The UN Human Rights Commissioner reported that more than 5,500 people were killed and over 2,600 injured by violence in Haiti in 2025, confirming another year of record lethal violence and continuing the grim escalation that had made each successive year worse than the last. The 2025 figures exceeded even the catastrophic 2024 toll and reflected the failure of the transitional political arrangement and the underpowered security mission to change the trajectory of criminal violence in Haiti.
The death toll was geographically dispersed in ways that previous years’ figures had not been, reflecting the expansion of gang activity beyond Port-au-Prince into the Artibonite, Centre, and other departments. Communities that had previously been relatively insulated from the capital’s gang war found themselves directly in the path of criminal expansion, contributing to the rising national death count while also generating the displacement and food production disruption that worsened the humanitarian situation.
Gang violence remained the primary driver of the death toll, but the 2025 statistics also reflected the growing contribution of security force operations — drone strikes, summary executions, and operations in which civilian bystanders were killed — to overall mortality. The multiple sources of lethal violence were creating a complex security environment in which communities faced risks from gangs, security forces, and self-defense groups simultaneously.
As 2025 ended, the authorization of the Gang Suppression Force offered some prospect of a more robust international security response in 2026. But the transformation of authorization into actual deployment, and the deployment into effective operations, would require sustained international commitment that previous experience suggested could not be taken for granted. Haiti’s population was entering yet another year with no certainty that 2026 would finally bring the security improvement that every year for a decade had promised without delivering.