The foreign ministers of ten countries — including France, Norway, and the United Kingdom — have issued a joint statement warning that Israel’s plan to deregister international non-governmental organizations operating in Gaza will have a “severe impact on access to essential services,” including healthcare. The warning came as a December 31 registration deadline approached that threatened to trigger the forced closure of dozens of established humanitarian operations.

The joint statement, published by the UK government, is available here.

Israel changed its INGO registration requirements earlier in 2025, adding a condition that organizations submit full staff lists — including the names of Palestinian employees in Gaza. Aid organizations refused, citing the well-documented pattern of Israeli forces targeting Palestinian aid workers: more than 500 have been killed since October 2023. Submitting those lists is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It is a security threat to the people doing the work.

The ministers warned that if the deregistrations proceed, one in three healthcare facilities will close. The organizations facing closure “are integral to the humanitarian response,” they said, working alongside the UN and Palestinian organizations to deliver food, medicine, and emergency care to a population that has been systematically stripped of its own infrastructure over two years of war.

The ministers urged Israel to take “urgent and essential steps” to ensure INGOs can operate “in a sustained and predictable way.” What they did not say — and what the record makes clear — is that Israel’s restriction of humanitarian access is not an administrative problem awaiting a technical solution. It is a policy. The staff list requirement, the deregistration deadlines, and the 42 percent aid compliance rate documented under the ceasefire agreement all point in the same direction: toward making Gaza’s humanitarian collapse irreversible.