Dissolved in November 2025, the Humanitarian Foundation for Gaza (GHF) congratulated itself on having “shown that there was a better way to deliver aid”. Behind this triumphant self-portrait lies a worrying reality: the emergence of an experimental model that intends to substitute for an independent humanitarian system a device for access to basic services totally aligned with the politico-military objectives of the powerful. The issue is therefore to know whether the precedent it constitutes is destined to replicate itself.
A laboratory named Gaza
It would be tempting to reduce the controversy around the GHF to a chapel quarrel between humanitarian actors defending their prerogatives. That would be to miss the essential. What has been at stake in Gaza since the spring of 2025, and even more in the “New Gaza” project carried by the Trump Administration, is of an entirely different nature, namely an attempt to redefine what “doing humanitarian” means, who decides it, and in the service of which objectives. It is not a technical quarrel. It is a battle for the very meaning of the word.
Without prior operational history and without accountability vis-à-vis the populations it was supposed to serve, the system put in place by the GHF exerted systematic pressure on traditional actors — UNRWA[1] first and foremost — to cede their operational space. Where the UN system operated some 400 distribution points spread across the entire territory, the GHF opened only four “secured sites”, essentially concentrated in the south of the enclave, near Israeli forward bases. A distribution that has nothing to do with the map of needs and everything to do with the logic of displacement underlying the plan of demographic recomposition at the heart of the ambitions of the Israeli government.
What is new, beyond the brutality of the display, is the instrumentalization on this scale of aid as a lever of this transformation. Moreover, the catastrophic human toll of the “GHF model” is today widely documented[2]; certain organizations operating on site have moreover described the distribution system thus deployed as an “organized putting to death”[3].
Neutrality: functional foundation, political target
The four cardinal principles of international humanitarian law — humanity, neutrality, impartiality, independence — are not institutional communication labels. They are the functional foundation that makes humanitarian access possible in conflict contexts. If an organization is perceived as the political instrument of one of the parties, it loses its capacity to operate. Neutrality is not an abstract moral posture; it is an operational condition. It is from this reality that the notion of “zone of legitimate humanitarian relevance” emerges — that space, always negotiated and always fragile, where the legal, political and operational dimensions coincide sufficiently for unconditional assistance, based solely on needs, to be made possible. In Gaza, this zone is on the way to extinction. It is knowingly and deliberately asphyxiated.
By making aid an instrument serving the ambitions of territorial reconfiguration of one of the parties to the conflict, the GHF model has contributed to legitimizing and facilitating dynamics contrary to the fundamental rights of the populations concerned. This is a fracture line that cannot be relativized in the name of pragmatism, nor diluted in the nuances of compromise which sometimes, in the sector, take a comfortable form of abandonment of responsibility.
The fracture is all the more insidious as it occurs in a context where organizations are struck by a dramatic scarcity of funding and thus constrained to make impossible choices. These dilemmas are not new in the history of humanitarian action, but their scale and their systematization are.
Gaza, PUI ©Charlotte Baudouin
Gaza as precedent: the ingredients of an exportable model
It would be reassuring to think that Gaza is a unique case. That would be a dangerous illusion. The ingredients of the model are identifiable: delegitimization of existing actors, accused of inefficiency or of complacency with the designated enemy; creation of an alternative organization backed by a sovereign power; marginalization of independent actors through access restrictions, pressure on funders or discredit campaigns; normalization through repetition and progressive institutionalization.
The Israeli decision of 1 January 2026 to deregister 37 international humanitarian organizations — including MSF, Oxfam, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Médecins du Monde, CARE, Première Urgence Internationale or Handicap International — illustrates with chilling clarity the third stage of this model. Indeed, via the overhaul in 2025 of its registration process, Israel intends in particular to impose on organizations the nominative disclosure of all their personnel. Most of them have obviously refused: submitting such lists would expose their teams to documented security risks — more than 500 humanitarian workers killed in Gaza since 2023 — and would violate their legal obligations, notably vis-à-vis the European Union[4]. OCHA had warned that this system was based on vague, arbitrary and highly politicized criteria; Philippe Lazzarini[5] described it as a “dangerous precedent”; and ten foreign ministers demanded its immediate lifting — without result. The logic is implacable: it is not a matter of expelling NGOs for operational faults, but of constraining them to choose between capitulating on their principles or losing access. Marginalization by impossible injunction — an exportable mechanism.
