Israel moves to tighten control of aid and rights groups
Separate new regulations for international aid groups announced in March require them to submit detailed information about their Palestinian staff and families, and allows officials to disqualify aid groups where the organization, or its employees, have voiced support for boycotting Israel or, potentially, accused Israel of violating international law.
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On Tuesday, more than 50 international aid organizations signed a letter protesting the new registration rules, calling them 'a grave threat to humanitarian operations and international law.' The groups, including Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, and the Norwegian Refugee Council, have to reapply under the new system by September, or have their registration revoked.
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'By framing humanitarian and human rights advocacy as a threat to the state, Israeli authorities can shut out organizations merely for speaking out about conditions they witness on the ground, forcing INGOs to choose between delivering aid and promoting respect for the protections owed to affected people,' the 55 nonprofit groups wrote in the letter Tuesday, adding that the regulations appeared to be 'based on vague, broad, politicised, and open-ended criteria.'
Aid groups have expressed particular concern over the requirement to share the names, contact details, and identification numbers for their Palestinian staff. Israel has argued this is necessary to vet employees for potential ties to militants, but aid groups fear this could endanger their teams, pointing to how hundreds of humanitarian personnel have been killed in the conflict.
'There's no reason to believe that that data would be held and treated in good faith, given the arbitrary nature of staff arrests and extrajudicial killings' of humanitarians, Joseph Belliveau, executive director of the US-based medical charity MedGlobal, said in an interview.
Meanwhile, draft legislation under debate in the constitution committee of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, would tax foreign governmental contributions to Israeli nonprofits at 80 percent and prohibit those that receive foreign funding from appearing in court. Israeli rights organizations have conducted strategic litigation throughout the war to challenge the government's secret detentions of Palestinians from Gaza and their conditions of detention.
The bill's sponsor, Ariel Kallner from Netanyahu's Likud party, named as the bill's targets Israeli organizations such as Breaking the Silence, a group that supports whistle-blowers serving in the Israeli armed forces, saying it received disproportionate funding from abroad and was working to 'delegitimize' the state of Israel.
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Kallner had introduced a similar bill in 2023 calling for a 65 percent tax but shelved it following sharp criticism from the Biden administration, France, and Germany.
At a committee hearing on Monday in the Israeli parliament, Kallner said the Biden administration's sanctions against armed West Bank settlers in 2024 'came as a result of vile blood libel by organizations [that delegitimize Israel], such as Breaking the Silence.' (The Trump administration reversed those sanctions in January.)
Kallner described the legislation as 'part of the struggle for the Zionist project and in support of the soldiers fighting on the front lines,' while citing other examples of foreign government-funded Israeli groups that recently pressured the Israeli government to allow more food into Gaza.
'I have no problem with NGOs. I have a problem with FGOs — Foreign Governmental Organizations,' Kallner said. 'These organizations do not represent Israeli society. They target our soldiers, discredit Israel around the world, and defend murderers.'
Avner Gvaryahu, a former director of Breaking the Silence, said the tax measure would cripple many of these organizations, and the proposed ban on appealing in Israeli courts was unprecedented.
Although the bill's sponsors have offered to exempt certain Israeli organizations from the 80 percent tax on a case-by-case basis, that would lead to a politicized atmosphere, he warned.
'This doesn't just pinpoint and destroy every organization that is vocally critical of the government,' Gvaryahu said. 'It also creates a dependency of every other organization on the government and eliminates their ability to critique the government.'
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A position paper submitted to the Knesset in December by the Institute for Law and Philanthropy at Tel Aviv University estimated that 96 Israeli nonprofits that received roughly $32 million in foreign state donations in 2022 would be affected by the proposed bill. Many of those organizations, though not all, are 'human rights organizations advocating against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and/or the rights of Palestinians and Palestinian citizens of Israel.'
Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
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