Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has abandoned its principles of neutrality and impartiality in its coverage of the Gaza war, relying on Hamas-provided figures while downplaying the group’s role, according to a new NGO Monitor report.
The report comes a year after MSF’s former leadership raised the alarm that the NGO was stepping too far from its initial mission.
Alain Destexhe, the former secretary general of MSF International, warned that “MSF is no longer neutral; its humanitarian language now serves a political cause,” according to Atlantico.
Destexhe had earlier published a report in December 2023 highlighting MSF staff’s infatuation with Hamas, which violates its principles.
He found that over 40% of statements by staff, including senior figures, praised the terror group and the October 7 massacre, and that some boasted of participation in tunnel construction and weapons production.
While NGO Monitor said that the pattern of pushing an “increasingly narrow narrative that exclusively criticized Israel and erased Hamas” was apparent by 2015, it found that MSF’s biased position became significantly more apparent after Hamas’s October 7 attacks in 2023.
The attacks, in which more than 1200 were killed and hundreds abducted, saw terrorists invade southern Israel as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rained rockets down across the country, not differentiating between civilian and military targets.
NGO Monitor noted it took MSF three days to acknowledge that the “Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a major attack… fired rockets… and took hostages,” but that message was watered down by far more vivid and descriptive accounts of the “horrific” situation in the Gaza Strip.
MSF took three days to acknowledge October 7 after the attack
While Hamas’s massacre took three days to acknowledge, which it recorded online and was extensively reported on by Israeli and international media, NGO Monitor complained that MSF published an unverified accusation on October 7 directed at Israel for causing the death of a nurse and an ambulance driver.
The medical workers’ deaths were attributed to “the escalation between Israel and Gaza,” and did not mention Hamas or the war crimes committed by the group.
MSF acknowledged it “do[es not] have legal authority to establish intentionality,” the core requirement for any finding of genocide. However, its officials have regularly described Israeli actions in the Palestinian territory as such.
Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, an MSF doctor who has regularly visited Gaza, claimed that Israel “intentionally targets children in its genocidal war” and employs a “strategy of intentional dismantlement and destruction of the Palestinian health sector.”
The same MSF official amplified the false claim that Israel was responsible for the Al-Ahli hospital explosion, caused by a misfired PIJ rocket.
MSF included such accusations in a press release in October 2023, failing to publish a retraction even after the United States, Canada, and France, as well as an investigation by The New York Times, confirmed PIJ was responsible.
Israel often held responsible for food shortages in Gaza
As part of this narrow perspective employed by MSF, NGO Monitor noted that Israel was often held singularly blamed for food shortages in Gaza, without mention of Hamas’s recorded theft of the humanitarian aid sent into the territory by the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).
MSF also regularly decried strikes on medical and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip without condemning Hamas for using the institutions as cover for its terrorist activities.
WHILE MSF officials openly accused Israel of genocide, there was near silence on other humanitarian crises across the globe, an NGO Monitor media analysis found.
From 2023 to 2026, MSF failed to use the word “genocide” to describe the humanitarian crises in Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, or Myanmar.
Darcie Grunblatt, a former writer for The Jerusalem Post, found MSF unwilling to provide a comment when investigating the medical crisis in Sweida following government and militia attacks on the Druze community.
The anti-Israel condemnations, often based on accusations and figures provided by Hamas, were published to MSF’s social media account with a reach of over a million accounts.
NGO Monitor’s qualitative, multilingual audit of MSF’s global communications from October 7, 2023, until January 14, 2026, found MSF used the Israel genocide label 272 times across all its platforms and 70 times on MSF’s primary X/Twitter.
Noticeably absent from these posts were mentions of the Israeli hostages, who were only mentioned a total of three times across all of MSF’s international feeds.
A quantitative audit of MSF’s global communications in 2023-2025 also found that, while operating in over 70 countries, the organization’s advocacy efforts throughout late 2023 were almost exclusively focused on Gaza, frequently at the expense of other high-casualty crises.
According to NGO Monitor, MSF has also created an environment that allows its staff to moonlight as medical personnel while working for Hamas.
NGO Monitor was critical of the organization’s hiring practices, pointing to the cases of Fadi al-Wadiya, a physiotherapist with MSF for six years who was exposed by the IDF as being a member of PIJ’s missile array, and Nasser Hamdi al-Shalfouh, an MSF driver exposed by the foreign ministry as being a Hamas terrorist.
Adding more weight to the criticism, an MSF staffer involved in the NGO’s hiring process admitted to The Atlantic in 2025 that “We were told not to check backgrounds,” and that “Our Arab staff was greatly concerned because to be in the same room with operatives put all at risk.”
Destexhe and Karine Toledano, an adjunct professor of anesthesiology at the Université de Montreal and McGill University, and a board member of Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism, also told The Atlantic that “Further evidence has emerged that some MSF-affiliated healthcare workers in Gaza were members of Hamas or other Palestinian terrorist groups…
“The abuse of protected medical roles by armed operatives should have prompted institutional reckoning, transparency, and reform.
“Instead, MSF has in recent years appointed senior figures across multiple national branches with overtly political positions aligned with narratives that excuse or erase Hamas violence while condemning Israel.”
More recently, NGO Monitor noted that MSF refused to comply with Israel’s January demand to provide a list of staff for vetting, despite having previously agreed to do so.
NGO Monitor concluded its report with the recommendation that an independent and public investigation be carried out in MSF, including in its UK and US branches.
It said that MSF must immediately stop repeating the genocide accusation against Israel, that all MSF personnel and volunteers be externally vetted, and that biased individuals and structures within the leadership team be removed.
“In its genocide propaganda and heinous Holocaust inversion, many MSF officials promoted blatantly false testimonies, violating basic principles of medical ethics,” said Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor.
“To restore its shattered reputation and resume its mission of providing aid, an independent investigation leading to fundamental organizational changes and close oversight is vital,” he continued. “MSF in its current framework is no longer a trustworthy humanitarian organization.”