On November 5, the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz revealed a new Israeli measure that forced dozens of humanitarian organizations operating in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank to halt their activities. It explained that the measure "tightens the conditions for organizations to enter Gaza and the West Bank, and obliges them to provide details about their employees and their families."
"New Israeli rules for registering international non-governmental organizations could leave hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza without access to life-saving health care by 2026," Doctors Without Borders said in a statement.
She continued: "These new requirements threaten to withdraw the registration of these organizations as of January 1st," and also warned that failure to comply with the Israeli procedure and failure to register will prevent organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, from providing essential services to people in Gaza and the West Bank.
The international organization described the loss of access and response capabilities for independent and experienced humanitarian organizations to those in need in Gaza, amid the destruction of the health system in the sector, as a "real catastrophe," and called on Israel to "ensure that international non-governmental organizations are able to maintain and continue their independent and impartial response in Gaza."
The statement quoted Pascale Coissard, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Gaza, as saying that the organization's teams treated "hundreds of thousands of patients and provided hundreds of millions of liters of water" last year, while it intends to expand its activities and support the devastated health system in Gaza.
She noted that the organization's teams provided 800,000 outpatient consultations during 2025, and dealt with more than 100,000 severe injury cases.
Israel approved the new procedure for registering organizations last March, after transferring its jurisdiction from the Ministry of Welfare to the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, headed by Amichai Shekli (of the Likud party), according to Haaretz.
The newspaper explained that under this procedure, organizations are required to provide a large number of documents to Israel, including a list of all their foreign and Palestinian employees, and information about their family members.
“Dismantling UNRWA”
In a related context, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said that it has faced a coordinated media disinformation campaign for more than two years aimed at dismantling it, and that this campaign has reached "unprecedented levels".
This came in a post by the agency via the X platform on Sunday evening, in which it stated that "one of the common myths in the context of media misinformation is that UNRWA keeps Palestinian refugees in a state of permanent displacement."
In refuting this, UNRWA explained that “refugees, wherever they are, remain refugees in the absence of just and lasting political solutions to their plight,” and stressed that “dismantling it (UNRWA) will not end the refugee status of Palestinians in theabsence of a political solution.”
She warned that those who will pay the price for this are "the poorest among the Palestinian refugees, those who live in the camps and have no alternative to UNRWA for basic services such as education and health care."
She continued: "Spreading misinformation will distract attention and cause real harm to one of the most vulnerable groups in the Middle East," and pointed out that the real alternative for refugees is "a real investment in peace and in empowered and qualified future Palestinian institutions."
During the two years of genocide that Israel launched against the Gaza Strip, UNRWA was subjected to a broad Israeli crackdown, and Tel Aviv accused it at the beginning of the war of supporting attacks against it and employing militants within its ranks, which the UN agency denied.
Over the past two years, the occupation army has also targeted a number of UNRWA headquarters and facilities in the Gaza Strip, including schools and health facilities that have been converted into shelters.
In 2024, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation banning UNRWA’s operations, while Israel formally notified the United Nations of its cancellation of the agreement that had governed its relations with the agency since 1967.
Despite the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel coming into effect on October 10, the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip remains extremely difficult due to the restrictions imposed by Israel on the entry of humanitarian, relief and medical aid.
Israel is refusing to fulfill its obligations under the Gaza ceasefire agreement, including the entry of the agreed-upon quantities of aid, and is violating the agreement by carrying out attacks that have resulted in the deaths of 401 Palestinians and injuries to 1,108 others since the agreement came into effect.
On October 8, 2023, Israel began a two-year war of genocide in the Gaza Strip, which left about 71,000 Palestinian martyrs, more than 171,000 wounded, and massive destruction affecting 90% of the infrastructure, with reconstruction costs estimated by the United Nations at about $70 billion.
