GAZA 2026: ISRAEL'S LATEST ASSAULT ON AID GROUPS STRIKES AT THE SOUL OF HUMANITY |
Israel’s decision to ban 37 international humanitarian organisations from operating in Gaza and across the occupied Palestinian territories is not an administrative or technical matter.
This move coincides with the Netanyahu government cutting electricity and water supplies to the offices of UNRWA, the biggest UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
These are not random acts but political moves with life-and-death consequences — and one that fits squarely within a broader pattern of policies designed to undermine Palestinian survival.
At a moment when Gaza’s health system has been systematically destroyed — with the United Nations declaring maternal and newborn health facilities “decimated” amid widespread destruction, shortages, and soaring mortality — its infrastructure levelled, and its population displaced and starved, cutting humanitarian access is not a neutral security measure.
It is an escalation. It further strips Palestinians of the basic means to stay alive.
For Palestinians, international aid organisations are not supplementary actors filling temporary gaps.
They have become essential because Israel’s decades-long occupation, blockade, and repeated military assaults have deliberately dismantled the conditions for normal life across all Palestinian territories, not only in Gaza, but also in the occupied West Bank.
Israel exercises decisive control over borders, airspace, and the movement of people and goods; it controls water resources, population registries, land use, and the flow of fuel and electricity.
In Gaza, this control takes the form of an overt siege. In the occupied West Bank, it is enforced through military occupation, settlement expansion, movement restrictions, and the fragmentation of Palestinian space.
Under these conditions, meaningful economic self-sufficiency is not merely difficult, it is structurally denied.
Humanitarian organisations therefore provide what an occupying power is