The Six Designated NGOs

The Six Designated NGOs are Al-Haq, Addameer, Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P), the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC): six Palestinian civil-society groups that Israel’s Ministry of Defense declared terrorist organizations on 22 October 2021, alleging they function as funding and recruitment arms of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a group Israel, the United States, Canada and the European Union all designate as a terrorist organization in its own right. The clearest tie: an accountant on the payroll of two of the six, UAWC and Addameer, was indicted as the operational commander of the PFLP cell that planted the August 2019 roadside bomb that killed 17-year-old Israeli hiker Rina Shnerb. The groups themselves, most Western governments, and major international human rights bodies rejected the designation as unproven and politically motivated. Both the evidence and the pushback are part of the record.

Who they are

The six operate in the West Bank and, for some, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and each has a distinct mandate. Al-Haq, founded in Ramallah in 1979, is the oldest and best known, a legal research and human rights documentation group and a founding member of the international BDS movement. Addameer (Arabic for “conscience”), founded in 1992, supports Palestinian prisoners and their families. DCI-P, founded in 1991 as the Palestinian branch of the Geneva-based Defense for Children International network, documents cases involving Palestinian minors in Israeli custody. UAWC, founded in 1986, runs agricultural development and land-cultivation projects for Palestinian farmers. UPWC, founded in 1980, and Bisan, a smaller Ramallah research center, run women’s programs and community research respectively. All six describe themselves as independent civil society and human rights organizations with no operational link to any armed faction.

The designation and its legal basis

On 22 October 2021, then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz signed orders under Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Law naming all six as terrorist organizations, a status that criminalizes membership, funding, and public support for the groups inside Israel and the West Bank. Israeli security officials said the organizations “diverted humanitarian funds from European donors to the PFLP and recruited members into the terror group,” and that their offices had hosted PFLP meetings. On 17 August 2022, after an appeals process, Gantz ratified the designation as permanent for three of the six (Addameer, Bisan and UPWC), whose appeals were formally rejected; the finding is recorded on Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing register.

The evidence Israel cited

The core piece of evidence tying the network to violence was personnel, not rhetoric. Samer Arbid, an accountant employed by both UAWC and Addameer, was indicted as the operational commander of the PFLP cell responsible for the August 2019 roadside bombing near the settlement of Dolev that killed 17-year-old Israeli hiker Rina Shnerb and wounded her father and brother. NGO Monitor, an Israeli watchdog that has tracked the organizations for years, documented that PFLP officials had publicly identified staff at several of the six as party members, that representatives of all six attended a May 2019 PFLP gathering in Ramallah, and that the PFLP’s own English-language website linked directly to DCI-P, Addameer and UPWC until roughly 2015. None of this evidence was presented in an open court; the designations were administrative, made under counter-terrorism regulations rather than through a criminal trial, which is the central objection of the groups’ defenders.

The funding, and why the pushback doesn’t erase the personnel ties

The six collectively drew millions of dollars a year from European governments, the European Union, and Western foundations. Reported figures include roughly $15.6 million channeled to UAWC through the UN Food and Agriculture Organization with Canadian funding, NOK 70.4 million (about $7 million) from Norway to UAWC, $800,000 to Al-Haq from the Open Society Foundations, and $100,000 to DCI-P from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. That scale of funding, combined with the groups’ genuine and long-documented human rights work (prisoner welfare, child-detention monitoring, farmer support, legal aid), is why Human Rights Watch called the designation an attack on civil society, nine European Union member states declined to accept it absent further evidence, and United Nations human rights experts condemned it outright. None of that pushback engages the personnel evidence directly: it objects to the process, an administrative designation rather than a criminal trial, not to the documented fact that an accountant employed by both UAWC and Addameer commanded the PFLP cell that killed Rina Shnerb, or that PFLP officials publicly named staff at several of the six as party members. Objecting to how a finding was reached is not the same as refuting what it found.

What’s real, and what the designation actually targets

DCI-P’s documentation of individual cases of Palestinian minors in Israeli military detention, UAWC’s decades of agricultural extension work for West Bank farmers, and Addameer’s prisoner-welfare casework are real fields of activity with real beneficiaries, not fabrications. But the designation was never aimed at that work; it was aimed at the personnel and money running through it. The dispute is not over whether these groups do human rights and social work, it is over whether that work is entangled with, funds, or provides cover for an internationally designated terrorist faction, and the personnel evidence, an accountant who ran a PFLP bombing cell, staff publicly identified as party members, a PFLP website linking directly to three of the six, answers that question even though Israel’s process for reaching it was administrative rather than judicial.