Israel’s government says it will suspend the licenses of dozens of humanitarian groups operating in the Gaza Strip beginning Thursday, a move that relief workers say will lead to deeper suffering in the decimated enclave and further obstruct the provision of medicine and other aid.
The suspensions, if not reversed, threaten to undercut a central plank of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire signed in October between Israel and Hamas, which calls for the immediate and full entry of humanitarian aid.
Among the groups facing suspension is Doctors Without Borders, one of the largest international nongovernmental health care providers in Gaza, along with other groups that supply an array of vital aid and services, including shelter assistance, as winter weather ravages the enclave.
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism, in a statement Tuesday, said aid organizations “that fail to meet security and transparency requirements” would have their licenses suspended beginning Jan. 1 — a reference to a set of conditions Israel began imposing earlier this year that aid groups have criticized as arbitrary, onerous or unworkable.
As relief organizations have waited to hear whether their registrations will be renewed, they say Israel has used their uncertain status to block aid shipments, rejecting them on the basis the groups are “unauthorized.”
“Israel’s plans to block INGOs in Gaza means blocking life-saving aid,” Hadja Lahbib, the European Union’s commissioner for crisis management, said Wednesday in a post on X. “The EU has been clear: the NGO registration law can not be implemented in its current form.”
In a joint statement, the United Nations and a coalition of NGOs said “the ongoing re-registration process and other arbitrary hindrances to humanitarian operations have left millions of dollars’ worth of essential supplies — including food, medical items, hygiene materials, and shelter assistance — stuck outside of Gaza and unable to reach people in need.”
The work of the nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, in Gaza “cannot be replaced,” the statement added, citing the looming suspensions and an Israeli crackdown on UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, that had already “pushed the humanitarian response inside Gaza to a breaking point.”
Israeli authorities announced their intention to tighten requirements for aid groups in March, introducing a set of guidelines they said could be used to reject the registration of such groups — among them whether an NGO or its employees ever called for a boycott of Israel, expressed support for legal proceedings against Israelis in international courts or promoted “delegitimization campaigns against the State of Israel.”
Israeli officials asserted at the time that the new process would streamline registrations for NGOs while ensuring relief work was carried out “in a manner aligned with Israel’s national interests.”
“The intention is to ensure aid does not fall into the wrong hands, not to control NGO workers or organizations,” COGAT, the Israeli military agency that oversees humanitarian aid to Gaza, said Wednesday in a statement on X.
Israel also demanded that NGOs supply the names, contact details and identification numbers of Palestinian staff members, saying it was necessary to screen employees for potential ties to militants. Aid workers say the requirement violates privacy laws but, more importantly, could endanger Palestinian employees in Gaza, where hundreds of humanitarian workers have already been killed.
The list of NGOs whose registrations were due to expire Thursday included some of the most prominent independent aid organizations in the world, including Mercy Corps, the International Rescue Committee, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam and CARE International, according to a list by the Israeli diaspora ministry.
Other groups said their request for re-registration had already been denied. They included Save the Children, which said in a statement that, as a result of the rejection, the group’s international staff no longer could travel to Gaza and that its supplies to the enclave were blocked. It is “currently challenging this in legal proceedings.”
The foreign ministers of Britain, France, Canada and seven other countries called the Israeli registrationrules “restrictive” in a joint statement released Tuesday and added that attempts to limit the ability of NGOs to operate was “unacceptable,” given the “renewed deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which remains catastrophic.”
The diaspora ministry, in announcing the pending suspensions Tuesday, singled out Doctors Without Borders, or MSF, saying that people “affiliated” with the group were linked to Palestinian militant groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas. The ministry statement did not identify the people and said MSF had “failed to provide full disclosure” regarding the identities and roles of the individuals.
MSF said in a statement that it “takes allegations that its staff are linked to armed groups extremely seriously.”
“MSF would not knowingly employ people engaging in military activity. Any employee who engages in military activity would pose a danger to our staff and our patients,” the statement read. “Publicly making such claims without substantiated evidence puts humanitarian staff at risk and undermines life-saving medical work.”
“The most critical role we play is in our capacity,” said Leah Cowan, humanitarian affairs advisor for MSF in Gaza. As Gaza’s health ministry and its health system had been “systematically targeted and destroyed over the course of the last few years,” MSF was trying to keep Gaza’s healthcare system operating at a bare minimum level.
Roughly “one in three babies are born in MSF-supported health care facilities, and we’re responsible for supporting 20 percent of the hospital beds in Gaza. So it’s not a small issue,” she said.
Several of the organizations whose registrations had not been renewed have publicly criticized Israel for alleged human rights violations, including its obstruction of aid and killings of civilians during the war.
“We are deeply concerned if we’re going to see a humanitarian response that’s going to be increasingly silenced in Gaza and less critical,” Cowan said. “Because we’re also taking it upon ourselves to report about what we are treating and what we’re seeing on the ground.”
Some relief officials said they had hoped that President Donald Trump, given his repeated expressions of confidence in the ceasefire, would press the issue of the NGO access to Gaza this week, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House. Neither leader mentioned the issue in their public remarks.
“It’s extremely disappointing that the Trump administration could not exert more influence given the impact this ban will have on phase 2 of the ceasefire and the entire progression of the peace plan,” said Athena Rayburn, the executive director of AIDA, an umbrella organization representing over 100 organizations that operate in the West Bank and Gaza.
While least $50 million worth of aid was sitting outside Gaza, barred from entering, critical services the aid organizations provided inside Gaza threatened to be lost.
They included the supply and maintenance of shelters for roughly 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza who required such support, because their homes had been destroyed — services that were “driven” by the international NGOs, she said.
The expertise the organizations provided could not easily be replaced, said Shaina Low, communications advisor for Palestine for the Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the groups whose registration has not been renewed.
Israel had begun prioritizing aid provided by governments, including tents. But many of the tents that had been supplied were either not waterproof, or had flat roofs — both designs catastrophically flawed, during heavy winter rains. NRC staff members in Gaza had been forced to help shore up the tents, including by reinforcing them with tarpaulin that was intended for other uses.
Since October, 17 of the NRC’s aid shipments had been blocked by Israel, all but one of them for the reason that the organization was “not authorized to bring aid to Gaza,” she said.
They had included items like tents, kitchen sets, blankets and other bedding, and hygiene items. Among the items rejected was a mannequin, intended for use in first aid training, she said.
Abbie Cheeseman and Lior Soroka contributed to this report.
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