We can already draw parallels with other observed situations. In Ukraine, certain donors limit their funding to an exclusive intervention on the governmental side, relegating to second place populations located on the other side of the lines. The politicization of funding becomes the most effective vector of the politicization of aid — without forcing the hand of organizations on the ground. In the Sahel, the vocabulary of national sovereignty and of the fight against “humanitarian neocolonialism” increasingly serves to justify the marginalization of actors refusing to align themselves. In Europe itself, the criminalization of sea rescue sketches, in the community space, an attenuated version of the same model. And tomorrow, in the climate or food crises to come, the temptation will be strong to make it a lever of power. The question is not whether such contexts will occur — they will occur. It is whether independent actors will still exist to defend the principles.
Gaza, PUI ©Charlotte Baudouin
A structural fracture that is becoming institutionalized
What is happening goes beyond a funding crisis or yet another manifestation of tensions between humanitarian and political spheres. It is a structural fracture, in the process of institutionalization, between two radically different conceptions of international aid. On the one hand, a model based on law, principles, accountability vis-à-vis affected populations and independence vis-à-vis political actors. On the other, a model where aid is an instrument serving objectives defined by the powers that finance it, where beneficiaries are targets of a policy and not subjects of rights, and where neutrality is perceived as an anomaly to correct, even a threat to neutralize.
This fracture today acquires a qualitatively different dimension for several converging reasons. The simultaneous weakening of international regulatory mechanisms — retreat of multilateralism, crisis of UN governance, dismantling of cooperation tools in the main contributing countries — removes the safeguards that made it possible to contain instrumentalization within certain limits. The dramatic scarcity of funding places independent organizations in increased vulnerability in the face of political pressures: when resources are lacking, conditionalities become more difficult to refuse. And the growing sophistication of the legitimizing discourse of convenience humanitarianism — it is no longer a matter of openly violating principles but of redefining them, of proposing a reading that authorizes political alignment while maintaining the appearance of impartiality — makes resistance even more demanding.
The case of the memorandum of understanding signed between the US Department of State and OCHA illustrates with striking precision this mechanism of sophisticated conditionality. Through this agreement, the United States committed 2 billion dollars[6], an amount presented as a “historic commitment” in favor of humanitarian action. The Department of State communiqué nevertheless leaves little room for ambiguity: these funds will be administered in accordance with “country policy agreements” intended to “ensure alignment with American interests and priorities”. There lies the knot of the problem. For simultaneously, on 27 January 2026, the Trump Administration published the final rules of its so-called Promoting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance (PHFFA) policy[7] — the most extended version to date of the Mexico City Policy, known to its detractors as the Global Gag Rule. In its current form, this policy is no longer limited to foreign NGOs receiving American health assistance: it now applies to all non-military aid — including humanitarian aid — and to all organizations that benefit from it, from foreign governments to international agencies. Above all, the rule cascades: any organization receiving American funds is required to impose it on its own subcontractors and partners. In this context, the fear is legitimate and growing among sector actors that the conditions attached to these 2 billion USD transiting through the CBPFs will end up contaminating, by trickle-down effect, all OCHA partner organizations — including those that do not directly receive American funds. This would be the materialization of a particularly feared scenario: that in which the ideological conditionality of a dominant donor penetrates the very heart of a supposedly non-earmarked multilateral mechanism, emptying of its substance the promise of independent pooled funds. It is the exact financial counterpart of what the deregistration of the 37 NGOs represents on the operational access level: a structural injunction to capitulate on principles, or to withdraw.
Resist, name, reinvent
Awareness-raising and capacity building of Community Relays in Tchambanga 20.01 – BHA Funding ©PUI
Faced with this picture, it is not a question of yielding to stupefaction. The history of humanitarian action is precisely that of a capacity to reinvent itself in adversity. But this reinvention requires absolute clarity on what is at stake and an explicit will to defend the lines that cannot be crossed.
