As It Happens6:27Israel will ban dozens of aid groups from Gaza in the new year
Shaina Low had hoped to see truckloads of aid flowing into Gaza in 2026. Instead, she says, millions of dollars worth of supplies will sit in warehouses while Palestinians suffer.
Low is a spokesperson for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), one of more than two dozen humanitarian organizations Israel is barring from the Gaza Strip, effective Thursday, for failing to comply with new registration rules.
Israel says the rules are aimed at preventing Hamas and other militant groups from infiltrating the aid organizations. But the banned organizations say the rules will have horrific consequences for a region that’s already facing deadly floods as it tries to rebuild just months into a fragile ceasefire.
“The thing that is so frustrating for us as aid workers is knowing that we have resources available outside, and that we just can’t reach the people with what we have because Israel has continuously, for more than two years, blocked us from bringing in our supplies, blocked us from scaling up, prevented us from reaching communities in need,” Low told As It Happens guest host Paul Hunter.
“And so we see this news with the registration as just another element of that obstruction.”
Controversial new registration rules
Israel announced new rules early this year requiring aid organizations to register the names of their workers and provide details about funding and operations in order to continue working in Gaza.
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs said more than 30 groups — about 15 per cent of the organizations operating in Gaza — have failed to comply and will be suspended.
Those include Doctors Without Borders, World Vision International, and several regional arms of Oxfam, including Oxfam Quebec.
“The message is clear: humanitarian assistance is welcome — the exploitation of humanitarian frameworks for terrorism is not,” Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli said.
In Gaza City’s Holy Family Church, Palestinian Christians are preparing for a modest Christmas after two years of war. Israel and Hamas signed a truce on Oct. 9 to halt the war, but health authorities say hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since the peace plan began.
Asked why the NRC doesn’t just give Israel the information it wants, Low says it’s not that simple.
Providing a list of names would violate privacy rules in several of the European countries the organization operates out of, she says. What’s more, she says it would put NRC workers at risk.
“Israel is a party to the conflict. And not only are they a party to the conflict, but they’ve killed hundreds of aid workers in Gaza,” she said. “So, for us, it’s a risk to hand over our staff names to them.”
The United Nations reported in October that at least 562 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023.
“There hasn’t been any evidence that NRC or any of these other organizations have any ties to armed groups,” she said.
“We see this as just part of a campaign to delegitimize legitimate humanitarian actors who have been operating in the occupied Palestinian territory for decades.”
While announcing the bans, Israel singled out Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), accusing the charity of failing to respond to Israeli claims that some of its workers were affiliated with Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
“MSF would never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity,” it said in a statement.
MSF says Israel’s decision will have a catastrophic impact on its work in Gaza, where it supports around 20 per cent of the hospital beds and a third of births.
The new regulations also include ideological requirements, including disqualifying organizations that have called for boycotts against Israel, denied Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, or expressed support for any of the international court cases against Israeli soldiers or leaders.
What does a ban actually mean?
The decision not to renew aid groups’ licenses means offices in Israel and East Jerusalem will close, and organizations won’t be able to send international staff or aid into Gaza.
But several of the groups, including NCR, said they will continue to operate programs inside Gaza with local staff.
The Israeli defense body that oversees humanitarian aid to Gaza, COGAT, said that the organizations on the list contribute less than one per cent of the total aid going into the Gaza Strip, and that aid will continue to enter from more than 20 organizations that did receive permits to continue operating.
But the affected groups say the timing of the ban, in the heart of Gaza’s flood-prone winter, will have deadly consequences.
“We have hundreds of thousands of people living in overcrowded displacement sites where there’s open sewage, where there is trash and solid waste piling up, and nowhere for the floodwaters to go other than people’s tents,” Low said.
According to the United Nations, 1.9 million people — 90 per cent of the population — have been displaced in Gaza over the last two years.
Since January, Israel has also banned the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the top UN agency working with Palestinians, accusing it of being infiltrated by Hamas. The UN denies this.
Canada issued a joint statement with several other countries on Tuesday criticizing Israel’s “restrictive new requirements,” and calling on the country to allow NGOs and UN partners to operate in Gaza.
“[We] express serious concerns about the renewed deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which remains catastrophic,” reads the statement from the foreign ministers Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Low says it’s time for the international community to do “more than just issuing statements of condemnation.”
“Israel as the occupying power has an obligation to provide for the basic needs of the people living under its control or facilitate humanitarian relief,” she said.
“What we’ve seen time and again over the last two years is Israel failing to meet those obligations, and yet we’ve seen very little action from states to hold them accountable for those violations.”
