EIGHT international aid groups working in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories said yesterday that they would defy an order to provide information about their workers to the Israeli regime.
The eight NGOs – Action Aid, Allianza por la Solidaridad, Medecins du Monde, Medicos Del Mundo, Premiere Urgence International and Medical Aid for Palestine – have joined Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in refusing to hand over details of their workers.
In December, Israel announced it would ban 37 aid organisations, including MSF, from working in Gaza from March Ist.
On Sunday, the Israeli authorities said that, following this ban, MSF had committed in early January to comply with the order and share the list of its staff but had reversed this decision saying that Israel had failed to allay its fears that providing information put those staff and their families at risk.
MSF stated: ‘This is a pretext to obstruct humanitarian assistance,’ and it refuses to hand over the names of its employees because the Israeli authorities ‘failed to provide the concrete assurances required to guarantee our staff’s safety, protect their personal data and uphold the independence of our medical operations.’
MSF, as the main provider of health in Gaza and responsible for 20% of Gaza’s hospital beds, has come under constant attack from the Zionist regime – as have all aid workers.
Since the start of Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza, 550 aid workers, including 15 MSF staff, have been killed by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).
A spokesman for Premiere Urgence International said that sending lists of employees to Israel was ‘an absolute red line’ for aid agencies that ‘would potentially endanger the lives of our staff.’
The demand for information includes copies of passports, CVs and names of family members, including children. Action Aid said the requirements ‘form part of a relentless campaign to undermine and dismantle the systems that sustain Palestinian life.’
Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon who volunteers in Gaza, said: ‘The destruction of the health system, which is the central tenet of the genocidal project, needs to continue into the “ceasefire”.’
In the statement banning MSF, the Zionist government said: ‘Currently, assessments are being made to provide alternative medical solutions’ after MSF’s ‘departure’.
This immediately set off alarm bells amongst doctors and experts with James Smith, an emergency doctor who has volunteered in Gaza, saying: ‘The great fear … is that Israel will do what it did with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)’.
The GHF was the joint US/Israeli food distribution agency run by foreign mercenaries and IOF troops who turned these centres into killing grounds for Palestinians desperately seeking food.
Over 850 Palestinians were killed at GHF sites in the six months they were in operation last year.
Smith warned that Israel ‘will use the language of humanitarianism to create alternative systems over which it has complete control, and those systems will be used to enact violence and suffering rather than deliver on humanitarian objectives.’
US president Donald Trump insists that he is ‘not concerned’ about the ongoing genocidal attacks on Palestinians as he prepares to wage war on Iran while Starmer’s Labour government remains silent, preferring to jail those who oppose Zionist genocide.
At the over 100,000-strong pro-Palestine demonstration in London last Saturday, the general secretary of the Unison trade union, the largest in the UK, said: ‘Palestine will not be a minor issue to us, but a top political priority for the unions,’ insisting: ‘We will not support complicity with genocide.’
Now is the time for union leaders to make good these pledges and end the Labour government complicity with genocide by calling a special TUC Congress to organise the strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down the Labour government, replacing it with a workers government and socialism.
Indeed, the TUC must take the lead and call for worldwide general strikes for Palestine and for the victory of the World Socialist Revolution.
