Israel’s new ban on dozens of aid organisations working in Gaza will have ‘catastrophic’ consequences for the delivery of vital services in the devastated territory and will put Palestinian lives ‘at imminent risk’, diplomats, humanitarian workers and experts say.
Thirty-seven NGOs active in Gaza were told by Israel’s ministry of diaspora affairs on Tuesday that they would have to cease all operations in the territory within 60 days unless they fulfilled stringent new regulations, which include the disclosure of personal details of their staff.
In a statement, the ministry said the measures were intended to prevent NGOs employing staff with links to extremist organisations and were necessary to ensure that Hamas did not exploit international aid.
Aid organisations said they had been engaging with Israeli officials for many months.
“We have made strenuous efforts to comply even if these demands are made nowhere else. We do extensive vetting ourselves. It would be disastrous for us to have any armed combatants or people linked to armed groups among our staff,” said Athena Rayburn, executive director of the Association of International Development Agencies, which represents more than 100 NGOs operating in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, according to Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.
“We have such strong measures in place already and have proposed alternatives to the Israeli authorities that would meet this requirement, and they have refused.”
Israeli officials said that the NGOs hit by the ban only supplied 15 per cent of the desperately needed assistance in Gaza, which is suffering an acute humanitarian crisis after two years of devastating war.
One senior UN official said the ban would ‘cripple’ relief operations. Israeli laws banning Unrwa, the main UN agency dealing with Palestinians, from Gaza had already had a significant impact, they added.
Rayburn said the ban would bring about a ‘catastrophic collapse of humanitarian services’, and that Israel authorities had been made ‘fully aware’ of potential consequences.
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