UN food agency official fired after highlighting Gaza hunger

Former United Nations food agency official Benjamin Davis said he was fired after his work, including briefs and seminars, highlighted the hunger crisis in Gaza, The Guardian reported Tuesday.

The outlet wrote that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) director’s seminar led the Israeli mission to file a complaint with the FAO. The mission also dispatched a diplomat to take photos of staff taking part in a moment of silence gathering in October 2025.

FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu requested Davis, a Spanish American citizen and a 26-year fixture within the FAO, step down from his role by Sept. 30. Davis appealed and rejected any notion that his actions were political.

“I feel it’s a terrible injustice,” he told Reuters last week. “I’ve been disciplined without due process for speaking about a subject at the core of FAO’s mandate about the right to food which is the most basic of human rights.”

The Hill has reached out to the FAO for comment.

Qu, a veteran Chinese agronomist, appeared to refer to Davis’s dismissal last Tuesday when he threatened to fire anyone considered to be engaging in political activism. He said at the 28th Session of the Committee on Forestry in Rome that the FAO is “not going to allow you to play the game here of human rights,” according to The Guardian.

“Of course human rights are very important, but they have a human rights agency in Geneva,” he continued. “If you want to take care [of human rights], go there. That’s why [when] some senior members play political games here, I fire him. I’m a very soft person. I didn’t fire that many.”

Davis told The Guardian that he and other FAO staff members were shocked by the remarks. He accused Qu of making comments about human rights that undermine “the foundations of why we’re here basically, or why FAO is part of the United Nations and why the United Nations exists.”

Davis wrote in his official response to his dismissal that silence “in the face of suffering and injustice is not neutrality, it is complicity.”

“Shutting down discussion on the starvation of the Palestinian people weakens the reputation of the organisation and the legitimacy of our mandate,” his letter reads, according to The Guardian. “Being true to our mandate calls for a frank and open discussion around starvation, famine, and genocide in Palestine and elsewhere.”

In September 2025, Davis said there was an altercation with a woman who identified herself as an Israeli diplomat. He told the British newspaper that she took photos of the meeting and that she later complained to FAO security that she was being harassed. Davis said these meetings, the moments of silence and the associated seminar were all approved by FAO management.

He said in an interview with The New Humanitarian that he wished some of the FAO’s senior management had attended the moments of silence and “step up.”

“But I tell people –– because a lot of people are bummed out, they don’t know what to do, they’re very disheartened –– I say, just do whatever little you can do,” he told the outlet. “Don’t despair.”

The Gaza Strip has faced worsening conditions in the nearly three years since Israel launched its military campaign across the territory in response to the Hamas-led attack on Israeli citizens on Oct. 7, 2023.

The territory’s roughly 2 million residents have endured a worsening hunger crisis amid the threat of Israeli strikes, drones, snipers and ground troops before and after the ceasefire deal reached last October. The war has led to the deaths of more than 74,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.