Israel is moving to push Doctors Without Borders out of Gaza, setting up a clash between one of the territory's most well-known medical-aid providers and the Israeli government. The group, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, says Israeli authorities have ordered it to stop bringing in supplies and foreign staff and to shut down all operations in Gaza by the end of February, after the organization refused to comply with new licensing rules, reports the New York Times.
Those rules require aid groups to register all Palestinian employees with Israel, accept tighter scrutiny of their political activity, and refrain from certain forms of criticism of Israel's war. MSF and other NGOs argue the demands violate international law, workers' privacy, and European data-protection standards to which they're bound. Israel has recently revoked the licenses of more than three dozen humanitarian groups in Gaza, including MSF and Oxfam, per the AP.
Israel's military arm responsible for Gaza aid distribution has dismissed MSF's role in Gaza as limited, saying it has delivered relatively few aid trucks and runs only a handful of medical facilities in Gaza. MSF counters that it supports or runs more than a fifth of the area's remaining hospital beds, operates or backs multiple hospitals and clinics, delivers about one-third of the babies in Gaza, and treated more than 100,000 trauma patients and carried out upward of 22,000 surgeries last year.
"If we can't work, it will have catastrophic consequences for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians," says MSF's emergency coordinator for Gaza, Claire San Filippo. A 25-page report from Israel's Ministry for Diaspora Affairs accuses MSF of "grave offenses," portraying its Gaza work as a cover for promoting an "extreme anti-Israeli narrative" and labeling it an "extremely high" security risk. The document cites MSF statements describing the war as genocidal and calling for an arms embargo on Israel. It also points to two Gaza employees it says had ties to Palestinian militant groups. MSF says it doesn't knowingly employ people involved in military activity and calls the attempt to limit its public criticism an "outrageous overreach," arguing that speaking out about what its staff sees in conflict zones is central to its mission.
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