3 hours ago
7
Israel’s new ban on dozens of aid organisations working in Gaza will have “catastrophic” consequences for the delivery of vital services in the devastated territory and will put Palestinian lives “at imminent risk”, diplomats, humanitarian workers and experts say.
Thirty-seven NGOs active in Gaza were told by Israel’s ministry of diaspora affairs on Tuesday that they would have to cease all operations in the territory within 60 days unless they fulfilled stringent new regulations, which include the disclosure of personal details of their staff.
In a statement, the ministry said the measures were intended to prevent NGOs employing staff with links to extremist organisations and were necessary to ensure that Hamas did not exploit international aid.
Israel has repeatedly claimed that Hamas has systematically diverted aid supplies for military or political purposes and infiltrated aid organisations but has provided limited evidence to support the allegations.
Aid organisations said they had been engaging with Israeli officials for many months.
“We have made strenuous efforts to comply even if these demands are made nowhere else. We do extensive vetting ourselves. It would be disastrous for us to have any armed combatants or people linked to armed groups among our staff,” said Athena Rayburn, executive director of the Association of International Development Agencies, which represents more than 100 NGOs operating in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
“We have such strong measures in place already and have proposed alternatives to the Israeli authorities that would meet this requirement, and they have refused.”
Israeli officials said that the NGOs hit by the ban only supplied 15% of the desperately needed assistance in Gaza, which is suffering an acute humanitarian crisis after two years of devastating war.
Aid officials said this calculation was misleading because most of the NGOs affected by the ban did not deliver their own services but were contracted by the UN to run basic health clinics, malnutrition screening, hygiene and shelter support and much else.
One senior UN official said the ban would “cripple” relief operations. Israeli laws banning Unrwa, the main UN agency dealing with Palestinians, from Gaza had already had a significant impact, they added.
Rayburn said the ban would bring about a “catastrophic collapse of humanitarian services”, and that Israel authorities had been made “fully aware” of potential consequences.
Under the 20-point agreement that allowed a fragile ceasefire to come into effect in October, Israel is obliged to allow “full aid” to be “immediately sent into Gaza”.
The ceasefire ended two years of relentless conflict, but further progress towards a lasting peace deal has stalled, with Israel saying it will not withdraw from the 53% of Gaza territory that is still under its control until Hamas disarms and returns the remains of the last hostage it is holding. The Islamist militant organisation has so far refused to commit to full disarmament.
Speaking on Monday, Donald Trump said he hoped “reconstruction” could begin soon in the Palestinian territory, reduced to ruins by Israeli offensives in response to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks, but gave no details.
Some aid officials said they would be able to find “workarounds” to mitigate the worst effects of the ban but that urgent assistance was needed in Gaza, where recent storms have destroyed tents that were the only shelter for an estimated 500,000 people, food is expensive and clean water, scarce.
On Wednesday, Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, said in a statement that Israel’s move was “outrageous”, warning that “such arbitrary suspensions make an already intolerable situation even worse for the people of Gaza”.
The EU warned on Wednesday that the new NGO registration law that had led to the ban “cannot be implemented in its current form”.
But Israeli officials insisted the law was necessary. “They [the NGOs] refuse to provide lists of their Palestinian employees because they know, just as we know, that some of them are involved in terrorism or linked to Hamas,” Gilad Zwick, spokesperson for the ministry of diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, told AFP.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the main medical aid organisation, is among those facing a ban.
Israeli officials claim individuals affiliated with MSF have links to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. MSF rejects the accusations as unsubstantiated, adding it would never knowingly employ anyone engaged in military activity.
Shaina Low, a spokesperson for the Norwegian Refugee Council, which has extensive operations in Gaza, said it would be impossible to fulfil the new Israeli requirements.
“It is a security concern and a legal concern … and it’s all a distraction from actually getting aid to the people who need it,” she said.
In May, aid agency Oxfam said the requirement to share staff details raised protection concerns, after attacks on humanitarian workers in Gaza.
Several aid officials reported that during the war in Gaza they had been asked by Israeli military officials to supply details of the whereabouts of their international staff there. Suspecting that the information would be used to allow Israeli strikes on offices where there were only Palestinian staff, the NGO refused.
After targeting Unrwa last year, Israel and the US backed the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, a private company that distributed aid from a small number of hubs in southern Gaza amid chaotic conditions that led to the death from Israeli fire of more than 1,000 people.
Cogat, the Israeli agency charged with administration of Gaza, said 4,200 aid trucks would continue to enter every week via the UN, donor countries, the private sector, and more than 20 international organisations that have been reregistered.
The Hamas raid that triggered the war in Gaza killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and led to the abduction of 250. The ensuing Israeli offensive killed about 70,000, mostly civilians, with hundreds more killed since the ceasefire.
