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Israel has spent the past three years steadily tightening the bureaucratic noose around humanitarian organizations working in Palestinian territories. In this interview, Riad Othman of the aid organization medico international spoke with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Katja Hermann about how a new Inter-Ministerial Committee has imposed registration requirements that most NGOs consider impossible to meet without violating donor confidentiality, staff privacy, or their own political independence. Othman walks through what happened when medico and thirty-six other organizations had their registrations revoked at the end of 2025, the legal battle that followed, and the court ruling that both upheld Israel's information demands and limited the committee's reach in the West Bank.
There has been increasing pressure by Israel on NGOs operating in Israel or Palestinian territories. How has this shift in policy impacted your work?
On October 7th 2023, international NGO workers were given visa extensions of eight months by Israel. After that the government said that they would not be issuing any more humanitarian visas, no matter whether an organization was registered or not. You are blacklisted. Since then no international NGO has received visas for their international staff meant to be based there more permanently. And their ability to operate on the ground has been dramatically curtailed: Where they can go, who they can work with, who they can help, what they can bring in, it’s all restricted now. There have been dozens of cases where doctors working for medical organizations were blocked from visiting the West Bank, let alone Gaza. Israel is blocking medical staff, doctors, surgeons, not just a few country directors of some foreign NGOs. Specialists from outside are all being blocked as part of this policy, even agricultural experts can’t enter anymore.
It’s easy to see that the situation has gotten a lot worse in the last year, but in reality the problems started earlier, I would say around 2012. Since then Israel has continually restricted the space of humanitarian and non-governmental actors. It started off with visa restrictions on international staff and blocked access to Gaza. Even before the war we were getting signals from the relevant authorities that a big change was coming. And when the war started, the ministries into whose remit our work falls told us that they’ve given up our files.
In December 2025, the Israeli government tasked a new “Inter-Ministerial Committee” (IMC) with elaborating new rules for registration and a list of criteria that NGOs had to fulfill. Before the war, a single ministry was in charge of NGOs, the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Now ten different ministries and Israeli government entities are in charge of international NGOs through this umbrella organization of the IMC. It released this new list of criteria released in March 2025. Since that process started we have had about a year and a half of uncertainty.
Many humanitarian aid organizations including medico international have rejected these new terms. Why is that?
Israel is using this registration process to waste our time, to slow us down. The procedures for regulating and registering international NGOs operating in the occupied territories were detailed in a twenty page document. In it, there are two distinct reasons under which Israel can deny an organization or an individual accreditation or a visa. On the one hand there are political reasons, on the other there are operational aspects.
On the political side, the IMC has come up with 14 criteria to disqualify someone. This includes denying the Jewish and democratic nature of the State of Israel or maintaining any sort of contact with entities designated as terrorist organizations. Since October 2021, this included several Palestinian human rights NGOs. This means that if you have any relationship with the six Palestinian NGOs which were designated in October 2021, that's grounds for denial. Other reasons include supporting armed groups, which seems like an obvious one. But the criteria also include engaging in “delegitimization campaigns”, which are not closer defined. Grounds for exclusion probably include engaging in any sort of boycott, divestment, or sanctions campaign, as defined by Israel. If you called for an arms embargo during the genocide in Gaza, that would be grounds for denial of registration. medico would then be, by default, ineligible to apply.
There’s also an operational aspect to this new process. The Israelis were demanding access to information that would be considered unacceptable anywhere else. Among other things they wanted information on donors: their names and addresses, and exact amounts donors had granted. They wanted to detailed reports on our partners: How much money they received and where they were working, which would give them information about our beneficiaries. They also wanted full information on international and local staff, which is a complete non-starter for all of us. If staff, specifically international staff, are found to have violated any criterion set up by the IMC, even if the organization as whole does not, Israel reserves the right to tell that organization that it’s not allowed to hire that person. All this gives them veto power to determine who works for your organization, who you're allowed to support, where you're allowed to support them, and what you're able to support them with. And then, at the end of the list it says the Inter-Ministerial Committee maintains the right to dismiss cases based on new criteria they come up with.
