ISRAEL’s “outrageous” plan to stop 37 aid organisations operating in Gaza from Thursday will make the situation in the devastated Palestinian territory “even worse,” United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said today.

He led a clamour for Israel to reverse its decision to force aid bodies to hand over detailed information on Palestinian staff or be barred from the coastal enclave.

“Israel’s suspension of numerous aid agencies from Gaza is outrageous,” Mr Turk said in a statement.

“Such arbitrary suspensions make an already intolerable situation even worse for the people of Gaza,” he warned.

Mr Turk pointed to a “pattern of unlawful restriction on humanitarian access,” including banning UN refugee agency UNRWA and attacks on other non-governmental organisations.

UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini also blasted Tel Aviv’s “troubling pattern of disregard for international humanitarian law.”

He wrote on social media: “Failing to push back against attempts to control the work of aid organisations will further undermine the basic humanitarian principles of neutrality, independence, impartiality and humanity underpinning aid work across the world.”

European Union commissioner Hadja Lahbib said the EU was clear that the “NGO registration law cannot be implemented in its current form.”

She said: “All barriers to humanitarian access must be lifted.”

Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Prevot also spoke out, telling Israel that humanitarian access was “neither optional nor conditional or political.”

He pointed to the International Court of Justice ruling that Israel must ensure it allows unhindered aid delivery.

But, Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam’s policy lead in occupied Palestine, pointed out that aid organisations had in any case been barred from bring materials into the strip since March.

“Israel continues to block us whether we’re registered or not and has continued to deliberately obstruct humanitarian aid regardless of these rules,” she told Al-Jazeera.

Amid the rising furore, Gaza’s government media office published end-of-year statistics on the genocide in the territory.

In 2025 alone, at least 29,117 Palestinians were killed or are missing, about half of them children, women and the elderly.

It said two million people — the vast majority of Gaza’s population — had been displaced, with 106,400 housing units destroyed and 66,000 damaged beyond use.

The office said more than 90 per cent of infrastructure had been destroyed under a barrage of 112,000 tonnes of explosives dropped on the strip.