The Government of Israel has announced that 37 NGOs, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and Oxfam, have failed to comply with new legal requirements to register and obtain permission to carry out their humanitarian activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, resulting in their licenses being revoked from 1 January 2026.
The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism of Israel, led by Amichai Chikli, has detailed in a statement that the licenses of these organizations will be revoked as of January 1 and they must complete the closure of their operations within a period of 60 days before March 1.
Israeli authorities had asked NGOs to submit within ten months a series of documents on their organization and operations, including a list of all employees, as part of a new registration regulation that allows permits to be denied if they are, for example, suspected of collaborating with “terrorist organizations” designated as such by Israel, such as the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein has indicated that “registration remains open,” so “organizations can still apply and applications will continue to be reviewed and processed.”
Without joining this register, NGOs cannot include international staff with technical expertise, for example in health, water or sanitation, or bring essential aid supplies across Israeli-controlled borders into Gaza or the West Bank. The original deadline to meet the requirements was September 9, although the Government extended it “in good faith” until December 31.
“The message is clear: humanitarian assistance is welcome; the exploitation of humanitarian frameworks for terrorist purposes is unacceptable. Israel will continue to protect its sovereignty, its citizens and the integrity of humanitarian action,” Chikli stressed, according to The Times of Israel.
The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli military authority in charge of the Palestinian territories, has stated in a statement published on social networks that this decision “will not affect the volume of humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip in the future.”
“The organizations that received notification of the suspension of their activities in the Gaza Strip did not transport aid to Gaza during the current ceasefire, and even in the past, their combined contribution only represented about 1 percent of the total aid volume,” he stated.
In this sense, he has argued that the tightening of conditions on the registry “aims to prevent the exploitation of aid by Hamas, which in the past operated under the cover of certain international aid organizations, consciously or unconsciously.”
COGAT has also accused MSF of refusing to provide Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs with a list of its employees under new registration rules, which also allow it to deny operational permits to entities that “promote the delegitimization of the State of Israel” or deny “its existence as a democratic state.”
The senior director of Research, Advocacy and Campaigns at Amnesty International, Erika Guevara Rosas, has highlighted on social networks that the decision to prohibit access to Gaza for humanitarian organizations “is not only a scandal”, but “a deliberate escalation of its genocide against the Palestinians.”
“Blocking vital aid while the civilian population faces hunger, disease and bombing, despite the supposed ceasefire, is a flagrant violation of International Law and an attack against humanity itself. It is collective punishment on a catastrophic scale,” he declared.
The Israeli authorities assured that in June 2024, a member of Islamic Jihad was identified as an MSF worker, while in September 2024, another employee of the aforementioned NGO was identified as a Hamas sniper.
UN agencies and NGOs working in Gaza demanded the “immediate” lifting of obstacles to access and humanitarian operations in the occupied Palestinian territory, citing the fact that the work of these organizations is “irreplaceable.”
