Israel’s High Court Blessed the Staff-List Demand That Pushed Foreign Doctors Out of Gaza and an Airstrike Still Hit a Marked MSF Bus
Israel did not lose the argument over who may practice medicine in Gaza. It won it in court, and then kept shooting. On May 20, 2026, the High Court of Justice rejected a petition from AIDA, an umbrella for 19 international aid groups, and blessed a registration rule that demands the names, passport numbers, and identification details of Palestinian staff. Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit gave the organizations 30 days to hand the lists over or stop work in Gaza and the occupied West Bank at once. The judges called security screening a core power of the state and said a charity’s own checks cannot replace it. Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli treated the ruling as a slogan: Israel would not allow “terrorist activity” under the cover of aid. The clinics did not get their foreign doctors back. On September 13 an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City damaged a bus carrying ten Médecins Sans Frontières staff, clearly marked, and injured one of them. The court had already decided the witnesses could be listed. The air force had not decided the witnesses could be spared.
The December 30, 2025, notices are where the paperwork started. Israel told 37 organizations, including MSF, Oxfam, the Norwegian Refugee Council, CARE, the International Rescue Committee, and Mercy Corps, that their licenses were dead and that field work had to stop by March 1, 2026. The tool was Government Resolution 2542, a December 2024 rule that routes humanitarian registration through the ministry that also runs the antisemitism portfolio and lets the state brand a group a security risk. A ban written that way is not a quarrel about forms. It is a decision about which witnesses may remain in a territory Israel has spent more than two years destroying.
The list was the point
The groups said the operative demand was a roster of Palestinian employees, with biodata, and in the fuller version described by The New Yorker, passport numbers, dates of birth, and for Palestinians the names of spouses and children. Handing a party to the war a list of local nurses is not compliance. It is a targeting file. Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed 15 MSF colleagues and, by MSF’s count, about 1,700 health workers. More than 500 aid workers are dead. MSF has said it would not knowingly hire people engaged in military activity. Chikli’s ministry answered that MSF hides lists because it employs “individuals active in terrorist organizations” and coordinates with the Hamas-run health ministry. MSF calls that a smear and a pretext.
On January 23, 2026, MSF told Israeli authorities it would, as an exception, consider sharing a defined list if staff agreed and if Israel gave concrete safety guarantees: no use of the data beyond a stated administrative purpose, no loss of MSF’s control over hiring and supplies, and an end to official defamation. The guarantees did not come. Doctors Without Borders says it has never handed over a staff list in this process. On February 1, Chikli’s ministry ordered MSF out by February 28. On February 26 the organization’s international staff left. Supplies and foreign personnel had already been blocked since January 1. Palestinian colleagues stayed, working under MSF’s registration with the Palestinian Authority, which Israel does not treat as permission to import a single crate of antibiotics.
A freeze that was always a pause
More than 15 groups sued on February 22. Human Rights Watch asked for the rules to be rescinded and said Israel had not committed to filling the gap. On February 27 the High Court froze the shutdown while it heard the case. Judge Dafna Barak-Erez called the legal dispute real. Aid workers called the injunction a lifeline and warned that it did not say whether trucks or foreign staff could move. They were right to read it narrowly. Craig Kenzie, an MSF project coordinator, told AFP the foreign team was already out and the stores were already low. About 1,200 Palestinian staff were covering water, surgery, and maternity care without the resupply the registration was supposed to unlock.
On March 23 the court held a first hearing. On May 20 it ended the pause. The Jerusalem Post reported the docket as of March: 129 applications, 30 approved, 19 denied, 47 still in review, 34 not started. The 30-day clock that began on May 20 was not a negotiation. It was a deadline to comply with the demand the petitioners had called a violation of humanitarian law, or to cease. Israel had approved two dozen other groups, many of them faith-based, and claimed the 37 were a rounding error. MSF’s own ledger makes that claim indecent. Between October 7, 2023, and the end of April 2026 its teams logged about 1.9 million outpatient visits and 654,000 emergency consultations. For 2026 it had budgeted 100 to 120 million euros. An estimated 18,500 people need care Gaza cannot provide. MSF had supported 147 medical evacuations by May. A rounding error does not run those numbers.
A ceasefire that did not stop the killing or the paperwork
A U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025. It did not end the dying. MSF’s own pages say Israel continues to kill and deprive people in Gaza and has not stopped what the organization calls a genocide. Gaza’s health ministry counted at least 72,988 Palestinians killed and 173,205 injured between October 7, 2023, and April 6, 2026. MSF’s British office has put deaths after the ceasefire announcement at at least 978, with more than 3,097 injured. Those figures are a floor. They do not count the infections and the untreated fractures that follow when foreign surgeons are sent home and the drug cupboard is not refilled. The New Yorker, reporting in May, found an MSF clinic still seeing patients without antibiotics and without chairs.
This is the same method The AEGIS Alliance has documented in the Qatar-Egypt-Jordan rebuke of ceasefire strikes and in the killing of Gaza goalkeeper Saleem al-Ashqar while he searched for cooking gas. Israel banned UNRWA in 2024 on theft allegations an International Court of Justice advisory opinion in October 2025 did not sustain. When one set of monitors is expelled, the next set is told to hand over names or leave. In July 2025, Israeli military officials had already said they lacked proof that Hamas systematically stole humanitarian supplies. The registration law does not need that proof. It writes ideology into the form. Boycott language, support for international cases against Israeli officials, or a refusal to describe Israel as a Jewish and democratic state can kill a license. That is not a security screen. It is a loyalty oath.
Who is left holding the scalpel
The September 13 strike is the ruling’s aftermath, not a separate curiosity. MSF said the bus in Gaza City carried a large logo on the roof and was hit when an Israeli airstrike struck a targeted vehicle about two meters away. One colleague was injured. The organization said Israeli forces had again shown blatant disregard for humanitarian staff, and that nowhere in Gaza is safe. A government that demands a nurse’s family tree in the name of protection, then drops a bomb beside a marked medical bus, has told the truth about the list. The list was never about keeping clinics safe. It was about deciding which Palestinians are allowed to keep working after the foreign witnesses are gone.
Palestinian staff are still trying to practice under a registration Israel does not honor at the crossing. That is not a victory for humanitarian law. It is what an occupying power looks like when a high court agrees that sovereignty includes the right to conscript the witness pool. The AEGIS Alliance will keep this file on the international news desk beside the rest of the Gaza record. The 37 names on the December list were never the edge of the story. The edge is the population that loses surgeons and drug shipments while a minister calls the loss security, and the marked bus that still is not safe after the judges have gone home.
