🚨Israel Just Banned Doctors Without Borders, and 31 Other Humanitarian Organizations from Gaza. The Genocide Continues.
When a state blocks medics and aid workers, it’s telling you exactly what it plans to keep doing
The genocidal State of Israel has announced it will ban dozens of humanitarian organizations from working in Gaza—including Doctors Without Borders (MSF)—under new registration rules and ideological tests. This isn’t a bureaucratic update. This is an escalation in the siege. It is the deliberate narrowing of the last lifelines keeping people alive.
Before I break down what’s happening, I need to ask you from the heart to become a member today. I keep this work free for the world—for readers in Gaza, for students in public schools, for families living in deep poverty, for elders on fixed incomes—because a smaller circle of people who can afford it chooses to carry some of the cost. Please click here to become a member and please click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member. Your support keeps this work free for them, and even for you when you can’t afford to pay.
Now let’s name what Israel is doing—plainly, and with receipts.
Multiple reports say Israel will suspend more than two dozen humanitarian organizations—some reports say more than 30—including Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and CARE - and many other award winning and life savings groups. The ban is expected to take effect TOMORROW, and organizations with offices in Israel or East Jerusalem may be forced to close and leave by March 1st, with an appeals process offered only paper.
Israel claims this is about preventing Hamas or other militants from infiltrating aid organizations. Aid groups and the UN have repeatedly rejected Israel’s broader claims that aid is being siphoned at scale by Hamas, and they warn the new rules are arbitrary and will harm a civilian population desperately in need of humanitarian aid.
But here is the part that tells you everything about what this really is: these new regulations reportedly include ideological requirements. Not simply “prove your staff aren’t militants,” but disqualifications for organizations that have called for boycotts, denied October 7th, or expressed support for international court cases against Israeli soldiers or leaders. In other words: not only “we want to check your paperwork,” but “we want to police your politics.” We want to decide who is allowed to speak about accountability while working to keep Palestinians alive.
That is not vetting. That is coercion.
And it’s happening in the middle of an “aid” catastrophe that no serious person disputes. Over the past two-plus years, Gaza’s health system has been battered and hollowed out. The needs are enormous even under a fragile ceasefire. The famine conditions, the collapsed hospitals, the lack of medicine, the amputations without proper anesthesia, the infectious disease, the hunger—it’s all still there.
Doctors Without Borders has said Israel’s decision will have a catastrophic impact. The group also says it supports around 20% of hospital beds and about one-third of births in Gaza. Read that again: one-third of births.
When you ban or suspend MSF, you are not playing politics with an NGO. You are playing politics with mothers giving birth, with premature babies, with hemorrhaging, with infection, with emergency C-sections, with the basic possibility of life.
This is what makes the timing so grotesque. Less than three months into a fragile (fake) ceasefire, as people are still living in tents and ruins and trying to survive winter, Israel is tightening the administrative chokehold on the very organizations that keep people alive.
And it’s not only Gaza. The reports say this also affects the West Bank, where international NGOs operate under conditions of occupation and rising settler violence. Israel is effectively telling the humanitarian world: your presence here is conditional on our political approval.
Now I want to be crystal clear about the international law here, in plain language.
Under the laws of war, humanitarian aid is not a “favor.” Civilians have protections, and occupying powers have duties. Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited. Blocking or crippling humanitarian relief—especially in a population that has already been pushed into mass deprivation—raises profound legal exposure. And forcing aid groups to hand over staff lists and internal data to a party to the conflict—without credible guarantees the information won’t be used for military or intelligence targeting—undermines the core humanitarian principles of neutrality and independence. That’s not activist rhetoric; that’s the backbone of humanitarian law.
And this isn’t Israel’s first move like this. Israel already banned UNRWA from operating on its territory earlier this year after months of political attacks and allegations. The United States, once UNRWA’s largest donor, halted funding in early 2024. This is the pattern: isolate the UN agency, choke the NGOs, pressure the medical groups, then claim “aid is still entering.”
One Israeli defense body reportedly responded by saying the groups being suspended contribute less than 1% of the total aid entering Gaza. But that talking point misses the human reality. Aid is not just a “percentage.” A medical organization can be a small slice of “total aid” and still be the difference between life and death for tens of thousands of people. And when you ban organizations because they won’t submit sensitive staff lists—because they fear those staff will be targeted—you are telling the world you want control, not accountability.
Here’s what I can’t get past: the same Western political class that performs endless outrage about humanitarian values—about women, children, human rights, the “rules-based order”—keeps enabling the one policy that makes those values impossible: the policy of impunity. Gaza has endured over two years of genocide, and now Israel is trying to kick out doctors and aid workers who keep civilians alive and document what is happening. And too many governments will murmur concern and do nothing.
That’s not neutrality. That’s complicity.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “How could they do this in public?” understand: they can do it because they believe nobody will stop them. They can do it because they have learned that the world will tolerate almost anything as long as it’s dressed in “security” language and stamped with bureaucratic seals.
I want you to remember this moment. Because later, when the deaths pile up from preventable causes—untreated infections, childbirth complications, malnutrition, chronic disease—officials will pretend it was inevitable. It won’t be. It will be policy.
If you want me to keep doing this work—keeping it free for the world, naming what’s happening clearly, and putting pressure where pressure belongs—please stand with us now: click here to become a member and please click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.
Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun
Somehow Israel continues to shock me. Not because I thought they were ethical, but because their public evil knows no bounds, has no limits. They have no shame. And they do this all right in front of the entire world. It's infuriating.
This is such an outrage I could barely finish reading the article. Thank you for writing about this.
This is even more of a free pass to Israel for genocide of Palestinians. They just simply want a death camp. That's even more direct than the horrific free pass the UN gave to Trump to colonize Gaza. And anyone who thinks that turning a blind eye will only affect Palestinians is absolutely wrong. Anyone who allows this must know that to deny medical care to ANYONE is a free pass to genocide everywhere.