thanks to a resolution the United States worked closely on with the UAE and other Council members.”

Getting humanitarian goods into Gaza grew considerably more complex amid Israeli attacks after the US, numerous other Western nations and Japan paused their funding to UNRWA, the main aid, health and education operation in the enclave, after allegations were made by Israel that 12 agency staffers took part in the Oct. 7 attack. So far, no country has recommitted contributions to the agency as they await an independent review of UNRWA and a UN internal investigation into the accusations.

The only Gulf nation to increase its funding to the UN agency appears to be Qatar, giving $25 million more above the $18 million it donated in December.

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