Antonio Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, expressed his “deeply concerned” about the incident on Friday and urged Israel to lift its restriction on humanitarian organizations that provide aid in Gaza.
Guterres “calls for this measure to be reversed, stressing that international non-governmental organizations are indispensable to life-saving humanitarian work and that the suspension risks undermining the fragile progress made during the ceasefire,” according to a statement from his spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric.
“This recent action will further exacerbate the humanitarian crisis facing Palestinians,” he added.
Israel on Thursday suspended 37 foreign humanitarian organizations from accessing the Gaza Strip after they had refused to share lists of their Palestinian employees with government officials.
The ban includes Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has 1,200 staff members in the Palestinian territories — the majority of whom are in Gaza.
NGOs included in the ban have been ordered to cease their operations by March 1.
The requirements, according to a number of NGOS, violate international humanitarian law or jeopardize their independence.
According to Israel, the new rule is intended to stop organizations that it believes are aiding terrorists from conducting business in the Palestinian territory.
The move to prohibit their overseas counterparts was condemned by eighteen left-wing NGOs with headquarters in Israel on Thursday, claiming that “the new registration framework violates core humanitarian principles of independence and neutrality.”
After Israel launched a bloody war in retaliation for Hamas’s historic October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, a precarious ceasefire has been in effect since October.
In November, authorities in Gaza said more than 70,000 people had been killed there since the war broke out.
Nearly 80 percent of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged by the war, according to UN data, leaving infrastructure decimated.
About 1.5 million of Gaza’s more than two million residents have lost their homes, said Amjad Al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGO Network in Gaza.
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