Charlie Kirk, Shabbat, and the Secret of Jewish Survival
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Thirty-seven aid groups are pulling out of Gaza; they don’t have to.
Let Hamas continue to control Gaza. That’s the message much of the world is sending Israel these days as they oppose Israel’s commonsense plans to require charities to disassociate from Hamas and other brutal terrorist groups.
Most nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) providing aid to Gazans have complied with Israel’s new transparency rules. Yet governments and groups around the world are bitterly complaining that some groups are choosing to end their humanitarian work in Gaza rather than sever links with Hamas.
On December 30, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland joined with the UK in issuing an official call for Israel to allow groups to continue operating in Gaza – whether they coordinate their activities with Hamas or not. Over a hundred aid groups have called Israel’s demands that they not operate in concert with Hamas a “weaponization of aid.” The UN, which has admitted that their aid agency UNRWA employed Hamas terrorists, has called Israel’s new rules “outrageous” and unlawful.
Let’s examine the new rules and why Israel has imposed them.
Hamas rules Gaza with an iron grip; any NGO (non-governmental organization) seeking to operate there must first gain permission from the terror group and then has to coordinate all activities with Hamas in order to provide services. NGOs are also required to disclose all their financial data to local Hamas officials in order to be able to work in Gaza.
During Israel’s recent war with Hamas, Israeli forces recovered internal Hamas documents that lay out this quid pro quo relationship in clear terms: “The evidence confirms that NGOs in Gaza do not operate independently or neutrally. Rather, they are embedded in an institutionalized framework of coercion, intimidation, and surveillance that serves Hamas’ terror objectives,” describes an analytical organization which reviewed the documents.
Every charity group that works in Gaza is required by Hamas to appoint a local Hamas affiliate they euphemistically call a “guarantor” to a high-level position within the charity. Guarantors must be at the level of director, deputy director, or chairman of the board. These Hamas-affiliated guarantors provide information about NGO’s operations to Hamas, and allow Hamas to have a say at the highest levels of decision-making inside NGOs. Charities cannot work without them.
Charity workers’ criticism of new Israeli rules of NGO disclosure – and their silence about Hamas’ overbearing control of their work – indicates a long-standing sympathy with Hamas.
NGOs operating inside Gaza are well aware of this arrangement. When they decry Israeli oversight over their operations, their lack of criticism of Hamas’ involvement in their work becomes deafening. Charity workers’ criticism of new Israeli rules of NGO disclosure – and their silence about Hamas’ overbearing control of their work – indicates a long-standing sympathy with Hamas and its affiliates and their anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments.
On October 7, 2023, as Hamas terrorists rampaged in southern Israel, raping, torturing, and slaughtering 1,200 people and kidnapping over 250 others, some of the marauding terrorists were employees of “humanitarian” groups.
UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, is the UN’s main organization aiding Gaza. It caters around the world to Arabs who are descended from people who lived inside the borders of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza between 1946 and 1948, who are classified as refugees in perpetuity. UNRWA has also cooperated with Hamas for years. Unbelievably, UNRWA employees themselves committed atrocities inside Israel on October 7. After reluctantly investigating 19 UNRWA employees out of the hundreds who were identified in Hamas’ attack, the agency fired nine of them, admitting that they took part in Hamas’ crimes. The number of UNRWA employees who belong to or have close links to Hamas is likely far higher, constituting an overwhelming majority of workers.
In 2024, Israeli security officials put the true number of UNRWA’s Hamas-affiliated employees at closer to 10,000, out of a total of about 12,000 UNRWA employees in all of Gaza. Approximately 440 UNRWA employees served as Hamas fighters. A further 2,000 were Hamas operatives; 7,000 employees have an immediate family member who belongs to Hamas.
Further UNRWA employees work for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a separate terrorist group that cooperates with Hamas. Israeli hostages were found to be held captive in UNRWA buildings and even in UNRWA employees’ homes. Then Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz explained that UNRWA served as “an arm” of Hamas.
Hamas’ own internal documents outline using “homes, schools, universities, hospitals, bridges, electricity companies, legislative councils, mosques, markets….” and other places as centers where fighters could gather behind human shields of Gazan civilians: “civilian facilities are considered the best obstacles to defend the resistance.” Hamas tunnels and rocket launchers were positioned within UNRWA centers, including UNRWA-run schools. In fact, Hamas’ entire internet server farm was located in a tunnel directly underneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters: shafts leading to the server farm were accessed from inside nearby UNRWA-run schools and Al-Azhar University.
Internal Hamas documents document many other cases of their affiliation with NGOs. Here are just a few cases out of many of international groups who partner with known terrorist entities.
MSF - Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) is an august French charity that operates around the world, including in Gaza, where they’ve provided medical care since 1989. They currently employ hundreds of locals and describe themselves as an “independent, medical humanitarian organization… (that) deliver(s) emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural disasters and exclusion from healthcare.” It also is home to a number of terrorists in Gaza.
