Israel is Denying Doctors and International Aid Workers Entry to Gaza at Unprecedented Rates
Amid a total blockade of Gaza, Israel imposed sweeping new restrictions on international aid groups
The Israeli military is denying international health care and humanitarian workers entry into Gaza at unprecedented rates, according to multiple doctors and aid workers who spoke to Drop Site News. Since early February, shortly after the Gaza “ceasefire” went into effect, as many as half of doctors with preliminary approval through the World Health Organization to enter Gaza found out the night before their scheduled entry that they were rejected.
Nearly all of the doctors being denied entry over the past six weeks have been on relief missions to Gaza within the past 17 months and have previously been cleared by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the branch of the Israeli military that oversees the West Bank and Gaza.
“This spike in rejections, without a doubt, we've never seen anything like this,” said Dr. Nabeel Rana, a vascular surgeon who volunteered in Gaza on two separate missions in 2024 and was denied entry for the first time on February 24. “It seems to be since the ceasefire went through—since the beginning of February—is when it's become very, very pronounced.”
Meanwhile, the Israeli government established an inter-ministerial team in December, led by the Director General of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, to oversee the registration of international NGOs working with Palestinians. The new registration procedures mean that the Israeli government can bar any organizations from entering Gaza until they have gone through its approval process. “This could completely upend the humanitarian system as it currently stands. We were supposed to have a team enter on 18 March and were told to ‘hold’ until the new terms were negotiated,” said Dorotea Gucciardo, the director of Development at Glia, an international humanitarian organization that operates in Gaza. The newly-formed team’s guidelines include denying registration for political reasons, such as “denying Israel’s status as a Jewish and democratic state,” or “supporting boycotts, denying October 7, supporting resistance efforts, delegitimization campaigns, or legal proceedings against Israeli security personnel.”
“This policy is using bureaucracy as another weapon in Israel's genocidal campaign against Palestinians,” said Gucciardo, who led two medical missions to Gaza in 2024. “It's unprecedented, and represents a dangerous escalation in the restrictions placed on humanitarian organizations working in Palestine, particularly in Gaza, which remains under total blockade. The Gaza Strip is being choked off from the rest of the world, and this new policy will cripple efforts to save and preserve life.”
The health care system in Gaza has been decimated in the war, with only one hospital in the territory fully operational and 20 partially functioning. There are severe shortages in essential medical supplies, equipment and in-patient bed capacity. Over 111,000 Palestinians have been injured and up to 14,000 patients—including 4,500 children—require medical evacuation abroad.
The procedure to enter Gaza imposed by the Israeli military is draconian. In the months after October 7, 2023, humanitarian organizations coordinated their entry through the United Nations and the Israeli military, organizing their own transportation from Cairo to the Rafah border crossing. As many as 15 health care workers crossed at a time for one- or two-week stints, with a relatively large turnover of volunteers entering and exiting the territory. People were also allowed to take multiple suitcases of supplies with them, including medical supplies, food, and toys for children, as well as large amounts of cash to support their stays.
That changed dramatically last summer following the Israel military’s invasion of Rafah in May and the closing down of the Rafah border crossing. Under the new system, health care workers had to apply for entry to the World Health Organization (WHO) a month ahead of time and receive pre-approval. “The WHO submits all that information to COGAT, meaning that COGAT has all of your application information, everything about you, a month ahead of time,” Rana said.
Pre-approved applicants would then travel to Amman and await a final approval from COGAT, via the WHO, the evening before their scheduled trip into Gaza. COGAT sends WHO a list with a color next to each applicant: green for approval, red for denial, and orange denoting at least a partial denial—with no explanation or justification. Approved volunteers board a bus the following morning to the King Hussein/Allenby crossing to enter the occupied West Bank, and then another bus escorted by the Israeli military to the Karam Abu Salem crossing into Gaza. The buses typically carry 20-25 people and operate twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The two dozen or so seats on each bus were split among all international organizations trying to enter Gaza, including UN staff, humanitarians, and medics.
Additionally, the number of people entering on a particular day have to equal the number exiting. “This means that there is never any slow accumulation of support inside,” Rana said. “It was really only a handful of medical workers from the entire world at any given time that were actually there on any given day, you could count them on your hand.” Each person was also restricted to bringing one suitcase and one backpack; any food, medical equipment or other supplies deemed outside of personal use were prohibited; and cash was restricted to $2,800.
