Sigrid Kaag, the U.N. envoy to Gaza and Israeli-Palestinian peace process point person, announced her resignation on Friday, in an interview where she expressed hopelessness and criticized her own organization, as well as Israel and U.S. President Donald Trump.
“I’m not trying to sound cynical,” she told the Dutch NRC Handelsblad daily. “It’s good to send a signal that things need to change at the U.N. I think there needs to be reform. The peace and security mandate, which can still be normative, is increasingly being pushed into the humanitarian corner.”
She said that during one encounter with an Israeli, she asked her interlocutor “not to laugh” when she told him that her title included promoting the peace process.
“I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen. The future doesn’t look good,” Kaag, who was a former leader of the left-wing D66 party in the Netherlands, told the daily.
The outbreak of war between Israel and Iran on June 13 complicated her task of coordinating the U.N. humanitarian response to the situation in Gaza, said Kaag, who is married to Anis al-Qaq, a Palestinian Authority deputy minister under Yasser Arafat in the 1990s and a former PLO ambassador to Switzerland.
“Gaza is essentially being sacrificed,” she said. “It’s being viewed as just another chronic humanitarian crisis. Media attention is shifting, and big geopolitical questions about Israel and Iran dominate the agenda now. In that climate, it’s hard to come asking for permission to let in 50 more aid trucks.”
Before entering politics, Kaag worked for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which Israel recently outlawed for its complicity in terrorism.
Kaag complained that Israelis have too little empathy for Gazans after Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas terrorists, as well as other gunmen and random Gazans, invaded Israel, killing some 1,200 people and abducting 251 others, among other atrocities.
“Everything changed after the Oct. 7 attacks—there’s no empathy anymore for Palestinian civilian casualties as long as hostages remain, although there’s been some small movement in that direction. And now, nearly 20 months later, we’re still talking about a ceasefire while Gaza has been totally destroyed,” she said.
Kaag added, “I find it very hard to keep projecting that there’s still hope. There used to be some alignment with Washington—a willingness to think about international law and the civilian population in Gaza. That’s just gone,” she said in reference to the election of U.S. President Donald Trump last year.
“Last year around this time, there was still an American administration that was engaged with international law and concerned about the civilian population in Gaza,” Kaag said, referencing former President Joe Biden’s administration.
Three days before the interview, Kaag visited Gaza, the interviewer wrote. “I honestly dreaded going,” Kaag said in the interview. “You feel ashamed—ashamed of the collective failure.”
In the NRC interview on Friday, Kaag said she would leave Jerusalem soon, relocating to Switzerland and teaching this fall at Sciences Po, also known as the Paris Institute of Political Studies, in France. “I really want to do something else now. Something positive. Something where you can actually make a difference,” she said.
The Gaza Humanitarian Fund
Kaag defended the U.N.’s refusal to offer aid to Palestinians through the Gaza Humanitarian Fund—an aid operation sanctioned by Israel and the United States to help the civilian population in a manner that removes Hamas from the process.
“In my view, the GHF is based on military considerations. The international legal order is very much at stake because of Gaza. If countries were to start working with a subcontractor of the warring party, how are you going to work elsewhere? Then in the future, every dictator can push the U.N. and the Red Cross into a corner,” she said.
The editorializing interview—its author accused Israel of waging a “genocidal war” in Gaza in the text—did not feature a comment by Kaag on Hamas’s systemic abuse of U.N. resources, which the GHF setup was meant to address.
Kaag tried engaging with Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but their work relationship hit a bump early on after Smotrich mentioned his admiration for Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, who is critical of Islam and Kaag’s party, and highly supportive of Israel.
“He loves Wilders and thinks there’s a culture war happening. And I spoke about human rights and the international legal structure. I didn’t make much progress with him,” Kaag said of Smotrich, an observant Orthodox Jew who supports Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria.
She expressed her disdain for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israelis in Judea and Samaria, early on in her political career, in comments that have complicated her relationship with Israel.
In 1996, she praised in a televised interview “pro-peace Israelis who said Netanyahu’s way is of soundbites with blatantly racist, demagogic overtones about the Palestinian peace partner.”
In the same interview, Kaag called Israelis in Judea and Samaria “illegal colonists on confiscated land”; claimed that one of them called her a “whore of the Arabs”; and said that her father-in-law was stabbed in 1995 on the Jerusalem promenade by a Jew wearing an Arab keffiyeh, a claim that was later contested by critics who said Israeli police records show no record of such an incident that year.