OAKLAND — Activists on Tuesday demanded the city stop disbanding encampments and evicting homeless residents, citing a scathing United Nations report that accused Oakland of violating residents’ rights with its “cruel and inhuman treatment” of the homeless.

Nearly 100 activists, homeless residents and others gathered in front of Oakland City Hall, imploring city leaders to focus on improving living conditions at the city’s many homeless camps, instead of “sweeping” them off sidewalks and displacing inhabitants who have nowhere else to go.

The protest follows a damning UN report on global homelessness that describes encampments under California overpasses in the same breath as rat-infested camps in Mumbai, garbage-strewn settlements in Belgrade, overcrowded shacks in Mexico City, and damp, abandoned buildings housing migrants in Santiago.

In Oakland and San Francisco, officials are attempting to discourage homeless residents from living in the cities’ encampments by denying them access to water, sanitation and health services, according to the report.

“It says that Oakland needs to do way better than it’s doing now,” Candice Elder, executive director of The East Oakland Collective, said in an interview before the protest. “We need to make the encampments more humane and livable than they are right now, and Oakland’s not doing it.”

Oakland and San Francisco are the only two U.S. cities singled out in the 23-page report, which is “very damning,” Elder said. City officials provide portable toilets and hand-washing stations at just 13 of the city’s encampments, leaving many without services, she said.

Oakland’s homeless population grew by more than a quarter between 2015 and 2017, jumping from 2,191 to 2,761, according to the most recent Everyone Counts homeless census, which experts say likely under counts the population. The rapid growth has left city officials struggling to keep up.

Earlier this month Mayor Libby Schaaf launched a $9 million initiative called Keep Oakland Housed to prevent at-risk residents from losing their homes. City officials also have set up three communities of converted Tuff Shed garden sheds to house the homeless. As residents move into the sheds, the surrounding encampments are cleared and declared off-limits for new camps, even though there often aren’t enough sheds to house all the displaced residents. Oakland officials also have removed encampments from city streets and sidewalks that were blocking public right-of-ways or creating health hazards.

Oakland Assistant City Administrator Joe DeVries said no one at the UN reached out to the city prior to publishing the report. If they had, he might have highlighted ways the city is serving the homeless camps — such as providing garbage pickup at more than 16 sites, and conducting periodic deep-cleanings, during which residents are asked to move their belongings temporarily.

“We agree that this is a humanitarian crisis, which is why we’ve been implementing so many interventions to try to make things better at encampments,” he said.

Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan criticized Oakland’s approach of clearing homeless camps Tuesday.

“Having people shove people from one underpass to the next underpass without any clear plan of where they’re supposed to go is wasting a lot of money, not solving the problem and also drawing international condemnation from the UN,” she said.

Casey Cummings, 51, is worried about losing her home in one of those “sweeps.” Cummings, who has lived in the city 30 years and used to own a tatoo and piercing shop in North Oakland, said she received notice on Saturday that the city will be clearing out the homeless encampment near Lake Merritt where she’s lived for the past five months. There’s no room in the Tuff Sheds for her, Cummings said, and she doesn’t know where she’ll go.

“There’s also this feeling of hopelessness,” Cummings said, “because I’m a lost cause now.”

Leilani Farha, who wrote the UN report, visited Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley and Los Angeles in January as part of a global tour of homeless camps. Farha, who serves as the UN’s special rapporteur on adequate housing, said she was devastated by what she saw in the Bay Area.

“I’ve seen squalor, I’ve seen homelessness in countries around the world,” she said. “I’ve seen really horrific things. And I saw all of that in Oakland, but I also witnessed a cruelty there that might be unparalleled.”

Farha said that cruelty is manifested in “sweeps” that displace residents and trash their belongings and makeshift homes. And in cities such as Oakland and San Francisco, officials deny the homeless access to services such as garbage collection and sanitation, she said. As a result, the communities get labeled as dirty, which provides incentive for city leaders to evict them, Farha said.

Activists who gathered Tuesday hoped the UN report would put added pressure on city leaders to act.

Steven DeCaprio, interim executive director of the Berkeley-based nonprofit Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, sent an open letter to Schaaf this week demanding the city stop evicting homeless residents from their camps. Next week, the Housing and Dignity Project, a collaboration between The Village, The Dellums Institute for Social Justice and The East Oakland Collective plans to release a report laying out possible solutions to the city’s homelessness crisis.

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Homeless greet Oakland’s new Tuff Sheds with hesitation, hope Farha said Schaaf reached out shortly after her UN report came out to talk about the findings. Farha hasn’t had a chance to respond to the mayor yet, but says she’s looking forward to connecting.

Meanwhile, local activists are waiting for the city’s next move.

“All eyes are on this administration,” activist Needa Bee, founder of The Village, said Tuesday as she pointed to City Hall behind her.