The first imperative is that of testimony and denunciation. If the confusion between independent humanitarianism and instrumentalized humanitarianism is deliberately maintained, then the capacity to clearly name what is happening is an operational dimension in its own right. In this sense, the coordinated actions of actors operating in Gaza, notably through the AIDA network[8], to resist the pressure and the mechanics of the new regulations imposed by Israel are not only salutary, but make it possible to maintain until today access to essential basic services for Palestinian populations whose living conditions remain catastrophic.
The second imperative is that of the sanctuarization of principles — not as an identity posture or rhetorical exercise, but as a strategic choice based on a lucid understanding of the conditions of operational effectiveness. Resistance to compromises on principles, even to gain access, is not sectarianism; it is investment in tomorrow’s capacity for action.
The third imperative is the diversification of funding bases. Excessive dependence on a limited number of institutional, state and Western funders is the structural flaw that political pressures exploit. Developing and diversifying alternative sources — private philanthropy, broadened contributions from countries of the South, innovative solidarity mechanisms — are the conditions of survival of operational independence.
The fourth imperative, finally, is strengthened cooperation between all actors, local and international. A form of “glocalization” of aid, mixing a coordinated and adapted approach of the positions of sector actors on all the issues structuring crises, is certainly the most durable answer to the question of the legitimacy of all in politically hostile contexts.
For a humanitarian conscience of the present time
At the end of this analysis, one observation is imposed: we are at a turning point. Not because tensions between humanitarian and political spheres would be new, but because their intensity and their institutionalization reach a threshold that renders yesterday’s responses structurally insufficient.
Gaza is not only a human tragedy whose scale exceeds everything the humanitarian system had known for decades. It is a laboratory, a precedent and a warning. What has been experimented there — the substitution of a political tool for an independent humanitarian response, the use of aid as a lever of demographic reconfiguration, the attempt to empty fundamental principles of international law of their substance while maintaining their appearance — is not intended to remain confined to the Palestinian enclave. It is a method. And methods that are not sanctioned spread.
The fracture line that is being institutionalized between operators serving political plans and organizations respectful of principles is not a line that one could cross inadvertently or by simple field pragmatism. It is constructed and deliberately drawn by actors who have an interest in blurring reference points, in occupying the semantic terrain of humanitarianism, in normalizing the confusion between convenience aid and principled aid.
Humanitarianism was born from indignation in the face of certain realities of the world and has on numerous occasions reinvented itself in reaction to impasses. This indignation, founding and driving, is not a luxury reserved for times of peace or the golden age of abundant funding. It is, more than ever, the fuel the sector needs to cross the current period without losing its soul.
Olivier Routeau
[1] United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
[2] According to the United Nations Human Rights Office, 994 of the 1,760 Palestinians killed between May 27 and August 15, 2025, died while searching for food near GHF sites.
[3] MSF-Gaza-ThisIsNotAid-FINAL.pdf
[4] RGPD : General Data Protection Regulation.
Règlement – 2016/679 – FR – rgdp – EUR-Lex
[5] Commissioner-General of UNRWA.
[6] Channelled through OCHA country pooled funds (Country-Based Pooled Funds, CBPF)
[7] Federal Register :: Protecting Life in Foreign Assistance
[8] The Association of International Development Agencies – Aida
Olivier Routeau :
Graduated in law and political science, Olivier completed his training in humanitarian project management at Bioforce in 2007. He then joined the NGO Triangle Génération Humanitaire as Field Coordinator then Head of Mission in CAR, in Lebanon, in Congo Brazzaville, and in Tunisia. He joined Première Urgence Internationale in 2011, first as Head of the Africa unit, then directed the Emergency and Operational Development Department from 2015 to 2018. Since 2018, he has held the position of Director of Operations of the association. He has also collaborated with IRIS since 2014, and in 2020 became the Academic Director of the training “International Program Manager”.