The Middle East, including the Palestinian Question: Briefing and Consultations
Tomorrow morning (21 May), the Security Council will hold its regular monthly open briefing on “The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question” (MEPQ). The anticipated briefers are Deputy Special Coordinator and Resident Coordinator at the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO) Ramiz Alakbarov, Board of Peace (BoP) High Representative to Gaza Nickolay Mladenov, and a civil society representative. Closed consultations are scheduled to follow the open briefing.
Alakbarov is expected to update Council members on recent developments in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). Regarding Gaza, he is likely to describe continued violations of the ceasefire and a persistently dire humanitarian situation. According to the latest update from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), dated 15 May and citing local health authorities, 856 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire was announced in October 2025. Most of the population has been displaced and is sheltering in overcrowded tents or damaged structures, while the World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that 43,000 of the 172,000 people injured in Gaza since October 2023 have sustained life-changing injuries. OCHA’s update also notes ongoing impediments to humanitarian access: the Kerem Shalom and Zikim border crossings remain the only operational access points for the entry of humanitarian and commercial goods, and Israel’s restrictions on the entry of dual-use items and its bans on the operations of partner organisations, as well as shortages of fuel and spare parts, continue to constrain the response.
Alakbarov is also expected to address the deteriorating situation in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. OCHA’s 15 May update recorded a sharp escalation in settler violence, documenting over 800 attacks resulting in casualties or property damage since the beginning of 2026—an average of six per day—with the Jordan Valley emerging as a particular hotspot, where the monthly average of such incidents has increased approximately 14-fold since 2020. There were 47 Palestinians killed in the West Bank by 11 May, while the displacement of Palestinians and demolitions of Palestinian-owned structures have continued. Alakbarov may also reiterate concern about accelerating settlement expansion and the fiscal crisis faced by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is partially due to months of withheld clearance revenues. He is likely to underscore that there is no alternative to a political process leading to a viable two-state solution.
Mladenov is expected to brief on the BoP’s written report on the implementation of resolution 2803 of 17 November 2025. This resolution endorsed the US-brokered “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict”, welcomed the BoP as a “transitional governance administration” in Gaza, and requested the BoP to provide a written report to the Council every six months. The first such report, covering the period between 17 November 2025 and 14 May 2026, was circulated to Council members on 15 May (S/2026/418). It presents the ceasefire, the return of all hostages, and an increase in humanitarian assistance in Gaza as significant achievements, while stating that the principal obstacle to the full implementation of the Comprehensive Plan is Hamas’ refusal to decommission its weapons and “permit a genuine civilian transition” in the enclave. The report also acknowledges “near daily” violations of the ceasefire and continued impediments to humanitarian access but does not cite attribution for these acts.
A central element of Mladenov’s briefing is likely to be the 15-point roadmap that he and the guarantor countries—Egypt, Qatar, Türkiye, and the US—presented to the parties to complete the implementation of the Comprehensive Plan. According to the BoP’s report, the roadmap recognises the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG)—which was established in January as a local technocratic governance body under the oversight of the BoP—as the sole legitimate transitional authority and requires Hamas to cease all military, policing, and administrative activities under the principle of “one authority, one law and one weapon”. The roadmap’s core security obligation is the phased, internationally verified decommissioning of Hamas’ weapons, matched with commensurate steps by Israel, including a phased withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to Gaza’s perimeter and the start of reconstruction in certified decommissioned areas. The report states, however, that talks on the roadmap had not been finalised by the close of the reporting period.
Mladenov may also describe the institutional development of transitional governance structures. The report states that the NCAG has prepared the legal, financial, and administrative architecture of the transition and vetted civilian police candidates but has not yet been able to enter areas of Gaza that remain under Hamas’ armed control. On the International Stabilization Force (ISF) that resolution 2803 authorised the BoP to deploy, the report notes that five countries—Albania, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Morocco—have pledged personnel and that a site survey was completed in late April ahead of deployment, which is “anticipated in phases, aligned to conditions on the ground and the status of implementation of the Comprehensive Plan, including decommissioning”. Mladenov is likely to convey the report’s central message that reconstruction “cannot commence where weapons have not been laid down”.
Mladenov may highlight the report’s assertion that aid distributed by UN agencies and partners increased by over 70 percent from pre-ceasefire levels during the reporting period. He may also note that the BoP assessed roughly $3.1 billion in humanitarian needs for the first post-ceasefire year and that it has received $17 billion in pledges for reconstruction. On reconstruction needs, the report references both the $71.4 billion estimated by the Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment published in April by the UN, European Union (EU), and World Bank, and the BoP’s own projection that total reconstruction investments across Gaza will exceed $30 billion, without addressing the gap between these two figures.
Finally, Mladenov is likely to convey the report’s four requests to the Council: to reiterate publicly that the decommissioning of weapons in Gaza is critical for reconstruction and an IDF withdrawal; to urge Hamas and all Palestinian factions to accept the roadmap without delay; to call on all parties to facilitate the unimpeded entry and operation of the NCAG across Gaza; and to call on member states to accelerate the disbursement of pledged funds.
The civil society representative may provide a ground-level account of conditions in Gaza that differs in emphasis from the BoP report. In this regard, the briefer might echo assessments by humanitarian and human rights actors that the ceasefire’s promise remains largely unfulfilled. A “humanitarian scorecard” published in April by a group of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) assessed the implementation of the Comprehensive Plan and resolution 2803 against the Plan’s own benchmarks and rated it overall as “failing”, scoring five out of 26 points. The publication scored humanitarian aid access specifically at zero due to restricted crossings, “opaque” restrictions on dual-use items, UN-coordinated aid averaging fewer than 100 trucks per day against the 600 envisaged by the plan, and new Israeli registration requirements that would bar many INGOs from operating in Gaza. Relatedly, in an 18 May press briefing on a report published the same day by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on practices and policies affecting human rights in the OPT—covering the period between 7 October 2023 and 31 May 2025—the Head of the OHCHR Office in the OPT, Ajith Sunghay, said that the “ceasefire has not led to any form of meaningful accountability for the violations committed in the preceding years”, while warning that “[i]mpunity only fuels recurrence”.
Council members may also reflect this difference in emphasis in their statements tomorrow. Some members—particularly the US—may welcome the progress that the BoP’s report describes in implementing the transitional framework endorsed by resolution 2803 and call on Hamas to swiftly decommission its weapons to further advance the framework. Others may express concern about continued ceasefire violations and restrictions on humanitarian access, as well as increasing settler violence and settlement expansion in the West Bank, and call on Israel to fully uphold its international legal obligations in this regard. These members may further stress that the obligation to facilitate aid and the right to self-determination are established principles of international law that cannot be made conditional on political outcomes. In this regard, several members may call for a reformed PA to swiftly assume its governance responsibilities from the transitional structures in Gaza and underscore the importance of ensuring that efforts to implement resolution 2803 are fully aligned with the objective of realising the two-state solution, as enshrined in other Council decisions as well as in the New York Declaration, which the General Assembly endorsed in September 2025.