Since early February, Israel’s already stringent restrictions have intensified. While rejections occurred in the past, they were relatively infrequent. Now they have become regular and consistent, with more than one or two people being rejected from every convoy going in. No explanation is given and there is no process of appeal, leaving applicants in Amman with little recourse. For those who are allowed in, the cash restriction has been reduced tenfold, to $280, in an economy with severe inflation.
COGAT did not directly address specific questions submitted by Drop Site and instead denied that Israel limits the number of humanitarian and medical teams “subject to security inspection.”
“Personally I've spoken to over a dozen of doctors and nurses, all U.S. citizens, who have been in this predicament over the past month. … And if you get denied once, the chances you get denied again are obviously very high,” said Dr. Thaer Ahmad, an emergency medicine physician based in Chicago who was last in Gaza in January 2024 and was rejected the night before a scheduled convoy on March 13. “Every single iteration of rules and regulations that is being instituted by the Israelis just makes it increasingly difficult to mount any sort of response and to organize around this. Doctors being denied is really just one aspect of a larger trend that we're noticing over the last few weeks, especially since the ceasefire.”
Humanitarian workers apply through a similar process to enter Gaza, though instead of initially applying through the WHO, they submit their applications through the United Nations Office for Project Services. Like medics, they are also being rejected by COGAT in unprecedented numbers over the past month and a half.
Arwa Damon, the founder of INARA, a nonprofit providing medical and mental healthcare to children in Gaza, was cleared to go to Gaza on four separate occasions in 2024, but was rejected on February 27. Her status was orange, so she reapplied. COGAT rejected her again on March 4, 7, and 11. On March 13, her status changed to red. Damon—who previously spent 18 years working as a journalist at CNN, including as its senior international correspondent—repeatedly tried to follow up with officials at COGAT to no avail.
“You try to figure out what the logic is for this,” Damon told Drop Site. “Is it those of us who are more vocal and are talking about what we've been witnessing in Gaza in the media? Except that people who haven't been talking, and organizations who haven't been that out there are also being denied. So, you try to figure out and find the logic, but you can’t,” she said. “I would characterize this as an attempt to further cripple our ability to provide for the people of Gaza.”
As of March 2, when the deadline passed ending the first phase of the ceasefire deal, Israel reimposed a total blockade on Gaza, barring any aid whatsoever from entering. The cutoff of all food, fuel, medicine, and other supplies is once again causing severe shortages, leading to prices for basic goods to skyrocket and severely exacerbating an already dire humanitarian crisis. Bakeries are closing down due to a lack of cooking gas and aid organizations are reducing rations. On Sunday, Israel also cut off the electricity supply to Gaza, forcing a major desalination plant to slash its water output severely limiting the amount of drinking water available to 600,000 people in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis.
“Those of us who rotate in, we rotate in fresh. But the vast majority of humanitarian workers in Gaza are Palestinians, they're Gazans, they're living this. They've been living this for 17 months without a break, they're beyond exhausted, they are physically and emotionally spent,” Damon said. “So this small group of individuals that's coming in and out that can take a little bit of that burden on…but [the Israelis] are crushing a system that is already crushed. For the longest time we were saying the humanitarian system in Gaza is on life support but now the machine is beeping and it's going to flatline.”
The WHO has not publicly commented on Israel’s increasing number of rejections of doctors and aid workers from entering Gaza over the past six weeks. “There's no pushback, there's no outrage, there's no appeal, there's nothing like that,” Rana said. “The World Health Organization has been very quiet about it and it's almost as if they're trying to suppress this. It's become obvious that each of these levels are not pushing back and not creating a fuss and trying not to publicize things because I think everybody's worried that they're going to get cut out. … When everyone just has to quietly go back home when you're rejected and that's the end of it—why would anything change?”
Drop Site sent questions to the WHO about the increasing rate of rejections of doctors into Gaza by the Israeli military and why the organization has not publicly commented on the growing trend. They did not provide an immediate response.
“There's a number of individuals who have been denied entry whose organizations are not speaking about it,” Damon says. “But I think we need to do what we can to keep the pressure on. Pressure has very rarely worked over the last 17 months, but on those rare occasions it has, and so we have to keep fighting for access. We have to keep fighting for access for ourselves and for aid to get inside.”
Jeremy Scahill contributed to this report.
*This article was updated on March 17 to reflect a response by COGAT.
This is ethnic cleansing. Absolutely cruel.
Thank you, Mr Kouddous, for your (as usual), excellent coverage. I know this must be heartbreaking work for you, as it breaks the hearts of we who read it. It also inspires us to do what we can, whenever we can.