The Israeli government claim that some humanitarian organizations have employed members of Hamas. In the Israeli view, these new procedures were set up to stop terrorist organizations from infiltrating NGOs. Are these allegations credible?
It’s important to put these allegations into context. Israeli accusations are often treated as established facts. The presumption seems to be that Israel is a neutral actor making an accusation and that Israel would never make a false or misleading statement. Even after three years of genocide in Gaza people pretend that Israeli accusations are sacrosanct. They’re not.
In October of 2021, when Israel designated six Palestinian organizations as terrorist groups, they claimed that these organizations were working hand in hand with terrorist organizations, that they were the NGO wing of armed militias. But when asked what proof the authorities had it was things like an employee attending a conference that might have had some connection to the PFLP. It’s all very vague. We keep hearing 12 people from UNWRA were involved with Hamas. Then it became 1200, then became 120. There is a case of an NGO worker which seemingly confirms the Israeli allegations, but the evidence provided is hardly convincing, especially since some of the statements by employees of the Union of Health Work Committees incriminating other organizations were likely extracted through torture. No court in a democratic country would accept this.
Where is the actual evidence? If the government of Israel had convincing evidence of how international NGOs were being infiltrated and how their funds were being siphoned off, why does it not take NGOs to court and settle it there? This is propaganda pushed by an extremist Israeli government and a handful of quasi-governmental NGOs in Israel and abroad. They have been lobbing accusations against UNWRA and against the UN in general for three years now. To them, everybody's Hamas. If you don't agree with the genocide, you're Hamas. If you don't support the starvation campaign, you're Hamas. If you want to provide any aid to Palestinians, you're Hamas.
People need to be more critical of such allegations and what purpose they serve. It is this accusation of terrorism or even just spatial proximity to terrorists that has been used time and again to lend legitimacy to illegal attacks against civilians and against professionals protected under international law. More than 400 aid workers have been killed, including internationals, and even more Palestinian health workers. No one has been held accountable for this. But we are expected to jump through hoops to prove our innocence. The last time I checked, we have the concept of innocent until proven guilty.
Are there any internal processes that you’ve set up to make sure that these allegations do not come true?
We do not randomly hire everybody who sends us an application. We have an internal process, a vetting mechanism following UN guidelines that every international organization engages in. Additionally, we also follow EU guidelines. There's a background check process that all of us go through to be hired which makes sure these things don't happen.
The accusation that our funds are being siphoned off to support terrorists is particularly absurd. The only aid that we've seen stolen in notable quantities has been taken by Israeli aligned militias in Gaza with support of the IDF. This has been verified by the US State Department, which is not exactly a friend of ours, and various EU entities.
There are the Abu Shabab gangs, gangs near Beit Hanoun, and gangs around Rafah. They are responsible for most of the documented aid theft. But we don't talk about them. We keep debating hypothetical aid obstruction or aid confiscation by Hamas with no proof whatsoever.
As of early 2026, Israel has banned or revoked the licenses of 37 aid organizations from working in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and East-Jerusalem. Several organizations, medico included, have taken legal action against this move. What are your demands?
On 9 March 2025, the 100 organizations that are part of the AIDA network for international organizations working in development and humanitarian aid in the occupied Palestinian territories were told they had six months to apply for registration under the new process. This left organizations with three options: To comply fully, potentially violating their own rules and regulations, which could lead them to be sued by donors or staff; or to send in a partial application in which you give the Israelis the information you're legally allowed to provide but withhold what you're not legally allowed to give out; or to reject the new process because it was clearly politically motivated and biased against the NGOs. We, along with other organizations, chose the third option, because we do not recognize Israeli authority to register organizations that primarily work in the occupied Palestinian territories.
