Collaborate or leave: Israel’s cruel ultimatum to humanitarian groups in Gaza
Palestinians queue for meals from a World Central Kitchen distribution point in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 16 March 2025
Lee Mordechai and Liat Kozma write in +972 on 24 September 2025:
In March, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism launched a six-month re-registration process for all humanitarian organizations operating in the occupied Palestinian territories. The process — whose deadline has since been extended to the end of the calendar year — may sound mundane, but in fact it poses an existential threat to the activities of scores of international aid groups, many of which have worked to improve the lives of Palestinians under Israeli occupation for decades.
As a condition of the re-registration, Israel is demanding that these organizations provide a list of all their staff members, including Palestinians. Any groups deemed to be advancing “delegitimizing activity” against Israel, or found to employ someone who has publicly called for boycotting Israel in the past seven years, could lose their authorization to work in the occupied territories. The regulations imply that workers flagged by an interministerial committee must be summarily dismissed in order for their organizations to retain the ability to operate.
The aid groups know that giving Israel a list of their Palestinian employees could place them at risk of increased surveillance, pressure, and reprisals, particularly in Gaza. But refusing to do so and opting instead to protect their employees’ privacy and safety would jeopardize their ability to keep providing essential services to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This dilemma has deepened existing rifts within the humanitarian community — well in line with Israel’s longstanding divide-and-rule policies — and left aid organizations fearing for the future of their work.
While Israel seemingly prefers to maintain the presence of some humanitarian organizations in Gaza for international legitimacy, the aim of the re-registration process is to expel the majority of aid groups and co-opt those that remain into the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) scheme — which, since May, has had a near monopoly over the distribution of aid in the Strip, with extremely deadly consequences. In doing so, Israel seeks to accelerate the dissolution of the needs-based model of humanitarian assistance in Gaza, replacing it with one that instrumentalizes aid flows in ways that align with the government’s broader agenda of ethnic cleansing.
On the ground, this dynamic is abundantly clear. The fact that there are still only four active GHF aid distribution sites in Gaza, and that none of them are located in the north of the Strip where Israel is currently forcibly displacing the population en masse, underlines their function as a vehicle for demographic engineering. In a similar vein, while Israel finally agreed to allow a limited number of tents into Gaza last month, these were permitted to enter only through the southern Kerem Shalom/Karem Abu Salem checkpoint and designated only for those who had fled from Gaza City in the north.