OPINION:
Major organizations claiming to promote humanitarian agendas, such as Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam and Save the Children, are often portrayed as altruistic and politically neutral, but the reality is more complex and less rosy, particularly when these groups run major operations in conflict zones controlled by terrorist regimes, as in the Gaza Strip.
For Israel, the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-committed atrocities underscored the need for closer oversight. Officials and staffers from the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations were found to have actively cooperated in diverting materials and funds to the construction of terrorist infrastructure, namely Hamas’ massive tunnel network. Instead of maintaining neutrality, many groups continue to play key roles in anti-Israel lawfare and demonization campaigns, such as allegations of genocide, starvation and war crimes.
In response, the Israeli government formulated a new NGO registration and oversight process that went into effect Dec. 31. The old, chaotic system, inherited from Jordan after the 1967 war, had been in place for more than 50 years, and aid organizations had since been granted automatic renewals. The managing agency, the Israeli Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs, lacked the resources or expertise to vet organizations for possible terrorism links or anti-Israel political activism.
The Oct. 7 attacks, the ensuing war and the recognition that employees of various NGOs and U.N. agencies doubled as Hamas commanders and supply officers heightened the need for better vetting. Hamas documents captured by the Israel Defense Forces and made public included systematic records of the terrorist organization’s close cooperation with aid groups operating in Gaza. Central to the system was a network of “guarantors,” NGO employees reporting directly to Hamas.
NGO officials were aware of this system but kept silent, itself a serious indictment. Highly prestigious aid groups were complicit. In 2016, the Gaza manager for World Vision was arrested and later convicted of diverting millions of dollars in aid to Hamas.
To address this and related abuses, Israel’s new registration system, anchored in a public English language questionnaire, includes a listing of all staff members, allowing Israel to screen for terrorist connections. International aid NGOs rejected cooperation with the new system, objecting to the staffer list, which resulted in the end of their access to Gaza and the West Bank.
Yet these same NGOs routinely gave full employee lists to Hamas, as corroborated by a well-known Gaza-based NGO, which described “the [Hamas] Gaza authorities’ adoption of a unified electronic system” that “obliges the associations to enter all the associational information.”
Using their vast resources and political access, these NGOs and their allies in the United Nations and Western governments initiated a campaign condemning Israel’s regulations and their exclusion from Gaza. The European Union, Britain, France, Canada, Japan and others issued harsh condemnations of the Israeli process, expressing complete support for NGO assertions and omitting evidence of NGO cooperation with Hamas, including large-scale diversion of aid that deprived civilians of supplies.
The criticism also failed to address the numerous examples of NGO staff involvement in Gaza terrorism. For example, open sources demonstrate Doctors Without Borders staffer Fadi Al-Wadiya’s heading of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s missile production arm. Other documents detail Doctors Without Borders’ operating in the only room in Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital with a “[safe] communication landline which belongs to [Hamas’ military wing]’s activity.”
Typically, NGOs also vastly overstate their importance in Gaza humanitarian operations. Save the Children called its work “essential” and “lifesaving,” but it was responsible for a mere 0.14% of aid brought into Gaza during the war, according to the IDF. Similarly, Doctors Without Borders described its activities as “vital,” but IDF data shows the organization sent only 95 aid trucks into Gaza during the current ceasefire, compared with the 4,200 trucks that now enter every week.
Gaza residents face legitimate humanitarian crises and require many forms of aid, but pretending that oversight is unnecessary or can be left to the NGOs is a dangerous fantasy. The Israeli registration system should be embraced as the first necessary step for good-faith reform, ensuring that the NGO staff are free from Hamas allies or operatives who steal resources from those in need and prop up the Hamas terror state.
• Professor Gerald Steinberg is the founder and president of NGO Monitor.
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