“We pay the price for having testified on Gaza”

Why does Doctors Without Borders have to leave Gaza?

On December 30, 2025, Israeli authorities required 37 humanitarian organizations, including MSF, to be registered with a new ministry. To do this, we had to provide a detailed list of our staff within two months. If we fail to comply, our activities in the Palestinian territories would be banned after these two months. The UN had called on Israel to reverse this decision.

Why did you refuse to provide this list?

We wanted to obtain guarantees on what the authorities would do with it, because blindly exposing the names of our Palestinian employees on site seemed to us to threaten their security. How would these lists be used? Who would this information be shared with? We never got any answers to these questions. And when we proposed other solutions, nothing changed.

Does the suspension of the measure, on February 27, 2026, by the Israeli Supreme Court change the situation?

No. The Court has “frozen” for the moment the entry into force of the new provisions, but does not rule on the merits. And, as luck would have it, this decision came the day after all our international staff – including me – had just left the Gaza Strip, since we had reached the end of the sixty-day deadline. There are therefore no longer any international MSF staff in Gaza.

And since January 1, no foreign personnel employed by MSF and no truck of equipment from our NGO have been authorized to enter the enclave. This reprieve therefore changes nothing: of course, our local staff can continue their activities, but how will they do it without equipment? It’s a planned death, slowly.

What consequences for Gaza?

It is the population who will suffer even more. Essential services – food, water, shelter, etc. – are largely destroyed, the health system is almost at a standstill. MSF supports nearly 20 health centers and hospitals, manages 460 of the 2,300 hospital beds in the territory, or one in five, and provides assistance to one in three deliveries. We carried out more than 800,000 medical consultations in 2025. We are also the second largest water distributor in the region.

Our 1,200 local employees will lose their jobs and be deprived of the income that allows their entire family to survive. We are witnessing a gradual and voluntary dismantling of the Gazan health system. Already, very little material was allowed in. 1,700 health workers have been killed since October 2023, including 15 MSF employees.

Today, the demands of the Israeli authorities constitute a pretext to prevent humanitarian assistance. And perhaps to replace us with private actors, subject to the demands of the authorities.

Is this expulsion linked to your positions?

Indeed, we are blacklisted because we have told what we see. Our communication was badly received by the Israeli authorities, it is obvious. We testified because we were the only observers of what was happening there: no journalists are allowed to enter. We pay the price.

We made the situation public because it was unprecedented: the massive scale of the destruction, the Palestinians forcibly displaced, trapped and bombed in appalling ways. The majority of the injured are women and children. A large part of the inhabited areas have been erased from the map. Leaving the Palestinians alone worries us a lot.

It was therefore not possible to provide treatment without testifying…

Beyond providing humanitarian assistance, providing testimony and warning is one of MSF’s missions. We remain impartial and neutral: we simply report what we observe and note. Our communication is based on direct testimony from our staff on site, the people to whom we provide assistance, and those around them. We don’t advocate political biases, we tell their stories.

Do you have any hope?

We maintain discussions with the Israeli authorities. I think of our local teams, with whom we have shared links sometimes for more than twenty years. They will continue to work, with all our trust, and we will support them remotely. This continuity of aid will ensure that Gaza is not completely forgotten by the world.