Israel's Banning of MSF from Gaza and the West Bank: An Ongoing Disregard for Humanity

EDITORIAL ANALYSIS

As a journalist who has reported wars and humanitarian crises for over 40 years, Edward Girardet has known MSF ever since it operated out of two rooms on the outskirts of Paris in the late 1970s.

Last December, the Israeli government announced that it would ban Médecins sans Frontières from Gaza unless it agreed to meet new registration and security rules. This decision affects not just MSF. It is part of a blanket prohibition denying access to 37 aid agencies and foreign reporters to Gaza.

For anyone who has watched how dictatorial powers operate from the Soviets in Afghanistan to Iran under the Ayatollahs, however, this is a familiar playbook: prevent independent aid agencies and journalists from helping local populations or serving as outside witnesses.

MSF has refused to comply, citing safety concerns and a lack of assurances from the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) regarding the protection of its staff. As one MSF representative explained, "The last thing we wish to do is provide details of our staff to the Israelis, who cannot be trusted not to abuse such information."

MSF operations in Gaza during Israeli siege.

Photo: <SF

A Personal History with MSF

I first encountered Médecins sans Frontières in the late 1970s when it was still a small NGO operating just off the Peripherique on the outskirts of Paris. Since then, I have watched it grow into one of the world's largest non-governmental volunteer medical organizations. Recipient of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, it now operates with over 67,000 staff members in up to 80 countries worldwide.

As for Gaza and other parts of and other parts of occupied Palestine, MSF has been providing medical and psychological assistance for nearly four often tumultuous decades. During this period, it has persisted through various conflicts marked by major security risks, evacuation orders, supply shortages, and the deliberate destruction of medical infrastructure by Israeli forces.

The dangers MSF has faced in Gaza and the West Bank are no different from the repression imposed by autocratic forces in Russia, Iran, and Sudan, not only against local populations but also against independent outside witnesses.

Jeff Danziger

A Staggeringly High Human Cost

Since the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, which killed over 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, an estimated 60,000 Gazans have been literally slaughtered during repeated IDF assaults aimed at annihilating Hamas and securing the return of hostages. Many of these Palestinian victims were, and still are, women and children caught in the bombing and constant crossfire. Tens of thousands more have been injured.

These attacks have also been directed against humanitarian and media workers. MSF alone has lost 15 staff members over the past two and a half years. As of January 2026, an estimated 246 journalists and media workers, most of them Palestinian, have been killed, some of them intentionally.

The IDF has repeatedly denied deliberate targeting, often citing operational errors, faulty artificial intelligence, or the failure of civilians to heed warning shots. Despite incidents filmed by witnesses on mobile phones suggesting intentional assaults, the IDF constantly promises investigations but with few results. For many, these IDF claims of follow up are simply not taken seriously.

Jeff Danziger

The murder of reporters is nothing new to me. In May 2003, an IDF soldier deliberately shot James Miller, an award-winning British documentary filmmaker and a friend of mine, while he was reporting in the Gaza Strip. Despite ample evidence that Miller's shooting was deliberate, the soldier has never been indicted. The Tel Aviv government simply does not care what the world thinks.

British documentary filmmaker James Miller who was shot dead by an Israeli soldier.

Speaking Out Against Injustice

Dr. Rony Brauman, MSF's former president from 1982 to 1994 and a secular Jew born in Israel, has criticized the current Netanyahu regime and hardline West Bank Jewish settlers for operating like "Nazis." According to Brauman, whom I know well from joint travels including being stuck for six weeks in the Angolan bush with UNITA rebels, the forcible stealing of land from Palestinians represents an "unacceptable form of colonial behaviour".

This, Dr. Brauman asserts, could ultimately lead to the country’s political suicide unless Israelis force their government to change what some regard as an dismissive apartheid approach toward its own minorities and the Palestinians.

Such comments have ignited the wrath of Zionist groups, who have branded the French doctor a self-hating Jew with MSF itself condemned as an antisemitic organization.

