Israel’s deregistration of international health providers in Gaza makes legally mandated care increasingly impossible, raising serious questions about compliance with international law.

Access to healthcare is widely accepted as among the most basic of human rights. This is recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, plus the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Beyond medical treatment, this mandates access to health facilities (including hospitals), plus the maintenance of what is fundamentally necessary for health (and survival), including safe drinking water, basic sanitation, and essential medications.

Protection of medical personnel is also covered. Where there is armed conflict, International Humanitarian Law specifically protects medical personnel, units, and transports. Those providing humanitarian aid should be similarly respected. Yet in the current catastrophe that is Gaza, those international laws are broken apparently without consequence.

Israel remains a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, ratifying it in August 1991. Israel is also a party to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified in October 1991.

This public record underscores the breaches of international law by an occupying power (Israel) of a stateless occupied people (Palestinians), that has dramatically worsened since the Israeli response to the heinous attack on Israel by the military wing of Hamas in October 2023.

The most extreme religious-nationalist government in Israel’s history has eliminated any pretence of a two-state solution with a homeland for Palestinians, pursuing instead a territorial expansion well beyond 1967 once-were-borders. This has led to flagrant abuses of its military power or any obligations it have – under laws their own state ratified - to treat Gazans, including children, with the care mandated. (Fifty per cent of Palestinians living in Gaza are aged 18 or less.)

Under desperate circumstances of disruption and delay, as well as bombardment and grave food and shelter shortages, INGOs deliver more than half of the food assistance in Gaza, support more than half of the field hospitals, implement three quarters of shelter and non-food item activities, and provide 100 per cent of the treatment for children with severe acute malnutrition.

Among other groups, this directly affects Médecins Sans Frontières, an internationally recognised group that has provided at least 20 per cent of the health care in Gaza, even at the cost of some of their own workers’ lives – 15 MSF workers have been killed since the start of the conflict; 1700 health workers in total.

MSF can work in Palestine only until 1 March, but the organisation reported on 2 February, “… already we have been blocked from bringing in international staff and supplies…For patients on the ground in Palestine, the humanitarian situation remains severe: cold and wet winter weather is worsening shelter and exposure issues, and access to essentials – especially fuel and water – remains unreliable. Israel’s withholding of registration from MSF and others is not only having grave consequences for humanitarian aid, but it is also a breach of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law.”

Dr Sue Wareham is national president of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War. This doctors-led group has affiliations globally and is concerned not only with the prevention of war and the global build-up of weapons, but also with the stark health consequences of war, and its aftermath.

Dr Wareham said this week: “The extent of deliberate destruction of healthcare in Gaza is not something our organisation has previously witnessed in over four decades of advocacy. Attacks on healthcare, tragically, have become more frequent in wars, but never before have we seen the extent of targeted destruction of a functioning healthcare system, and the killing, abduction and incarceration of its [health] workers, as we’ve seen in Gaza.

“Doctors, nurses and other health workers in Australia care deeply about this. The extent of suffering that has been deliberately inflicted on fellow humans runs counter to everything we do in our professional lives.”

UN organisations and INGOs claim that the IDF have deliberately targeted health facilities, including hospitals, as well as health workers. While Israel claims that hospitals are “misused” by Hamas, they have not been required to verify this. By late 2025, the UK government was calling the collapse of the health system in Gaza “unacceptable”. To date, however, the Australian government has neither publicly condemned Israel’s actions nor commented on the inevitable consequences of this further loss of humanitarian and health provision.

Israel’s rationale for expelling health and aid providers is unconvincing. Dr Wareham explains, _“_Israel’s deregistration of dozens of international INGOs, with demands that they provide personal information on their staff, is an act of cruelty towards the very agencies who are bringing at least some relief to the Palestinian people. The deregistration process places INGOs in an impossible situation of choosing between staff safety and serving people in desperate need. MAPW has never before witnessed aid agencies, some of them among the world’s most reputable, being treated with such contempt and inhumanity.”

On behalf of Australia’s doctors and health workers, a letter was recently sent from MAPW to Australia’s Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, pointing out Israel’s failure in its core obligations under international law. The Albanese government has repeatedly issued statements that urge compliance, yet has not at any point imposed meaningful consequences for Israel’s repeated violations.

More than 50 INGOs have warned that Israel’s punitive registration measures will impede critical humanitarian action for Palestinian people, while the foreign ministers of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK issued a joint statement about the “catastrophic situation”.

Australia could act. Dr Wareham: “The foreign minister has the power to name Israel’s ongoing illegal obstruction of health care and aid, and to condemn the collective punishment of Palestinian people that it inflicts. This surely meets the threshold of ‘serious violation or abuse’ under Australia’s sanctions regime, and the subsequent imposition of meaningful penalties on responsible entities including the state of Israel itself.”

That Australian doctors and health workers are on the front lines of concern and protest, as well as care, should surprise no one. Our government talks about the need to uphold our international obligations but doing little other than offering platitudes and handwringing is a choice not to invoke the powers Dr Wareham describes.

This is, after all, the same government that risks further social division with their hosting of President Isaac Herzog, known for signing a bomb to be dropped on Gaza, a besieged enclave with the highest number of child amputees in the world, and with the “ largest orphan crisis in modern history”.

If it takes doctors, nurses, health workers in Australia to reveal the layers of suffering inflicted on our fellow humans in Gaza, then those severe breaches of international law and humanitarian obligation must become our business also. We have the means to write to Minister Wong,  foreign.minister@dfat.gov.au, protesting this decimation of health services in defiance of international laws. We can also counter arguments that seek to further dehumanise and dispossess Palestinians, or further “entitle” the state of Israel to rights they appear determined to deny to others.