FAO Official Claims Dismissal Over Gaza Criticism, Director Warns Against 'Human Rights Game'

Ben Davis spent years at the Food and Agriculture Organization working on rural development and gender equality across the Global South. In July, he was told his contract would not be renewed. The reason given: he had breached the agency's impartiality rules by speaking publicly about Gaza.

Davis, who held the title of Director of Rural Transformation and Gender Equality at the Rome-based UN agency, said the termination centered on two things he had done. The first was organizing weekly moments of silence at FAO headquarters to draw attention to starvation and famine conditions in Gaza. The second was co-authoring a report, published in May, that examined food availability in the territory and connected those findings to humanitarian law. When the report circulated internally, he said, FAO leadership ordered it taken down and explicitly instructed staff not to reference humanitarian law in any Gaza-related work.

On Tuesday, FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu made public remarks that Davis understood as a direct message to him and others like him. Speaking at the opening of a filmed session on forestry, Qu warned staff against what he called playing "the game here of human rights." He acknowledged that human rights matter, but suggested that work on the subject belonged elsewhere—specifically in Geneva, where dedicated human rights agencies operate. "That's why some senior members play the political game here, I fire him," Qu said, according to the account Davis provided to AFP. "You should follow the FAO constitution. You are against staff regulations. But I'm a very soft person, I didn't fire that many. I will fire more people if they are against the law."

When asked whether he believed the director-general's comments were aimed at him, Davis said yes without hesitation. He noted that Qu had publicly criticized him before for being too political. The prospect of further firings, Davis said, concerned him deeply.

The moments of silence Davis organized had drawn substantial crowds at their peak—hundreds of FAO staff members gathering in the hallways and common spaces. By the time of his dismissal, attendance had declined to between 30 and 40 people per week, but the practice had clearly registered as a form of dissent that leadership found unacceptable.

The broader context frames the dispute. Since October 2023, more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's military operations in Gaza. After a ceasefire agreement took effect in October 2025, the killing did not stop entirely; at least 1,431 Palestinians have died in Israeli attacks in the months since. Davis's work on food security placed him in direct contact with data about humanitarian conditions in the territory. His decision to speak about what he was seeing, and to create space for colleagues to acknowledge it, became grounds for his removal from the organization.

The FAO did not respond to requests for comment on Davis's account or on the director-general's remarks. What remains unresolved is whether other staff members face similar pressure, whether the directive against referencing humanitarian law in Gaza work remains in effect, and what the director-general meant by his promise to fire more people if they violate FAO regulations. The organization's position appears to be that impartiality requires silence on certain subjects. Davis's position is that impartiality and speaking truthfully about humanitarian conditions are not incompatible—and that the cost of enforcing silence is the removal of people who refuse to pay it.