The IDF has approved 24 organizations to continue providing humanitarian aid in Gaza, including many American and Christian organizations, as well as International Medical Corps, which has significant Jewish management and prior connections to the Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC).
There are also NGOs from other countries, such as Peace Winds Japan, Deutsche Welthungerhilfe, and UK-Med.
Overall, the 24 countries on this list produce 99% of the total aid volume according to Israel, though it had not named them until now.
The IDF has said that the banned groups have produced only 1% of the aid, with many of them already banned during the war, meaning that the current ban changes nothing on the ground.
Curiously, Japan International Volunteer Center was banned, whereas Peace Winds Japan was not. There are also other countries where some groups were banned, and some groups were not.
Israel has not been entirely transparent about why it has banned one group over another. However, it has stated that groups with a history of members who wore dual hats and worked with Hamas were more likely to be banned, as well as groups that support the boycott, divest, and sanctions campaign (BDS) against Israel.
No Israeli official has said so out loud, but political affiliation could also be a factor.
Recently, the Trump administration went all-in regarding defining large portions of Europe as problematic, which were more multicultural, liberal, and pro-universal globalized values that do not match the US president’s Christian, conservative, more relativist nationalist values.
Part of Trump’s strategy has been to realign US policy also with more far-Right and conservative European religious groups. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar have made some similar moves.
It is possible that the list of approved organizations could have also been influenced by some of these ideological alignments.
Groups that failed to meet requirements banned from Gaza
Officially, the reason that one group is banned, and another is not, is whether an organization fulfills technical registration requirements. But Israel decides what the registration requirements are and whether to waive them in one case or not. There are clearly larger policy concerns underlying the registration process.
There are also questions about whether these underlying considerations are properly evaluating the full playing field.
For example, groups like Palestine Solidarity Association in Sweden may or may not have a great impact on the broader humanitarian aid situation, but very few have heard of them, and their brand is clearly an organization on the Palestinian side. Doctors Without Borders, however, has a strong positive global brand, and Gaza is just one of a large number of areas where it operates.
In other words, banning the Palestine Solidarity Association in Sweden likely has little geopolitical impact or public relations impact on whether fair-minded people in democratic countries believe Israel when it says that it is trying to facilitate humanitarian aid.
In contrast, Doctors Without Borders largely has nothing to do with Gaza, let alone Hamas, and is very well-known worldwide, such that banning it could have a major impact on Israeli credibility regarding the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
The Post has also received information that even if Doctors Without Borders does not provide food aid and is replaceable, in the current difficult situation in Gaza, banning it could impact the broader medical situation.
Of course, Israel can cite that the NGO did not comply with registration requirements and that at least two Doctors Without Borders workers wore dual hats as terrorists (and there were probably more that Israel did not catch).
But Doctors Without Borders is fundamentally not deeply and widely infiltrated by Hamas the way UNRWA is, because it is not a Gaza organization.
And the registration issue could have been finessed quietly or by allowing a third party in the United States to vet the group’s personnel. The NGO’s objection that some of its completely innocent aid workers have also been mistakenly killed by the IDF cannot be dismissed.
Rather, information obtained by the Post indicates that the group is being banned more because of its support for BDS.
There are hard questions to ask about the utility gained by blocking Doctors Without Borders because of its support for BDS versus the terrible headlines Israel has faced worldwide for doing so.
Israel would provide humanitarian aid to Gazans just because it is the right thing to do, but how much sense does it make to lose nearly all of the positive potential public relations attention from providing 600-700 trucks of aid per day, when creating headlines about banning a group like Doctors Without Borders?
None of this means that Israel is not within its rights to ban some groups.
But there are serious questions about whether the broader impact of banning each group on the list was taken into account.