A few examples include: MSF employee Fadi Al-Wadiya who simultaneously worked as a high-level fighter with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, where he built missiles. When he was killed in an Israeli drone strike in 2024, his death was recorded as an attack on a health care worker. In 2023, two MSF physicians, Mahmoud Abu Nujaila and Ahmad Al-Sahar were killed by Israeli forces in Al-Awda Hospital, which is run by an NGO connected to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
In February, 2024, MSF publicly disclosed that it coordinated its activities with the “Ministry of Health in Gaza,” which is run by Hamas. That was no surprise to Belgian investigators who’d been examining MSF’s political posts, reports, social media, and statements from MSF’s Gaza operations. A “significant proportion of its staff seem to share the Hamas point of view and support the terrorist attacks of 7 October,” Belgian’s special committee investigating MSF unearthed.
CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) International describes itself as a "global confederation…with the common goal of fighting global poverty.” It’s operated charitable endeavors in Gaza for years, where it’s also partnered with terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a violent terrorist group.
Oxfam International describes itself as a “global movement for change, to build a future free from the injustice of poverty.” It works with 60 partner groups in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, but refuses to disclose which. One can gain a rough idea from Oxfam’s frenzy of tweets, interviews, and formal statements over the past two years calling on nations to boycott Israeli goods, cut diplomatic and cultural ties with Israel, and isolate the Jewish state.
Save the Children describes itself as a “leading independent organization creating lasting change in the lives of children in need.” In Gaza, it partners with several organizations that have proven links to terrorist groups.
One of the groups Save the Children partners with is the Defense for Children International - Palestine; though it sounds harmless, this group acts as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a violent armed terror group. Another Save the Children partner, Addameer, claims it is an NGO fighting for prisoners’ rights; in reality, it is a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. (The USA designated Addameer a terrorist entity in 2025.)
While these and many other prestigious sounding NGOs might seem as if they’re staffed by high-minded Europeans or others who eschew violence, in reality they are indebted to Hamas which allows them to operate, and employ radical locals to run their programming in Gaza.
In an effort to force NGOs to disclose their ties with terrorist groups, Israel announced in March 2024 that groups would have six months to provide paperwork about their policies and employees in Gaza in order to renew their operating licenses for 2026. When NGOs complained that they didn’t have enough time to provide this information, Israel extended the deadline to the last day of 2025, December 31.
Most NGOs running relief operations in Gaza have complied, providing updated paperwork about their Gaza staff, projects, and policies. Thirty-seven organizations, including those listed above, have refused to do so, preferring to end their operations in Gaza rather than provide the transparency that Israel is requesting. These 37 represent about 33% of all NGOs currently working inside Gaza.
Far from “closing” NGOs out of callousness, Israel is tightening rules about their operation. These 37 NGOs shouldn’t be able to whitewash the fact that they are choosing to pull out of Gaza rather than disclose or end their ties with terrorist groups or end their campaigns of delegitimization against Israel.
On March 1, 2025, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs implemented a new registration process for NGOs that work in both Israel and Gaza. (It would technically be possible for NGOs to avoid disclosing any information to Israel by entering and leaving Gaza through the territory’s Egyptian borders.) The request is transparent and similar to what other states require of NGOs operating in their territories. (You can read the requirements here.)
One big change is requiring NGOs to provide “a list of all employees involved in the management and…implementation of (NGOs’) Work Plan, including Palestinian employees, as well as foreign employees… The list shall include full names, passport numbers (for foreign employees), identification numbers (for Palestinian employees), and contact details.” This should help prevent known terrorists from being on NGOs’ payrolls.
Israel’s new rules also bar NGOs that engage in "delegitimization campaigns” against Israel, that call for the boycotting, divestment from and sanctioning of Israel on the world state, or which “denies the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” NGOs also cannot deny the existence of the Holocaust or of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks or participate in politically-motivated trials against Israelis abroad.
Israel’s Ministry of Defense has said the new rules are necessary “to prevent the exploitation of aid by Hamas,” which it notes has used NGOs for “the diversion of aid, the use of local employees for terrorist purposes, and the transfer of funds from terror-linked sources.”
For all the pearl-clutching about how onerous these new guidelines are, it’s noteworthy that a large majority of NGOs operating in Gaza, including many that have been extremely critical of Israel, have managed to renew their operating licenses without difficulty. Scores of charity groups have complied with Israel’s new policies and are maintaining their vital aid work in Gaza. Even Save the Children, mentioned above, has submitted the paperwork necessary to keep running programs there.
Yet 37 groups, including Medecins Sans Frontieres from Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Spain, Oxfam’s Dutch affiliate, Oxfam Quebec, and more have ceased operations on January 1, 2026. Their actions are a terrible tragedy for the needy of Gaza, and an indication of just how embedded hostility towards Israel is in these organizations.
Aid that flows into Gaza through Israel is overseen by COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories), an agency run by Israel’s Ministry of Defense. COGAT has insisted that there will be no lessening of aid provided to Gaza - because of a shocking fact that has been overlooked by much of the world’s press: The 37 NGOs ending their operations in Gaza haven’t provided any real help in some time.
None of the groups in question have operated in Gaza since the start of the current ceasefire on October 10, 2025. Prior to that, the total amount of aid they provided “amounted to only about 1% of the total aid volume.”
The loss of 37 NGOs will be felt very little in Gaza but is doing damage to Israel’s reputation around the world as these groups accuse Israel of “banning” them and preventing aid from reaching Gaza’s civilians. In reality, these NGOs have chosen to take a stand against Israel and cease their charitable work in Gaza. The world deserves to know the truth.
Terribly misinformed article.