From the headline, a New York Times piece on Doctors Without Borders in Gaza appears to paint a worrying picture of Israel’s approach toward the influential humanitarian agency. But the text, masquerading as professional journalism, is little more than an echo chamber for the propaganda of a powerful NGO.
Draped in anecdotes of suffering Palestinian patients and heroic physicians from Doctors Without Borders (also known as MSF, Médecins Sans Frontières), the January 17 article – titled “Inside the Doctors Without Borders Clinics that Israel Is Closing in Gaza” – seeks to guide readers to an ostensibly inescapable conclusion: that new Israeli regulations for humanitarian NGOs like MSF condemn civilians to needless misery.
That conclusion is wrong – and very dangerous.
The Times piece promotes three claims: that MSF is indispensable to Gaza’s health system; that Israel’s new NGO regulations damage this system and are politically motivated; and that concerns about MSF’s terrorist links are marginal, even petty. Each claim collapses under scrutiny.
Start with the question of the inflated portrayal of MSF’s role in Gaza’s hospitals and clinics, for which the Times substitutes sentiment for statistics. A patient says, “If MSF stops working, people will lose their lives,” a claim which the piece does not further explore or verify. Instead, it refers to the group’s “vital role in the territory’s medical system” – not coincidentally, the same terminology used in MSF’s press releases attacking Israel.
Indeed, the article relies almost entirely on site visits and interviews apparently arranged in cooperation with MSF, then uses those impressions to dismiss Israeli claims that MSF exaggerates its importance. (Bilal Shbair, the lead author, lives in Gaza, and her previous reports on war casualties omitted information on their Hamas ties.) That circular logic would not pass muster in coverage of a corporation, a university, or a political campaign. It should not pass in the case of powerful NGOs.
Gaza's medical disaster is a consequence of Hamas rule
Beyond a few anecdotes, the journalists make no attempt to assess MSF’s actual contribution, an omission which is surely not accidental. According to data published by the Israeli agency coordinating aid (COGAT), MSF operates only five clinics or medical points in Gaza out of roughly 220 medical facilities. Even assuming MSF performs admirably in its limited footprint, calling it “essential” to Gaza’s medical system is clearly exaggerated. If MSF were to disappear tomorrow, Gaza’s medical disaster (the consequence of 18 years of the Hamas regime’s misrule compounded by the October 7 atrocities) would not meaningfully change.
More troubling are the Times’ blatant omissions and distortions. Israel’s new NGO registration requirements did not emerge from bureaucratic caprice, or even in response to MSF’s pattern of exploiting its “humanitarian mission” to act as an activist group intent on demonizing Israel.
Rather, the rules emerged from a long record of abuses, including terrorist infiltration of international NGOs in Gaza. The Times mentions, almost in passing, that one MSF employee from Gaza killed in 2024 was a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad involved in rocket production. It presents this as an unfortunate aberration.
It is not. Multiple reports – by NGO Monitor and by the Israeli government – document a pattern of MSF staff and affiliates with ties to terrorist organizations, alongside shamefully lax vetting procedures. MSF did not merely hire one bad apple – it planted a poison tree. This highlights the root of its organizational culture, the lack of oversight, and the absence of any accountability.
Then there are MSF’s full-throttle delegitimization campaigns, 21st-century blood libels and atrocity inversion under the false “genocide” label. The Times frames Israel’s scrutiny as simple opposition to vanilla “political speech.” But MSF has not merely criticized Israeli policy; it has accused Israel of genocide, apartheid, and wholesale massacres, while routinely omitting Hamas’s systematic abuse of hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure for military purposes (actual war crimes). In October 2023, an MSF doctor in Gaza was the primary “eyewitness” for false accusations that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli hospital – claims later debunked (notably by The Times) but never retracted.
Moreover, some MSF insiders have sounded alarms. Alain Destexhe, a former MSF secretary-general, has accused the organization of systematic bias in favor of Hamas and of abandoning its humanitarian charter. Such criticism or even qualifiers are nowhere to be found in the Times’ account.
Finally, consider the staff privacy argument. MSF claims that submitting staff lists for Israeli vetting would violate European privacy law. Yet for years, NGOs in Gaza – including MSF – provided similar information to Hamas authorities without apparent legal consequences. Evidently, privacy is sacrosanct when Israel checks for terrorist links, but negotiable for an Islamist terrorist group like Hamas.
With Hamas, Israel faces an enemy that embeds itself in civilian institutions as a matter of doctrine. In that environment, allowing powerful, politically hostile NGOs to operate without transparency is not humanitarianism; it is negligence. Israel is right to draw a line.
The real scandal is not that MSF is locked out of Gaza until it cooperates in preventing terrorist infiltration. It is that The New York Times portrayed a well-funded NGO advocacy campaign as a verifiable portrait of reality – and invited its readers to confuse moral posturing with moral clarity.
The writer is founder and president of NGO Monitor and professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University.