Their names are Bara Zuhaili, Hussam Abu Safia or Feroze Sidhwa and they are doctors. They have all worked in Gaza (Palestine) during the siege initiated by Israel on October 7, 2023, after the Hamas attacks. And they have all said the same thing: “We had to choose who lived and who died, because the hospitals couldn’t handle it anymore.” Today, the world suffers a gazification unforgivable: he says that he is unable to care for all the people immersed in armed conflicts, humanitarian crises, famines or natural disasters because there is not enough money for it. He has to limit himself to selecting who he thinks he can still save, condemning the rest.
This is the result of global scissors in humanitarian aid and cooperation, starting with those of the United States, the largest donor historically. The emergence on the scene, once again, of , has left the coffers of international institutions in the bones, which not only receive fewer dollars but are discredited by the Republican president. And it infects, in the process, other countries that were wishing to escape international commitments.
The call should be a shameful wake-up call for the leaders of the world, but it has passed almost without pain or glory since it was presented on December 8. He speaks of “brutal” cuts in the budget and recognizes, without half measures, that “there is no water in the pond”, in the words of the head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA), Tom Fletcher. We are talking about lives, about people.
Hard prioritization exercise
In the south of Spain you often hear the phrase “what finger should I cut that doesn’t hurt” when mothers talk about their children. Well, the UN has had to take the step and cut it off. For the new year, it has faced a “tough prioritization exercise” and has established that its humanitarian objective will ultimately be to save 87 million lives, for which it requires $23 billion. The figure is already adjusted to minimums. Less is nothing.
That amount, which seems overwhelming when you read it, is less than half of what it requested for emergencies for 2025. Now the UN readjusts it not because there are fewer victims of wars, earthquakes or floods and political persecutions – not at all – but because it has been forced to decide where to put resources, which are increasingly scarce.
2025 has seen the largest contraction in humanitarian funding in a decade, $12 billion, a consequence of the US only disbursing $2.5 billion for this year’s UN humanitarian plan, compared to $11,000 in 2024. The consequences were immediate, including increased hunger and strain on health systems, “even as parts of Sudan and Gaza hit,” shocking the world, but not the donors. “Programs to protect women and girls were drastically cut, hundreds of aid organizations closed. And more than 380 aid workers were killed, the highest number on record,” they denounce.
The head of UN humanitarian aid assured that his workers are “overloaded”, depending on “insufficient funds” and “under attack”, furthermore, when hitting humanitarian workers is a war crime. “Only 20% of our calls are supported. And we’re the ones driving the ambulance when there’s a fire,” Fletcher said. And he adds: “On top of that, now we are also asked to put out the fire. But there is not enough water in the tank. And they are shooting at us.”
A displaced Sudanese woman searches for water in a camp in Tawila (Northern Darfur, Sudan), on November 15, 2025.
Trump, upon returning to the Oval Office, fulfilled one of his campaign promises, which was to slim down the structures of the State, and in his opinion one of the least necessary flanks was that of foreign policy and, above all, that of cooperation. In February, he already ordered the and, from there, everything went downhill, adding cut after cut in his assignments to UN agencies and organizations or even leaving them: the US on the same day that Trump was sworn in on the bible. Everything is so Christian.
Given this reality, in mid-2025 the humanitarian response will focus on providing aid to 114 million people, compared to the initial objective of 178 million beneficiaries. And, even so, not even that secondary goal, reduced to the minimum, was met, because with three weeks left in the year, only help had been obtained for 98 million people, 25 million less than in 2024.
The prioritization of the incoming 2026 will continue and, therefore, funds are sought to offer means of survival to “only” 87 million people, when the reality is that 239 million people would need vital assistance, when they should be struggling for no less than 33,000 million. This means that it goes directly to saving lives, which is the most urgent thing, leaving aside other needs that improve those lives, from health prevention to education. It is the overwhelming priority but what remains on the way is a formidable erosion of essential human rights.
“This is a ruthless selection of human survival, this is what it means to put power before solidarity and compassion”
“This appeal establishes where we must first focus our collective energy: life by life,” assumes the UN. “This is a ruthless selection of human survival, this is what it means to put power before solidarity and compassion.”
The constant feeling, reviewing the report, is that OCHA is on the verge of collapse and that the erosion of fundamental programs or the blow to the protection services of the most vulnerable communities may be long-lasting, perhaps irreversible. The world getting worse and the people, shattered.
It would be SO easy…
Tom Fletcher, when presenting the report in Geneva (Switzerland), made a disarming reflection by explaining that the figure they are now asking for “represents less than 1% of what the world has spent in the last year on weapons or a budget that could be covered if the richest 10% in the world, that is, all the people who earn more than 100,000 dollars, contributed just 20 cents a day.” The effort would be minimal for those who can if there were political will to pitch in.
Humanitarian agencies will now take this appeal to UN Member States and ask for their support. Countries will also be urged to step up protection of humanitarian workers, “not with statements of concern, but by holding accountable those who kill us, and those who arm those who kill us.”
“The humanitarian system is running out of fuel, with millions of lives at stake,” said the UN Secretary General, during a meeting to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the CERF, on December 12. “This is a time when we are being asked to do more and more with less and less. This is simply unsustainable,” he argued.
It is not just a financing deficit itself, says the international organization, but it is “an operational emergency” and one that they fear will become systemic. If CERF falters, “then the world’s emergency services will falter. And the people who depend on us will suffer.”
Where and how
The UN plan will cover people in need in 50 countries, including 29 detailed plans, with 23 national aid operations and six additional ones dedicated to refugees and migrants. The largest project is the one aimed at the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem), where $4.1 billion is needed to reach about three million people.
In , the second most urgent crisis, $2.9 billion is required to provide life-saving aid to 20 million people trapped in the world’s largest displacement crisis, with another $2 billion for the seven million Sudanese who have fled the country. Guterres calls the Darfur area directly “the epicenter of human suffering.”
The largest of the regional plans is for Syria, with $2.8 billion for 8.6 million people. Although the country has ended almost 14 years of civil war, with the , it is devastated, facing millions of internally displaced people and the attempted return of those who left for other States. Burma joins them, in “a serious crisis without media attention.” “This call establishes where we must first focus our collective energy and is therefore based on life and death decisions,” Fletcher said.
Situation map of the world’s humanitarian emergencies for 2026, according to the UN report.
The plan implies at the same time a questioning of the UN’s way of working in the humanitarian field, through the reduction of bureaucracy and duplication of tasks, and the search for greater efficiency. They call it a “humanitarian reset,” which “is not a slogan, but a challenge for everyone, in Fletcher’s words. It is, he added, “a mission, but also a survival strategy for the work we do and for so many people.” UN workers will necessarily have to be “smarter, faster, closer to the communities we serve, more honest about the difficult trade-offs we face. Making every dollar count for those we serve.”
“We will dedicate a greater proportion of the money we receive directly to people in need, to organizations and individuals on the front lines and to the communities we serve and not to institutions, organizations or agencies. We want to minimize transaction costs along the way,” OCHA concludes.
It remains to manage the precariousness, while and the . The worst thing is that the UN is practically certain that its new appeal will fall on deaf ears and, quite possibly, in 2026 even more embarrassing estimates will have to be made. The word is “apathy.”
