Palestinians line up to receive meals from a World Central Kitchen distribution point in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, March 16, 2025. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

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.

Palestinians flee southward from Gaza City at the outset of an Israeli ground offensive, in the central Gaza Strip, September 18, 2025. (Doaa Albaz/Activestills)

 A PR war of attrition

Israel has long sought to restrict the activities of international humanitarian organizations operating in the occupied territories. But its intensified crusade against the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and its 75-year mandate to provide much-needed support to Palestinian refugees marked a substantial escalation. In January 2024, Israel accused the organization’s staff of participating in the October 7 attacks, causing several donor countries to suspend financial support. Nine months later, the Knesset passed a law branding UNRWA as a terrorist organization and banning it from any contact with the Israeli government, essentially rendering its work in Gaza and the West Bank impossible.

Using this new playbook, Israel is no longer aiming simply to limit the operations of groups that provide aid, report Israel’s violations of international law, and refuse to be co-opted, but to banish them — an endeavor that is being enabled by the indifference of the international community. Beginning with UNRWA and proceeding with other UN agencies and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), Israel is waging an intense campaign of delegitimization that aims to paint them all as ineffective at best and complicit in terrorism at worst, unless they submit to the GHF scheme.

In this war over narrative, Israel holds two distinct advantages. First, its formal and informal spokespeople have more resources, more reach, and better connections with the international media than UN or INGO spokespeople; this allows them to disseminate their message louder and in more arenas than the humanitarian organizations, which have few defenders in these battles. Second, Israel can attack and discredit its adversaries at will, whereas the aid groups are constrained in their critique of Israel since they remain dependent on its approval to work in Gaza and the West Bank.

These tensions escalated after Israel barred all aid from entering Gaza in March 2025, and more so again after the introduction of the GHF mechanism in May. Ever since, Israel has been trying to maneuver the INGOs into accepting the GHF as a legitimate humanitarian partner organization. The result, in essence, is a public relations war of attrition. Israel believes it can outlast the INGOs and browbeat them into accepting the GHF, while the organizations believe the GHF mechanism is a temporary measure that will eventually collapse and lead to a resumption of the previous aid system.

Displaced Palestinians carry food parcels and supplies from a GHF aid distribution point at the Netzarim corridor in the central Gaza Stip, August 2, 2025. (Ali Hassan/Flash90)

Speaking on condition of anonymity due to fear of retribution, several INGO workers told +972 Magazine that they believe they are losing the PR war, even despite the highly negative press the GHF has received. “I don’t think we’re succeeding in pushing back against the new GHF narrative,” one explained. “It’s as if there are no facts on the ground, and everyone is just speaking based on opinion.”

Within this narrative war, the GHF aims to find support wherever it can; for example, it has been highlighting its work with the questionable Samaritan’s Purse, an American missionary organization with a record of anti-Muslim messaging. The GHF also recently boasted that it has the support of “200 NGOs and faith groups,” though it didn’t name any of them.

In the meantime, aid groups that transgress unwritten rules experience sharp reprisals. The NGO Rahma was open to a limited collaboration with the GHF: after securing permits to get 4,000 food parcels into Gaza, which it couldn’t bring in itself, Rahma handed the aid to the GHF. According to Rahma, rather than just distributing the aid as agreed, the GHF disseminated photos showing it handing out parcels marked with Rahma’s logo, increasing suspicion among other INGOs that saw Rahma as breaking the agreed-upon line. Rahma protested publicly against the GHF, and a few weeks later, Israel revoked its permit to conduct humanitarian work.

Rahma’s surprise delisting sent a message to other INGOs about what Israel will and will not allow them to do. Other reprisals have been directed at individuals: soon after publicly accusing Israel of generating “conditions created to kill” at aid sites in Gaza, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian territories, Jonathan Whittall, discovered that Israel would not be renewing his visa, essentially forcing him out of the job.

