A Doctors Without Borders worker assists a Palestinian woman at a tent clinic in Susya, in the south of the occupied West Bank, in July 2024. (Mosab Shawer/AFP/Getty Images)
Israel will begin implementing sweeping new visa and registration rules for international aid organizations operating in the Palestinian territories, introducing restrictions humanitarian groups say would politicize their work, put local and international staff at risk and undermine relief efforts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The new measures, which Israel announced this week, give officials broad authority to reject the registration of nongovernmental organizations providing assistance to Palestinians using a far-reaching set of guidelines. Among the criteria: whether an NGO or its employees have ever called for a boycott of Israel, denied its existence “as a Jewish and democratic state,” or expressed support for legal proceedings against Israeli citizens in international courts for acts carried out while serving in the military or any security agency.
Aid groups say they are particularly worried about a provision requiring them to submit the names, contact details and identification numbers for Palestinian staff, something Israel contends is necessary to vet employees for potential ties to militants. But because the war in Gaza has been so deadly for humanitarian personnel, with more than 300 killed, the majority of them Palestinians, aid organizations said they find the request to hand over names to one party to the conflict “highly problematic,” according to a Jerusalem-based relief worker who, like other aid officials and staff in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation by Israeli authorities.
Registering in Israel is mandatory for international humanitarian groups seeking access to the Palestinian territories — home to about 5 million people — and helps facilitate visas, permits, financial transactions and other logistics essential for large-scale aid operations. But although NGOs have been working in Israel for decades, the move now to constrain their activities comes amid a wider Israeli effort to curtail aid delivery in Gaza and shrink the political and legal space in which humanitarian groups function, relief workers say.
Israel has said that the greater oversight will ensure relief work is carried out “in a manner aligned with Israel’s national interests,” according to a statement introducing the changes. COGAT, the Israeli Defense Ministry unit that coordinates civil affairs in the occupied territories, has also touted the new rules as beneficial to NGOs because, as one of the agency’s spokesmen said in a recent briefing, it streamlines older registration procedures that were hamstrung by the pandemic and then the war.
But Israel has also repeated, without evidence, its long-standing charges — denied by aid agencies — that the assistance going to Gaza is being diverted to Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the enclave. And on Thursday, COGAT, in a post on X, accused relief organizations of publishing “false narratives” that blame the Israeli government for the lack of aid in Gaza, home to more than 2 million people, the vast majority of whom remain displaced.
Earlier this month, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a halt to all food, fuel and other supplies entering the territory, saying the decision was necessary to pressure Hamas to release the remaining Israeli hostages taken during the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, after a temporary ceasefire expired March 1.
Israel launched its war in Gaza after Hamas-led militants stormed Israeli communities, killing around 1,200 people and taking more than 250 others hostage. The military campaign destroyed much of the enclave, including critical infrastructure, and killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.
Throughout the war, which raged for 15 months, humanitarian agencies maintained a robust presence on the ground, supporting hospitals, delivering relief and raising the alarm as Gaza tipped toward famine, even as Israel fired on aid convoys and blocked the flow of goods. Israeli officials denied restricting aid and instead blamed relief organizations for not distributing the supplies quickly enough.
“The new regulation marks a dramatic shift in Israel’s policy toward foreign entities that, under the guise of humanitarian work, seek to undermine the state, promote boycotts, and tarnish its reputation,” Amichai Chikli, minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, said in a statement.
Chikli’s ministry is overseeing the process and leading a new committee tasked with approving or denying the applications. The committee is made up of representatives from across government, including intelligence and security agencies, many of which don’t deal directly with humanitarian groups or relief efforts, legal experts say.
“This is not a committee that understands, even slightly, anything about Israeli humanitarian obligations under international law,” said Michael Sfard, a Tel Aviv-based human rights lawyer.
International law says that Israel is the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza — territories it captured from Jordan and Egypt, respectively, in 1967 — and must facilitate humanitarian aid to the Palestinian population. Last year, the International Court of Justice, the top judicial arm of the United Nations, ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide by ensuring sufficient humanitarian assistance and enabling basic services. In a separate advisory opinion in July, the court said that Israel “has the continuing duty to ensure that the local population has an adequate supply of foodstuffs, including water.”
But on Monday, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry said in a statement that the roughly 170 international NGOs registered in Israel — including groups such as Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council — will have just six months to reapply under the new system, or have their registration revoked, with just seven days to appeal.
