UN Says Gang Violence Has Killed or Injured Nearly 5,700 in Haiti This Year

The United Nations' top human rights official told the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Friday that gang violence in Haiti has killed or injured nearly 5,700 people so far this year, as armed groups continue to expand their territorial control despite the deployment of an international force created specifically to stop them.

High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said his office had documented at least 5,700 people killed or injured by gangs, or during operations against them, between January 1 and September 11 this year. Gangs kidnapped more than 230 people and raped over 1,000 women and girls in the same period, he said in an oral update delivered to the Council, adding that the true toll is almost certainly higher because much of the country remains too dangerous for monitors to reach.

The scale of the violence

More than half of this year's casualties occurred during security operations rather than in gang attacks themselves, Türk said, with hundreds of people struck by stray bullets and by explosive drones now used by both police-backed forces and the gangs they are fighting. Self-defense groups known as "brigades," which have sprung up in neighborhoods abandoned by the state, killed or injured roughly 280 people on their own this year, according to figures relayed by UN News, the organization's official news service.

Beyond the direct casualties, the UN estimates that some 1.5 million Haitians have been forced from their homes nationwide, more than half the population faces acute food insecurity, and roughly 40 percent lack access to even basic healthcare. Prisons, Türk said, are operating at more than three times their intended capacity, and over 125 people have died in detention this year alone — a reflection, rights investigators say, of a justice system that has all but collapsed in gang-controlled areas. Child recruitment by armed groups has also surged: the UN estimates that 30 to 50 percent of gang members are now minors, with recruitment of children nearly tripling last year.

How the crisis reached this point

The violence has deepened despite a major shift in the international response. A year ago, the UN Security Council voted to replace the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission, which had struggled to make headway against the gangs, with a more muscular Gang Suppression Force authorized for up to 5,500 military and police personnel with the power to detain suspected gang members. The Caribbean Community threw its weight behind the plan at the time, with its ambassadors telling the Council the force was "a critical first step toward creating favourable conditions for elections" and urging the wider international community to step up its support, boldly and with resolve.

More than a year later, the force remains badly short-staffed. Türk told the Council that its first operations, run out of a base at Camp Vertières on the edge of Port-au-Prince, "marked a long-awaited step towards greater security," but that it remains "far below the strength needed," with roughly 1,500 personnel deployed against an authorized ceiling of 5,500. The shortfall has been laid bare by episodes such as the August massacre in the hillside commune of Kenscoff, where gang fighters killed dozens of residents, including people who had sought shelter in a church, in one of the deadliest single attacks of the crisis.

"The first operations by the Gang Suppression Force, mandated by the UN Security Council, marked a long-awaited step towards greater security. But the Force remains far below the strength needed."

The Security Council renewed the force's mandate for a further six months as it expired at the end of September, a decision welcomed by several Caribbean governments. Jamaica's government said it welcomed the renewal and urged the international community to back it "with the personnel, financing and equipment needed to make the force more effective," according to a report in the Jamaica Observer, which cited Agence France-Presse's reporting on Türk's briefing.

Who is bearing the cost

The burden continues to fall overwhelmingly on ordinary Haitians rather than on the gangs themselves. In late September, roughly 5,250 residents of the farming town of Gros-Morne fled their homes in a single episode after a gang reprisal attack, adding to displacement camps that now ring Port-au-Prince and stretch into the provinces. Schools have been repeatedly uprooted: the Lycée Alexandre Pétion, founded in 1816 and one of Haiti's oldest and most prominent secondary schools, has now relocated three times in three years to escape fighting near its original downtown campus, according to Haitian press accounts.

Haitians are also being returned into the crisis from abroad. The UN said more than 220,000 people, including nearly 20,000 children, have been deported or forcibly returned to Haiti from other countries in the region so far this year, many of them arriving in a country where, by the UN's own description, criminal groups now control large swaths of the capital and its surrounding communes. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, has carried out the bulk of these returns amid tightened border and trade restrictions, including a tightened transit regime for goods passing between the two countries that Haitian authorities reissued at the end of September.

Reaction and what comes next

Rights investigators who have studied the gangs argue that Haiti's crisis cannot be solved through force alone. Weapons recovered from gang fighters are disproportionately traced back to a small number of source points in Florida, underscoring long-standing complaints from Haitian and Caribbean officials that the UN arms embargo imposed on gang-linked actors is poorly enforced by the countries where the weapons originate. Türk renewed his call for the embargo to be "fully respected and effectively implemented," and urged what he described as the "full, accelerated deployment" of the Gang Suppression Force, paired with stronger human rights safeguards over its operations given the civilian toll of security raids.

• At least 5,700 people killed or injured by gangs or in operations against them, January 1 to September 11, 2026
• More than 230 people kidnapped and over 1,000 women and girls raped in the same period
• The Gang Suppression Force has roughly 1,500 of its authorized 5,500 personnel deployed
• Roughly 1.5 million people displaced nationwide; more than 220,000 forcibly returned to Haiti from abroad this year

Barbados, which has chaired regional diplomacy on Haiti on behalf of the Caribbean Community, has pressed the case for sustained international funding since the force was first created, with its foreign ministry stating that the Council's action was meant to help create conditions for Haiti's long-delayed elections and the "rebuilding of institutions," according to a statement carried on the website of Barbados's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Haiti's transitional governing authorities have said they still intend to hold the country's first presidential election in nearly a decade, though diplomats and rights groups say that timeline depends heavily on whether the security situation in and around Port-au-Prince can be stabilized enough for voting to take place at all.

For now, Türk's update leaves the Council with a familiar and unresolved tension: a UN-backed force with a broad mandate to dismantle the gangs, but without the troops, equipment or funding member states have so far been willing to commit, while the civilian death toll continues to climb each month the gap persists.