 Isolate, eliminate, co-opt

After nine months of interviews with aid workers operating in Gaza, it is clear that their discourse has changed considerably. If, early on, aid workers were hesitant to acknowledge differential treatment by COGAT — the Israeli unit that oversees the logistical coordination of humanitarian missions in Gaza — today such treatment is discussed openly.

Palestinians collect humanitarian aid delivered by international organizations in Gaza city, June 26, 2025. (Yousef Zaanoun/Activestills)

Some organizations continue to hope that personal relationships they have managed to cultivate with Israeli officials in COGAT or elsewhere will enable their continued operation within the occupied territories. Other groups see these relationships as undermining the neutrality of humanitarian work, leading to a general atmosphere of suspicion. As one aid worker noted, “Based on what we’re hearing from some of these organizations, the more complicit they [become], the more favors they get.”

Israel has mastered the art of gradually eroding humanitarian norms: first through an initial step that generates some public outcry, before later launching a much broader offensive that even critical voices are too exhausted to notice. Israel had already designated six prominent Palestinian human rights organizations as terrorist organizations in 2021, with little international backlash. The Gaza war provided a pretext for expanding this assault to international aid organizations as well.

“They always send out test balloons, and so we’ve had test balloons of this deregistration before,” one aid worker, who requested anonymity, told +972. “What happened in October 2024 [when Israel barred six medical NGOs from entering Gaza] is an example of that. What’s happening with Rahma now is a bigger balloon, and I’m not seeing the international outcry.

“What they did to UNRWA is what they’re going to do to other organizations: de-legitimizing, de-registering, kicking out internationals, and refusing to de-conflict [i.e. guaranteeing not to target] routes, office spaces, and clinics — essentially rendering them no longer worthy of protection,” the aid worker continued. “What’s especially concerning to me is that they didn’t start with smaller groups, they started with UNRWA. This was not an accident; it’s instructive, and it’s going to have a ripple effect elsewhere.”

INGOs still have the option to appeal to Israeli courts if their registration is revoked. But in the current circumstances, the Supreme Court is highly unlikely to overturn a Diaspora Ministry decision.

One interviewee believes it is unlikely that Israel would ban all humanitarian organizations in one fell swoop, but will rather isolate and eliminate them one by one away from the public eye. Those that remain, the aid worker continued, will be intimidated into accepting a role within the GHF scheme.

Trucks loaded with humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip, as seen from the Israeli side of the border, September 4, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

“Israel doesn’t want internationals here —that’s where the policy begins,” another aid worker explained. “[That was the case] even before October 7, but now they’ve found an opportunity to accelerate it. Except for Palestinian journalists, humanitarian workers have been the only ones reporting and monitoring the violations [on the ground] and speaking out about them. We’ve poked holes in their narrative. And Israel doesn’t want that anymore.”

However, the aid worker conceded that there is an increasing sense that they are fighting a losing battle. “Sometimes it feels like we [the INGOs] should all pack our stuff and leave. We’re not saving lives in the way we should, we’re not protecting Palestinians as we committed to, and we’ve fallen too silent. We’re unable to implement our humanitarian imperative. We’re basically beyond our red lines. The only way for us to operate is within these camps that Israel is setting up. And in the West Bank, we can’t access the most vulnerable communities.

“So the dilemma is stark. If we can’t act as a protective presence and live up to the localization agenda we committed to — empowering Palestinian partners, advocating with them, and ensuring they can lead our operations — we should just pack our stuff and leave. And if we stay, we must act with courage and integrity, not just administer aid within shrinking spaces.”

This dilemma for humanitarians has repercussions far beyond Gaza. When the powerful ignore, bend, and break the rules of the international order, they are dismantling an entire system built on the foundations of the UN, longstanding international norms, and an international justice system represented by the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice in The Hague. As one interviewee concluded: “Gaza is a thread: pull on it and it will unravel all of these systems.”

Lee Mordechai and Liat Kozma