On Monday, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a stark public warning: escalating restrictions imposed by Israel on independent human rights and humanitarian organizations operating across the occupied Palestinian territories have left Palestinian children growing more exposed and unprotected by the day.
The 18 independent child rights experts that make up the committee, which operates under the umbrella of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN OHCHR), issued sharp condemnation of Israel’s policy of labeling Palestinian civil society organizations as terrorist entities. According to the committee, this designation provides Israel with legal justification to disrupt critical life-saving and advocacy work, through tactics that include military raids on organization offices, travel bans targeting staff, personal financial penalties, threats of arrest, deliberate destruction of organizational documentation, and in multiple cases, threats of secondary sanctions against international partners that work with the targeted groups.
While the committee’s latest warning did not name the specific groups referenced, the pattern of restrictions stretches back years. In 2021, Israel formally outlawed six leading Palestinian human rights and advocacy organizations, among them Defense for Children International – Palestine, Al-Haq, Adameer, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees – all of which have a decades-long track record of defending Palestinian children’s rights.
More recently, new bureaucratic registration requirements imposed by Israel have threatened to force even more groups to end their operations at a moment of catastrophic humanitarian need in the Gaza Strip. On December 30 of last year, 37 international non-governmental organizations received official notification that their operating registrations would expire the following day. After a two-month grace period, the organizations would be legally required to cease all activity across Gaza, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. By January of this year, 53 international NGOs operating in the occupied territories issued a joint statement warning that these new measures would bring a complete halt to critical humanitarian programming.
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs defended the new restrictions publicly, claiming that organizations that failed to meet the country’s “security and transparency requirements” would have their operating licenses suspended. The ministry added that the restrictions also apply to any group that “refused to submit a list of their Palestinian employees in order to rule out any links to terrorism.” The 53 NGOs pushed back against this framing, noting that attempts to evaluate the impact of the deregistration policy using narrow, selective metrics fail to account for the on-the-ground realities of how humanitarian aid is actually delivered to vulnerable communities.
Since a ceasefire took effect in Gaza on October 10, Israel has expanded this crackdown across all occupied Palestinian territories. One high-profile case involves Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF), which Israel moved to ban after the organization refused to hand over a list of its Palestinian staff. In February, 17 international aid organizations filed a petition with Israel’s Supreme Court to block the ban. While a temporary court injunction currently allows MSF to continue its operations, the Israeli government is still pushing for a permanent ruling to end the group’s work entirely.
UN OHCHR emphasizes that these Israeli measures have left organizations unable to guarantee the safety of Palestinian children and families seeking life-saving support and legal advocacy, resulting in a situation where children are effectively left defenseless. “For more than three decades, these organisations have played a vital role in defending Palestinian children, including in the Israeli military courts, and in documenting grave violations against Palestinian children at the hands of Israeli forces,” the committee said in its statement.
The committee warned that without the work of these independent groups, Palestinian children will be left even more exposed, and violations of their fundamental rights could continue without any accountability for perpetrators. The committee’s statement called on Israel to immediately lift all restrictions and barriers that target child rights defenders in the occupied Palestinian territories. It also urged the international community to use all available diplomatic and political tools to hold Israeli authorities accountable for these actions, and to prioritize the protection of Palestinian children’s fundamental rights.
“Despite grave risks and limited resources, child rights defenders have continued to stand with Palestinian children and families in extraordinarily dangerous conditions,” the committee added. “They must be protected, not punished.”