Last November, to the fury of Israeli extremists and the Donald Trump administration, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against alleged Hamas perpetrators but also Prime Minister Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel's former Minister of Defence.

The ICC has accused them of genocide and other crimes against humanity, such as indiscriminate and widespread attacks against civilians, deploying starvation as a weapon of war, forced displacement, and torture. Such abuses are amply – and critically - recorded by select Israeli press, such as Haaretz, and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

Despite intense pressure from Washington, the ICC appears to have no intention of dropping the charges. Embarrassing for the Netanyahu regime, the warrant has placed them in the company of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who received an arrest warrant in March 2023 for war crimes involving the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine.

IDF Spokesperson on television: Seeking to control the narrative.

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Controlling the Narrative

The Netanyahu regime's decision to block MSF and other aid agencies - along with independent foreign reporters - suggests an imperious decision to remove itself from any form of public accountability or respect for international law, humanitarian response, and civic duty. This includes Israel's continued refusal to allow journalists open access to Gaza even under the new Gaza Peace agreement pushed by Trump.

Despite the IDF's alleged concern for journalist security - an assertion ridiculed by international reporters, such as Christiane Amanpour who maintain that it is the job of war reporters to cover wars, this is Israel's way of seeking to control the narrative.

The arguments used by the IDF's American or British-accented spokespeople often come across as arrogantly churlish propaganda. Their comments disparagingly refer to Palestinians and critics as terrorists, lesser human beings, and antisemites, and all in a tone strikingly reminiscent of Anglo-Irish Nazi apologist Lord Haw-Haw.

The international press, such as the BBC, Al Jazeera, New York Times, Le Monde, and others, have little option but to continue to rely on trusted on-the-ground sources such as civilians and aid workers for their information. Until their banning, MSF represented one of these crucial sources.

All this comes at a time when the international community needs reliable means of factual insight to scrutinize President Trump's increasingly dubious plan for a "new Gaza" coupled with Israel's own latest efforts to expand its illegal seizure of Palestinian lands in the West Bank.

Cartoon by Global Geneva contributor Jeff Danziger.

From Backroom NGO to Worldwide Force

MSF was first created in 1971 by a group of concerned French doctors and journalists responding to the failure of the International Red Cross and other aid agencies to speak out and provide more targeted relief during Nigeria's civil war in Biafra. Within a short time, MSF began operating in Nicaragua following the 1972 earthquake, Honduras in 1974 during the flooding caused by Hurricane Fifi, and its first war zone mission in Lebanon from 1976 onwards, helping both Christians and Muslims.

A internal dispute broke out early on about whether MSF should speak out against abuses as part of its humanitarian intervention rather than simply provide medical relief. This resulted in a breakaway group - Médecins du Monde - headed by MSF co-founder and later French politician Bernard Kouchner, who considered public condemnation of abusers imperative.

With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, MSF immediately dispatched teams to provide clandestine relief deep inside the country. I often travelled with their doctors and nurses alongside horse caravans transporting medical supplies to the interior. As a journalist, I found their presence an effective way of reaching out to ordinary Afghans, particularly women, since I could only interview them through French female doctors.

By the mid-1980s, MSF was well on its way to becoming a massive worldwide medical organization. Over the next three decades, I reported with MSF across Africa, Asia, and Central America. Their teams were often among the few operating on the frontlines or in places largely ignored by other aid agencies.

While long perceived as a "cowboy" operation with volunteer doctors and nurses taking extraordinary risks in places like Sri Lanka, Mozambique, and Somalia, MSF soon honed its approaches into an enviable form of well-organized professionalism, such as the creation of “ready to roll” depots in the South of France with vehicles, medicines and other supplies.

Famine victims in Ethiopia in 1984.

Photo: MSF

The Ethiopian Controversy

During the 1983-85 Ethiopian famine, I reported with Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado on MSF's nutrition programmes. The organization was expelled in 1984 for denouncing the government's abuse of international aid and forced resettlements that resulted in deliberately starving affected populations.

