Doctors Without Borders, the international medical aid group, said Tuesday that Israel had ordered it to cease operations in the Gaza Strip after it failed to comply with new restrictions that include registration of all Gazan employees and limits on criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war.
The move threatens one of the best-known humanitarian operations in the devastated enclave. Though Israel has sought to downplay the group’s importance, Doctors Without Borders says it runs or supports more than 20 percent of the remaining hospital beds, operates clinics for people with traumatic injuries and chronic illnesses, treats malnourished children and other patients, and distributed 700 million liters of water last year.
With 40 to 50 international doctors in Gaza at any time, about 1,000 permanent Palestinian workers, and another 1,000 Gaza medical workers whose Ministry of Health salaries it augments, Doctors Without Borders says it performed more than 22,000 operations and treated more than 100,000 trauma cases in 2025.
“If we can’t work, it will have catastrophic consequences for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians,” said Claire San Filippo, the group’s emergency coordinator for Gaza.
Ms. San Filippo said that the group was told on Sunday that it could no longer bring supplies into Gaza and told on Tuesday that it could no longer bring doctors, nurses or other international aid workers into the territory. She said it was given until the end of February to cease all activities in Gaza and pull out all its international workers.
The group was one of dozens providing humanitarian aid in Gaza that objected last year after Israel announced a new requirement to supply Israel with the names and identification numbers of their Palestinian workers.
Israel said the measure was to prevent militants from infiltrating aid groups. Doctors Without Borders and other NGOs refused to comply, saying the demand flouted international law and violated workers’ privacy rights as well as European data-protection rules the groups were legally obligated to follow.
Another part of the new policy allowed Israel to blacklist aid groups over their political activity, such as promoting boycotts against the country.
Doctors Without Borders was among more than three dozen humanitarian groups told on Dec. 30 that they would have their licenses to operate in the Gaza Strip suspended on Jan. 1 and would have to clear out by March under the new rules. Now, Israel is moving to enforce that.
Israel assailed Doctors Without Borders on two main grounds. Last week, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, a military unit responsible for facilitating humanitarian aid in Gaza, downplayed the organization’s importance in addressing the medical crisis there. It wrote on social media that Doctors Without Borders had brought in only 95 truckloads of aid since the cease-fire took effect in October, operates only a few hospitals and runs just “five out of 220 medical clinics in Gaza.”
The group says it supports six hospitals, runs two field hospitals, runs four primary health clinics and supports a fifth, runs two wound-care clinics, runs an inpatient feeding center for malnutrition cases, runs six mobile clinics, and delivers one out of every three babies born in Gaza. And Ms. San Filippo said scores of its trucks had been held up from entering Gaza by Israel.
On Monday, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, which drafted and enforces the new licensing rules for Gaza aid groups, accused Doctors Without Borders of “grave misconduct,” releasing a 25-page report by a government committee that dismissed the group’s activities in Gaza as “the pretext of humanitarian activity” while accusing it of advancing an “extreme anti-Israeli narrative.”
The report said the group posed a risk to “the security to the State of Israel” that was “extremely high.”
It backed up that charge mainly by reciting a long list of instances in which the group or its members had called Israel’s war in Gaza genocidal, criticized the “systematic destruction” in Gaza or expressed support for an arms embargo on Israel. Those statements, the committee said, could constitute grounds for “severe administrative measures” under the new guidelines.
The Israeli government strongly rejects the characterization of its war against Hamas in Gaza as genocide, arguing that it always sought to target militants who frequently fought from areas crowded with civilians. Several leading rights groups, however, disagree, citing the vast devastation in Gaza, a nearly three-month Israeli blockade on aid last year, and the enormous civilian toll from Israeli airstrikes.
Ms. San Filippo called the Israeli policy’s curbs on criticism of Israel an “outrageous overreach.”
“Bearing witness is a principle of Doctors Without Borders, no matter where we work,” she said. “If the descriptions of what our teams witness, see with their own eyes — the widespread destruction of the Gaza Strip, the wounded people, the spread of diseases as a result of the destruction of basic infrastructure, death, and the human consequences of genocidal violence — are unpalatable to some, the fault lies with those committing the atrocities, not with those who speak of them.”
The Israeli report also suggested that the Doctors Without Borders office in Gaza could have been infiltrated by Palestinian militants. It said a Doctors Without Borders employee killed during the war, Fadi al-Wadiya, had been a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And it cited the social-media activity of another employee in Gaza, who was killed in 2023, expressing support for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a militant group.
Though the committee said that these were “not merely isolated incidents,” it provided no further examples. After an Israeli strike killed Mr. al-Wadiya in 2024, Doctors Without Borders said it took the allegations against him seriously and would “never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity.”
Bilal Shbair contributed reporting from the Gaza Strip.
David M. Halbfinger is the Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He also held that post from 2017 to 2021. He was the Politics editor of The Times from 2021 to 2025.
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