OCHA

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) was established in 1991 under UN General Assembly Resolution 46/182 to bring coherence to international emergency responses. It sits within the UN Secretariat under the Emergency Relief Coordinator, manages the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), and publishes situation reports that serve as the primary authoritative record for casualty and displacement figures in active crises.

In the Iran-Israel conflict, OCHA is running simultaneous contingency operations across Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, and Yemen, a scale unprecedented in recent memory. Limited NGO access inside Iran forces the agency to rely on government and Red Crescent counts it cannot independently reconcile . In Lebanon, OCHA data recorded nearly 700,000 displaced in just ten days, matching the full 33-day toll of the 2006 war .

OCHA sits at the centre of a trust problem: its figures are the ones governments, journalists, and courts cite, yet those figures depend on the access that belligerents grant. When Iran restricts NGO entry and casualty counts diverge by thousands , OCHA cannot adjudicate; it can only report the gap. That tension defines its credibility in every conflict it covers.