Israel suspends operations of multiple humanitarian organisations in Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders

JTA – The Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is halting the operations of more than three dozen humanitarian groups in Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders. 

The ministry announced on Tuesday, 30 December that the affected organisations failed to meet its new requirements for nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) providing humanitarian aid in Gaza, which were posted online in November. The requirements included providing a full list of its Palestinian employees. 

“We emphasise that the registration process is intended to prevent the exploitation of aid by Hamas, which in the past operated under the cover of certain international aid organisations, knowingly or unknowingly,” wrote the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which oversees aid in Gaza, in a post on X. 

The ministry said that 38 of the NGOs working in Gaza did not have their permits renewed for the coming year, according to the Associated Press. 

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, posted a link to a Ynet article about the suspensions on X Tuesday, writing, “An ongoing scandal ignored by UN & European enablers shows why @Israel has to decertify some of the NGOs who have terrorists on their payroll.” 

The suspensions, which will begin on 1 January 2026, come as President Donald Trump has put pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to usher the US-brokered ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel into its second phase, which would include the reconstruction of Gaza. 

Speaking beside Netanyahu at a press conference on Monday, Trump said that he believed reconstruction efforts in the enclave were “going to begin pretty soon”, adding that work to improve sanitary conditions had already begun. 

But aid groups in Gaza have said that Israel has continued to block aid from entering the enclave as storms and flooding have battered the region’s residents in recent weeks. 

Earlier in December, Doctors Without Borders warned in a blog post that Israel’s new registration guidelines “risk leaving hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza without lifesaving healthcare in 2026.” The United Nations’ Humanitarian Country Team also lambasted the requirements, writing that aid groups had warned they were “vague, politicised, and impossible to meet without breaching humanitarian principles.” 

But COGAT minimised the impact of the suspensions in its post, writing that “the implementation of the government decision will not result in any future harm to the volume of humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip.” It said that the combined contributions of the groups affected amounted to 1% of the total aid volume in Gaza. 

In June 2024, Israel accused Doctors Without Borders, which is also known by its French acronym MSF, of employing a Hamas operative. In response, MSF said it was “deeply concerned by these allegations and is taking them very seriously.” 

“MSF chose not to cooperate with the registration process and refused to provide Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs with a list of its employees, as required by a government decision,” the post continued.