Yara M. Asi
In late December 2025, two months after the much-lauded ceasefire agreement that was meant to end the physical destruction of Gaza and bring a significant increase in desperately needed aid, Israel announced it was suspending the work of 37 humanitarian organizations—about 15 percent of the total number of NGOs working on the ground in the Strip. These organizations include some of the most well-established across occupied Palestine, including Defense for Children International, the International Rescue Committee, Medical Aid for Palestinians UK, Mercy Corps, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, known in English as Doctors without Borders).
Humanitarian Lifelines Under Threat
International NGOs have been heavily involved in the humanitarian response to the genocide in Gaza. They have delivered more than half of all food assistance, supported 60 percent of field hospitals, provided nearly 75 percent of shelter and nonfood aid, and are the only organizations treating children for severe acute malnutrition. This winter has been particularly brutal (at least six children have died in Gaza from hypothermia) and flooding from heavy rain has caused buildings and tents to collapse, sometimes when families were sheltering inside. Although many (but not all) of the bombs have stopped, the humanitarian need continues.
The Scale of NGO Operations in Gaza
The presence of these organizations in Gaza is significant. MSF alone reports that it directly supports one in five of Gaza’s hospital beds and assists one in three mothers during childbirth. MSF supports Nasser Hospital, the last remaining Ministry of Health hospital in southern Gaza that is only partially functional; several therapeutic feeding centers to treat patients suffering from severe malnutrition due to Israel’s restriction of food into the territory; field hospitals to help fill the service gaps created by Israel’s mass destruction of Gaza hospitals; and multiple other facilities offering services of all kinds, including trauma and wound care, reproductive services, and mental health consultations. MSF is also heavily involved in rehabilitation efforts, including clearing rubble from bombed hospitals, supporting water and sanitation services, and facilitating medical evacuations, primarily for surgeries at the MSF hospital in Amman, Jordan.
New Restrictions and Occupation Authority
Israel has suspended the 37 international NGOs because they refused to comply with new policies requiring them to submit to the Israeli government additional documentation about their staff, funding, and operations. The organizations say that they are not comfortable providing such information to a government that has bombed aid facilities and killed hundreds of aid workers, including those in pre-authorized aid convoys. Some humanitarian personnel, including Palestinian health workers, have been kidnapped and remain detained in Israeli prisons. Importantly, the Gaza Strip is not Israeli territory: NGOs should not be forced to acquiesce to the demands of an Occupying Power to be able to provide services to the population living under occupation.
Ideological Policing of Aid Work
Israeli authorities are not just demanding logistical information—they are requiring ideological conformity. According to Israel’s new regulations, organizations that have called for boycotts against Israel, or have expressed support for international court cases (including the ongoing genocide case in the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant) are automatically disqualified from providing humanitarian services in Gaza.
Claims of Security and the Aid Narrative
Israel’s bans will have a devastating effect. NGOs stripped of their licenses will not be able to deliver aid into or throughout Gaza. These organizations will not be allowed to maintain offices in Israel or East Jerusalem. International staff will not be able to enter Gaza at all. These restrictions place a heavy burden on the remaining local staff, who work with very few resources and are already exhausted. Israel says that the organizations must leave Israel and East Jerusalem by March 1, 2026.
Israel claims that the new regulations are to “prevent the exploitation of aid by Hamas.” Despite making this allegation for decades, however, Israel has never provided any supporting evidence. In fact, in July 2025 Israeli military officials confirmed that they had never found proof that Hamas has systematically stolen aid. In fact, more than 100 aid agencies working on the ground in Gaza have argued that Israel itself was weaponizing aid by blocking the entry of humanitarian supplies, denying or impeding aid distribution missions within Gaza, and by killing aid workers and seekers alike, especially during the disastrous operations of the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Silencing Witnesses to Atrocity
For decades, Israel attacked UNRWA, the largest provider of health and education services in Gaza, by delegitimizing, smearing, defunding, and eventually banning its operations nearly one year ago. Israel’s treatment of UNRWA offered an early warning of how it intended to handle the entire humanitarian ecosystem helping Palestinians. On January 20, Israeli authorities demolished UNRWA buildings in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem.
Aside from the information that Israel claims it needs from the agencies for security purposes—a seemingly endless objective that Israeli authorities have used to justify everything from land theft to extrajudicial murder—the new ideological restrictions suggest different motivations. For decades, humanitarian agencies have been among the most credible witnesses to the Israeli state’s policies and practices toward Palestinians. When these NGOs simply describe the reality that they are witnessing, they puncture Israel’s narrative that it is doing nothing wrong to Palestinians and that any act that outsiders deem unjust is misconstrued.
During the genocide, health and humanitarian workers have described indefensible realities, including children with sniper bullets in their heads, civilians starving to death mere kilometers from aid trucks filled with food, and targeted attacks on protected humanitarian infrastructure. The Norwegian Refugee Council described Gaza as “hell on earth,” while UNRWA called the GHF sites a “killing field,” and MSF deemed the sites “orchestrated killing.” In the months before the current ceasefire, Israel’s global reputation was suffering due in part to such reports, and there appeared to be a small opening for accountability. The ceasefire process put an end to that. Now, muzzling the humanitarian agencies working to mitigate the catastrophe created by Israel is the next step to ensure that the world moves on from Palestinian suffering.
Bearing Witness Amid Global Distraction
As an MSF press release plainly states, “If the descriptions of what our teams see with their own eyes in Gaza—death, destruction, and the human consequences of genocidal violence—are unpalatable to some, the fault lies with those committing these atrocities, not with those who speak out about them.”
But as with many other so-called red lines, there has never been a meaningful effort to hold Israel accountable for repeatedly crossing them. With a growing list of global crises—the Russia-Ukraine war, the US attack on Venezuela, tensions with Iran, and US threats of annexing Greenland—world powers have a whole host of other conflicts to deal with. Palestine gets pushed to the back burner, again.
In March 2026, the affected humanitarian organizations are supposed to completely cease operations in Gaza. But courageously, some organizations have said that they have no plans to end their lifesaving work on the ground, and, just as important, their efforts to bear witness to the daily traumas forced on the Palestinian people.