Human Rights Watch: Aid to Gaza Still Falls Short Six Months After October Ceasefire

More than six months after the October 2025 ceasefire, aid is still not entering Gaza at the scale U.N. agencies say is needed and civilians continue to be killed, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday, days before a U.N. Security Council briefing on the truce’s implementation.

In a report published May 19, the rights group said Israeli authorities were still obstructing humanitarian access and pointed to U.N. and health-sector data showing that conditions in Gaza remain severe despite the ceasefire. According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, citing the Gaza Health Ministry, 856 Palestinians have been killed and 2,463 wounded since the ceasefire took effect.

The intervention comes ahead of a May 21 briefing to the Security Council by the Board of Peace, the U.N.-backed body created under Security Council Resolution 2803 to assess compliance with the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict. That timing underscores the central tension in the current debate: The board’s own May 15 report described meaningful gains since the ceasefire, saying aid distributed by U.N. agencies and partners had increased by more than 70% from pre-ceasefire levels and that “basic food needs have been stabilized for the first time since 2023.”

But operational data cited by Human Rights Watch suggests those improvements still fall short of what Gaza’s population needs.

OCHA said Kerem Shalom and Zikim were the only operational entry points for humanitarian and commercial goods into Gaza. In the first 11 days of May, only about half of the aid trucks arriving from Egypt were allowed to offload at Israeli-controlled crossings, according to OCHA and Logistics Cluster data cited in OCHA’s May 15 humanitarian report. OCHA also said 789 private commercial truckloads entered Gaza between May 4 and May 10, but overall deliveries remained below earlier levels.

The aid system has also been disrupted by more recent closures. Human Rights Watch said Israeli authorities closed all crossings into Gaza on Feb. 28 after regional military operations involving Israel, the United States and Iran began. Kerem Shalom partially reopened on March 3, according to a World Health Organization flash update.

“The plan was supposed to bring relief. Instead, Palestinians in Gaza are still hungry, still cannot reach medical care, and civilians are still being killed,” Adam Coogle of Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

Food access remains below minimum need, according to U.N. agencies. OCHA’s May 1 report said aid groups reached about 197,000 families with food parcels in April, enough to cover 75% of minimum daily calorie needs, up from about half in March. But the World Food Programme said people in Gaza were eating less in the first half of April than in March, and that most families were eating vegetables, fruit or protein once a week or less.

The health system also remains badly degraded. As of Feb. 5, none of Gaza’s 37 hospitals was fully operational and only 19 were partially functioning, according to OCHA. WHO said 46% of essential medicines were at zero stock. The agency also estimated that more than 43,000 people had suffered life-changing injuries and that more than 50,000 needed long-term rehabilitation care.

Humanitarian workers continue to face lethal risks. OCHA had recorded the killing of at least 593 aid workers in Gaza since October 2023, including eight since the ceasefire. WHO suspended medical evacuations through Rafah for several days in April after a WHO-contracted service provider was killed in a security incident in eastern Khan Younis, according to WHO and Al Jazeera.

The Security Council briefing will also land amid a widening funding gap in the ceasefire’s reconstruction and aid mechanism. The Board of Peace has received $17 billion in pledges against roughly $70 billion in estimated reconstruction needs. But Reuters reported that by April, less than $1 billion of that pledged total had actually been delivered.

In its May 15 report, as quoted by Reuters, the board said “the gap between commitment and disbursement must be closed with urgency.”