The announcement came soon after Israel’s High Court rejected a legal challenge to the new regulations by the Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA), a forum of more than 80 NGOs working in the Palestinian territories. AIDA argued that the government’s decision to enact the rules was inconsistent with Israeli law and violated international humanitarian principles.
The ministry then posted a list of the documents and information required for registration, including the names, contact information and passport numbers of all foreign staff and their partners or children; detailed information about donors and other funding sources; as well as a record of all the international and local organizations and United Nations agencies with which the group cooperates.
“It’s even worse than we anticipated,” a senior aid worker in the region said of the new guidelines. “This is one of the most concerning moments that we, as humanitarian organizations, have experienced in a long time.”
Humanitarian officials are grappling with the burden this might place on war-worn staff, as well as NGOs struggling with limited resources after the Trump administration froze most foreign aid.
“It could force some, and maybe even all, organizations to say ‘we cannot operate under these conditions,’ which would not be good for anyone,” said Sean Carroll, president and chief executive of American Near East Refugee Aid, or Anera, which has worked in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon for more than 55 years.
“We’re registered where we need to be, and we’re allowed to do our work where we need to be. I think that’s really important,” Carroll said of his organization. But if any government Anera has a good working relationship with is going to change that, “then that’s problematic,” he said. “And they have no reason to change it because we haven’t changed the way we work.”
One key question, aid workers said, is whether they should prioritize humanitarian services and delivery on the ground — particularly in Gaza, where the needs are immense — but at the potential cost of their advocacy work, which includes raising awareness of civilian suffering and human rights violations in the territories.
As part of their missions, NGOs advocate for the rights and protections of civilians under international humanitarian law, said Allegra Pacheco, a human rights lawyer and chief of party of the West Bank Protection Consortium, a partnership of NGOs supporting vulnerable Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank.
But the broad new directives, which the government says do not constitute an exhaustive list, could be used to penalize groups that have been the most outspoken critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, NGO workers say. One of the guidelines allows the committee to deny registration to an organization that “actively promotes delegitimization campaigns against the State of Israel.”
“If you advocate [for] the application of international law … you could be anti-Israel,” Pacheco said.
Just this month, the British charity Oxfam said Israel’s decision to again block aid to Gaza was “a reckless act of collective punishment, explicitly prohibited under international humanitarian law.” Save the Children, also a U.K.-based nonprofit, also called the move “nothing short of a death sentence for Gaza’s children,” while medical NGO Doctors Without Borders accused Israel of using “aid as a negotiation tool.”
“It’s a dangerous time for Gaza but it also sets a dangerous precedent worldwide,” said the senior aid worker in the region.
“We all don’t know if we’ll even be here in a few months and it’s paralyzing,” the aid worker said. “Shall we try everything to stay and serve the most vulnerable people in Gaza? Shall we be principled and refuse to comply? We just don’t know.”
Carman reported from Washington. Claire Parker in Jerusalem and Miriam Berger in Jaffa, Israel, contributed to this report.
Middle East conflict
Israel’s energy minister said Sunday that he would immediately cut off electricity to the Gaza Strip, in an apparent effort to pressure Hamas on negotiations after the first phase of a ceasefire deal expired on March 1. Follow live updates on the ceasefire and the hostages remaining in Gaza.
The Israel-Gaza war: On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented cross-border attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking civilian hostages. Israel declared war on Hamas in response, launching a ground invasion that fueled the biggest displacement in the region since Israel’s creation in 1948. In July 2024, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an attack Hamas has blamed on Israel.
Hezbollah: In late 2024, Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire deal, bringing a tenuous halt to more than a year of hostilities that included an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. Israel’s airstrikes into Lebanon had been intense and deadly, killing over 1,400 people including Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader. The Israel-Lebanon border has a history of violence that dates back to Israel’s founding.
Gaza crisis: In the Gaza Strip, Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars, killing tens of thousands and plunging at least half of the population into “famine-like conditions.” For months, Israel has resisted pressure from Western allies to allow more humanitarian aid into the enclave.
U.S. involvement: Despite tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some U.S. politicians, including former President Joe Biden, the United States supports Israel with weapons, funds aid packages, and has vetoed or abstained from the United Nations’ ceasefire resolutions.
Middle East conflict