In September 2025, the Israeli authorities extended the deadline until the end of the year 2025. Very few organizations had actually applied by then. On 31 December 2025, the IMC sent a letter to 37 organizations informing them that their registration was expired. medico was one of them as the only German organization whose registration was revoked. The IMC informed us that if we had not applied yet, our registration would be automatically revoked, meaning that we must cease all operations in Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and remove all our employees. The IMC gave us 60 days to get out.
At the end of February, a petition for an injunction was put together by 19 of these 37 organizations, demanding immediate action to review the legality of the order, specifically on issues of jurisdiction and violation of privacy laws in regards to procedural aspects of the IMC. The court ordered an immediate injunction, basically a stop work order on the IMC, not to enforce the closure of the petitioning NGOs until the court came to a decision, which it did in late May 2026.
What was the outcome?
The court rejected the legal arguments around privacy, it ruled that NGOs are legally required to provide the information the Israeli authorities are demanding, and it gave us 30 days to comply or cease operations. The court’s primary argument is that security is more important than privacy, but they also claimed that there was no proof for any misuse of data.
But the court also ruled on another incredibly important point: The jurisdictional limits of the IMC. The court stated that the IMC lacked jurisdictional enforcement outside of the recognized borders of the state of Israel. Of course, “recognized borders” is a funny term because what the court means is Israel in its 1967 borders plus occupied and illegally annexed East Jerusalem, which is not what international law or the majority of the rest of the world considers Israel’s borders.
So the court has essentially recognized the legitimacy of the Palestinian authorities to regulate international organizations, as long as they operate in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. So if you don’t need the benefits of Israeli registration, visas for international staff or permits for Palestinian staff to cross Israeli controlled checkpoints, then you can continue operating, at least in theory. In practice, Israel controls all access to Palestinian territories.
Most international organizations have Palestinian registration, so the court has validated their ability to continue operations. And the court also rejected the right of the Inter-Ministerial Committee to bureaucratically annex control over what happens in Palestinian territories. The court clarified that this is not the IMC’s jurisdiction, authority or function within the state.
How did your donors support you through this process?
Our main institutional donor is the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the BMZ. We’ve had a very good experience with them, they've been incredibly supportive and adaptive to the changing conditions on the ground in Gaza, and we’ve been able to continue the project with them until today. We’ve had a close relationship with the BMZ for 30 years, and it’s nice to see continued trust.
My perception about the German government as a whole is different, though: We feel that they were too dismissive of our concerns about the issue, treating this weaponization of bureaucracy as if it was some neutral policy of a democratic state. In a context of a prolonged illegal occupation Germany should not be treating these steps by the government of Israel as if this was just another independent country making use of its sovereignty to determine who works there and who doesn't. This is a continuation and extension of the earlier repression against Palestinian civil society. Along with other NGOs we’ve been warning the German government for years that repression would intensify if there was no determined pushback against these tendencies.
The German government’s response was sympathetic but not supportive. They claim Germany has very little ability to influence Israeli authorities. They’ve also said that they cannot criticize Israel publicly, otherwise it'll hurt their backdoor diplomacy which supposedly gets results. I'd love to see those results.
Beyond the humanitarian sector, critical civil society in Palestine is under enormous pressure, not just since the war on Gaza. This pressure takes different forms, criminalization, blacklisting, defunding, or making life difficult through administrative burdens. Where do you see this development heading?
Let's not sugarcoat it. It's not over. For now, the Israeli authorities are claiming victory, walking away to reassess and to see how everybody's going to adapt over the next six months or so, how we adjust based off of the ruling and internal processes. As these things settle in they can figure out new ways to restrict us. They will initiate a new process, a new procedure, a new restriction. They'll make a conscious decision with the new government after the elections in October. This isn’t simply an issue of Netanyahu’s government. Whether we’ll get a Netanyahu government or a Lapid/Bennett government or Lieberman or somebody else, this issue will not go away.