While only a few news organizations reported the situation, such as my own paper, The Christian Science Monitor, almost none of the other aid organizations spoke out publicly. Instead, they chose to criticize MSF's abandonment of supposed neutrality, resulting in intense public debates on the role of foreign aid agencies and humanitarian ethics.

Documenting the Frontlines

In 1991, French filmmakers Christophe de Ponfilly, my Paris flatmate with whom I had reported in Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and Angola, as well as his production partner Frederic Laffont asked me to join them to produce a three-hour television documentary A Coeur, A Corps, A Cris. Filming for nearly a year, we had two teams reporting closely for weeks at a time with MSF teams operating in over a dozen countries ranging from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka to El Salvador, Somalia, and Kurdistan.

With Daniel Day-Lewis doing the narration, I reported the 75-minute BBC 2 version, Frontline Doctors, which provoked enormous debate but also raised so much funding that the aid agency had to create MSF-UK.

The sad reality is that when looking back at this film, it seems almost as if nothing has changed. The world has only grown worse, it seems, with select regimes operating even more repressively - and openly - than before. Such players, whether governments, guerrilla forces or mafiosi thugs in the Middle East, Sudan, Congo or Haiti, today act with utter disregard for what the outside world thinks.

Unfortunately, too, with the United States and other governments cutting back on their aid funding, the international community often comes across as helpless if not incapable of taking any effective counter action. Or the public is simply not interested, nor properly informed as aid agencies are unable to operate on the ground. A further problem is that fewer journalists and news organizations have the means to cover such stories. So it remains up to organizations such as MSF to shout.

During the mid-1990s, I visited other MSF operations from Liberia to Mozambique as editor of the book, Populations in Danger, commissioned by MSF and involving leading American and European writers. Our job was to candidly explore different angles of humanitarian response ranging from human rights to frontline medical action.

When purists within MSF insisted on deleting several hot topics, such as whether armed mercenaries should be deployed if governments and UN agencies were unwilling to step in to protect civilians, most of us resigned. The book still came out but without our bylines and a little less controversial than we had intended.

MSF's flying doctors.

Photo: MSF

An Imperfect but Essential Organization

Without doubt, MSF had lost some of its "cowboy" flair to become a more conventional international aid organization. Over the years, it has been criticized for racism given that most of its doctors and nurses on international missions are white and have embraced a form of colonial approach to their on-the-ground partners. This included, and probably still includes sexual promiscuousness with select volunteers indulging with local partners, leading to inappropriate relations and, at one point, a high rate of HIV/AIDS.

Nonetheless, I still consider the work of this unique organization exceptional. No longer considered a "shoot at the hip" operation, MSF International is now based in Geneva, where the organization's International Council meets, while running funding and organizational operations in over 31 countries and regions ranging from MSF France and MSF United States to MSF Australia, MSF Netherlands, and MSF West Africa.

Unusual for most NGOs, individual voluntary donations ensure up to 98 percent of MSF's operational budget (approximately 2.5 billion dollars in 2024), providing it the unusual luxury of being able to operate regardless of what governments think. Hence, not unlike its Ethiopian predicament in 1984, MSF still has the choice to operate in a manner it considers best.

Israel's Costly Mistake

Ironically, even if unable to provide civilians in Gaza and the West Bank with urgently needed medical relief, MSF will now find itself in the position to loudly lambaste the Netanyahu regime's attempt to quash independent humanitarian response, thus opening Israel and its treatment of Palestinians to even further global criticism. More governments, such as Italy, Japan, Spain, Canada, Colombia, the Netherlands, and Belgium, are pausing or ceasing weapon sales to Israel not only for its Gaza atrocities, but its constantly expanding illegal occupation of the West Bank.

The Netanyahu government may come to regret its decision to oust such a highly respected NGO that has spent nearly 40 years providing dedicated medical care to Palestinians. As a highly influential aid agency, it continues to stand out as an organization which, for all its imperfections, represents one of the last independent voices willing to bear witness to what happens in places the world would prefer to forget.

Edward Girardet is a Geneva-based foreign correspondent and author. He has reported conflict, humanitarian and environmental issues worldwide for more than 40 years.