‘Red line’: Global NGOs working in Gaza defy Israel’s threats after MSF ban 

As Israel cracks down on international aid groups supporting Palestinians after decimating Gaza’s healthcare system, eight NGOs have told Al Jazeera they will defy an order to provide information about their colleagues in the strip and the rest of occupied Palestinian territory.

Action Aid, Alianza por la Solidaridad, Medecins du Monde, Medicos Del Mundo, Premiere Urgence Internationale, American Friends Service Committee, Medico International and Medical Aid For Palestinians have joined Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, in refusing to comply with Israel’s requirements for registration.

“It’s an absolute red line,” a Premiere Urgence Internationale spokesperson told Al Jazeera. Sending lists about employees to Israel “would potentially endanger the lives of our staff”.

Medecins du Monde said, “Humanitarian access is not optional, conditional, or political. Israel is unconditionally obliged to facilitate relief schemes under international humanitarian law.”

Since Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza began in October 2023, its military has killed more than 550 aid workers, including 15 MSF staff.

On January 1, Israel withdrew the licences of 37 aid organisations, saying they had not shared data about their employees, funding and operations. According to rules set out by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, the information to be handed over for the sake of “security and transparency” includes copies of passports, CVs and names of family members, including children.

Al Jazeera contacted all 37 aid groups. Overall, 10 have said they will refuse to provide Israel with staff lists, four said they would not comment and the rest did not respond. The International Rescue Committee said it was “in touch with relevant authorities” and was seeking a way to sustain the delivery of life-saving aid.

‘Pretext to obstruct humanitarian assistance’

Action Aid said the requirements “form part of a relentless campaign to undermine and dismantle the systems that sustain Palestinian life”.

The measures, it said, compel charities to “accept political and ideological conditions unrelated to humanitarian work, violating our duty of care, international data-protection standards, labour laws and core humanitarian principles”.

Israel has weaponised aid throughout the genocide and officials have incited violence against Palestinian humanitarian workers by accusing some of them, without evidence, of aligning with Hamas.

It has claimed that MSF had employed fighters, an allegation the group rejects.

On Sunday, the Israeli ministry ordered MSF, which operates 20 health clinics in Gaza, to cease its activities by February 28.

“This is a pretext to obstruct humanitarian assistance,” MSF said, adding that it did not hand over the names of its employees because Israeli authorities “failed to provide the concrete assurances required to guarantee our staff’s safety, protect their personal data and uphold the independence of our medical operations”.

“For Israel, the genocidal project did not stop,” Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon who volunteers in Gaza, told Al Jazeera. “The destruction of the health system, which is a central tenet of the genocidal project, needs to continue into the ‘ceasefire’.”

He said the work of aid groups has become “more important” since Israel destroyed the Palestinian health system.

“These NGOs, by and large, particularly NGOs like MSF, rely almost exclusively on the services being provided by their Palestinian staff. And so all of the clinical work is now provided by Palestinian doctors.”

MSF had earlier agreed to the registration requirements but reversed the decision, saying Israel had failed to allay its fears about its staff’s safety.

MSF provides 20 percent of Gaza’s hospital beds. In 2025, it held 800,000 medical consultations and assisted in one in three births in the enclave – “services that cannot easily be replaced”, the medical charity said.

Fears of another GHF-style intervention

In its statement on banning MSF, the Israeli government said, “concurrently, assessments are being made to provide alternative medical solutions” after MSF’s “departure”, a statement that concerned experts and doctors.

James Smith, an emergency physician who has volunteered in Gaza, said, “The great fear … is that Israel will do what it did with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).”

The GHF was a United States- and Israel-backed scheme with the stated aim of distributing food in Gaza. But Israeli forces and foreign military contractors regularly fired at those seeking aid. More than 850 Palestinians were killed around GHF sites during its six-month operations in 2025.

“[Israel] will create these pseudo-humanitarian organisations,” Smith warned. “It will use the language of humanitarianism to create alternative systems over which it has complete control, and those systems will be used to enact violence and suffering rather than to deliver on humanitarian objectives.”

He added that Israel is “committing genocide” by denying the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

“You commit genocide with bullets and bombs, and you also commit genocide by ensuring that people don’t have access to clean water, nutritious food, safe and dignified shelter, or effective medical care.”

Medico International told Al Jazeera that the purpose of the registration drive was to make NGOs subservient and complicit to Israeli actions “or if they refuse, to deny and criminalise them”.

The push against NGOs “cannot come as a surprise for anyone familiar with the years of smear campaigns against Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations”, it said.

Medical Aid for Palestinians said it will not engage in a registration process, describing the order as a “deliberate political attack designed to silence, control and censor humanitarian organisations”.

“Under international law, Israel is required to facilitate rapid and unimpeded humanitarian assistance – not obstruct, politicise or criminalise it.”