Strangling Gaza’s Survivors, Criminalizing Humanity for Zionist Conquest: The Banning of Humanitarian Relief in Occupied Palestine
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Israel’s December 30, 2025, decision to revoke the licenses of 37 international humanitarian aid organizations—effectively banning them from operating in Gaza and the West Bank as of March 1, 2026—marks a chilling escalation in its genocidal campaign, designed to strangulate the last remnants of life in the besieged enclave. The list, issued by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and confirmed by Haaretz, targets essential groups like Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, CARE International, Action Against Hunger, Handicap International, and the Norwegian Refugee Council—pillars of aid that have delivered food, water, medical care, shelter, and psychological support to Gaza’s 2.3 million people for decades. Retroactive to January 1, 2026, the ban forces these organizations to halt operations, evacuate staff, and surrender assets or face criminal prosecution under Israel’s “anti-terror” laws. Demanding invasive staff data, loyalty oaths, and prohibiting any “delegitimization” of Israel (including reports on apartheid or settler violence), this move is not about security—it’s a calculated bid to erase witnesses, deepen famine, and accelerate the physical and cultural annihilation of Palestinians.
The ban’s impact on Gaza will be catastrophic, further ravaging an already devastated population. With these 37 groups expelled, Gaza loses 60% of its field hospitals, half its food distribution capacity, and vital services in sanitation, shelter, and child protection. Famine—already weaponized through Israel’s blockade of aid convoys—will intensify, condemning children, the elderly, the wounded, and the displaced to even greater suffering from hunger, disease, and trauma. This aligns with Israel’s broader policy of destroying infrastructure and blocking relief, tactics UN experts have labeled genocidal. As the International Court of Justice monitors compliance with its orders to prevent genocide, Israel defies the world by accelerating the very conditions—starvation, displacement, deprivation—that define it.
In the lead up to the implementation of this ban, eyewitness accounts from Gaza report that markets have more food than they’ve had since the beginning months of the genocide, but that distribution of this food is still a massive problem. The fear is that this is nothing more than a temporary Israeli propaganda ploy. As bombings and killings being to intensify again under the sham “cease-fire”, Gazans fear that March 1st will mark the beginning of a more viscious phase of the zionist’s genocidal scheme.
At the heart of this criminalization is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Gaza’s aid lifeline. Israel’s baseless accusations—claiming 12 UNRWA staff joined the October 7, 2023, resistance operations—triggered funding cuts by the US, Germany, Sweden, and others, crippling operations and exacerbating the crisis. UN and independent probes debunked the claims as rooted in coerced confessions and fabricated evidence, but the harm was irreparable: billions slashed, schools and clinics shuttered. Israeli forces have demolished UNRWA’s West Bank headquarters in violation of international law and bombed over 190 Gaza facilities since 2023, killing hundreds of staff and displacing survivors. This is no counter-terrorism—it’s the systematic erasure of Palestinian support structures, ensuring scarcity and hunger finish what bombs began.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a cornerstone of Gaza’s emergency care, has been vilified by Israeli officials as “terrorists without borders” in a smear campaign to justify expulsion. MSF staff have been killed, clinics demolished, yet Tel Aviv accuses them of sheltering militants—mirroring the playbook against UNRWA. Ignoring MSF’s strict neutrality, this defamation removes independent eyes from the genocide. With MSF and 36 other aid groups barred by March 1, Gaza’s vulnerable—children, elders, wounded, disabled—face amplified hunger, disease, and despair.
Western complicity props up this horror. The US and Europe preach human rights while arming the perpetrator, vetoing UN resolutions, and defunding UNRWA on Israel’s flimsy claims. Trump’s sham “Board of Peace”— a cabal of billionaires, Zionists and compromised diplomats — denies Palestinians agency or self-determination, casting them as passive subjects for “reconstruction” sans sovereignty. It’s imperial theater, extending occupation as benevolence. As of February 12, 2026, the board boasts 25 founding member countries with Israel joining on February 11, 2026. The executive board includes a list of seedy characters like the Bulgarian tecnocrat with a heavy Israeli bias, Nickolay Mladenov (Director General), zionist zealot Marco Rubio (US Secretary of State), zionist real estate developer Steve Witkoff (US Special Envoy), zionist slumlord Jared Kushner, Iraq war criminal Tony Blair, staunch zionist and billionaire Marc Rowan, president of the World Bank Ajay Banga, chief whitehouse advisor and special assistant to Stephen Miller, Robert Gabriel Jr., and others like Turkish FM Hakan Fidan—a lineup heavy on seedy business men, real estate tycoons and diplomats but devoid of Palestinian voices or accountability. Several of the aforementioned have also appeared in the Epstein files. Critics, including UN experts, call the board a “pay-to-play club” and a Trump vanity project aimed at supplanting the UN and circumventing international law, with a $1 billion donation requirement for membership and sweeping powers for Trump as “chairman for life.”
The Western powers’ complicity in genocide extends to slander against those who expose it. UN Special Rapporteur for Palestinian human rights Francesca Albanese has been relentlessly defamed, under attack again this week, with France condemning her statements as “scandalous” and a “disgrace” for calling the international power structure that has enabled this genocide “a common enemy of humanity” —accusations based on lies and distortions that aim to discredit her work documenting Israel and its western counterpart’s violations. Former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, now President of the UN General Assembly, epitomizes this moral decay: she has repeatedly cloaked Israel’s genocide in the language of “self-defense,” justifying strikes on civilian sites by claiming they lose protection if “Hamas hides behind them”—a blatant violation of international humanitarian law that excuses war crimes while preaching accountability elsewhere. Her tenure as Foreign Minister saw Germany arm Israel, defund UNRWA on fabricated claims, and suppress pro-Palestine voices with McCarthyite zeal; her elevation to the UN’s high ranking post only deepens the betrayal of the very principles the General Assembly is meant to uphold.
The impending March 1st deadline for Israel’s humanitarian relief ban will be catastrophic, further compromising an already devastated population. Western powers continue in their complicity, standing by or actively participating in the manipulations of the zionist narrataive. They continue providing the economic and military support necessary for Israel to implement its genocidal pograms and ethnic cleansing campaigns with complete impunity and a total disregard for international law. As Francesca Albanese has reiterated: “humanity across the world has and continues to mobilize in opposition to this devastating colonial system and our collective, revolutionary movement must rise and prevail for a livable and just future for Palestinians and for humanity as a whole.”
The post Strangling Gaza’s Survivors, Criminalizing Humanity for Zionist Conquest: The Banning of Humanitarian Relief in Occupied Palestine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.