By Tsafrir Cohen
medico international has been supporting the work of local partner organisations in Palestine and Israel for more than 35 years. medico has been registered as an international organisation with the Israeli Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and, in the occupied territories, with the Palestinian Authority for decades. At the end of December 2025, the Interministerial Committee, a new body within the Israeli government now responsible for the registration of international NGOs, informed 37 international organisations that their registration was due to expire. One of them is medico international.
In recent years, the Israeli government and its agencies already put pressure on the work of our partners both in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories, leading to the criminalisation of several leading Palestinian civil society organisations. In October 2021, the then Defence Minister Benny Gantz categorised six of them as terrorist organisations. These include institutions that document Israeli violations of the law and support Palestinian farming and herding families against illegal Israeli land grabs. The Ministry failed to present any convincing evidence. This was also publicly confirmed by the organisations’ international governmental donors. They withdrew their support nonetheless, ensuring that the smear campaign achieved its goal: to financially starve the organisations and paralyse essential parts of organised Palestinian civil society.
With Donald Trump in the White House, another blow followed. In September 2025, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the three respected and well-known human rights organisations in the occupied territories: the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, both based in Gaza, as well as Al Haq, the oldest Palestinian human rights organisation in the West Bank. The reason for the US sanctions: the organisations are accused of supporting the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) investigations into possible Israeli crimes. Combined with the US sanctions against ICC staff, the Trump Administration’s actions thus go well beyond the traditional position of non-recognition of the Court: the US is attacking the ICC as an expression of the idea of international prosecution for crimes under international law, with explicit reference to Israel. This context also includes the attacks on humanitarian organisations and their work, as carried out by the Israeli government for some time – be it in the form of accusations against the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), against Palestinian organisations, or against Israeli organisations that have adopted a clear and unambiguous stance against the occupation and settlement policies.
In spite of the revocation of our registration, so far we have been able to continue supporting our local partners. However, the impacts on the projects of other international organisations are dramatic: if international (e.g. specialist medical) staff can no longer obtain visas, the population concerned feels the effects very quickly. And the work is being undermined in other ways, too. Since October 2023, Israel has barred all Palestinian aid organisations, as well as all international organisations without their own staff in the Gaza Strip, from bringing aid supplies into Gaza themselves. On isolated occasions, we were still able to deliver medicines to Gaza through another organisation. But our partners in Gaza have largely had to make do with whatever was available on the market, often at very high prices. We are continuing to make money transfers to Gaza and are thus forwarding donations on, as we have done over the past two years.
We will continue to support our partners’ work with all the means we have at our disposal. It is unclear, though, how the situation will develop going forward. Recently, the Minister of Diaspora Affairs announced that staff of non-registered organisations would no longer be allowed to enter Israel, not even in transit to the Israeli-occupied territories or for short-term assignments or official trips to Palestine. So the signs from Israel continue to point towards escalation.