RAFAH, GAZA STRIP—Every day this week, hundreds of U.N. trucks stacked with pallets of humanitarian aid have exited Israeli-patrolled routes and rumbled into population centers in the Gaza Strip, where Israel has implemented daily pauses in military operations.
Many of those trucks, operating under enhanced Israeli protections introduced on Sunday, have not reached U.N. warehouses, according to Gazans and high-ranking Israeli military officers. Armed Hamas militants have hijacked them, the people said, and what aid has reached U.N. warehouses has disappeared into a patronage system controlled by Hamas.
Long-shuttered distribution sites for food aid at schools, mosques, and bakeries have remained so. Civilians have been forced to buy the aid, often still branded with the U.N. emblem, from sellers who charge exorbitant prices in order to pay heavy taxes to Hamas.
“Fifty trucks arrived yesterday at warehouses in Gaza City, and Hamas stole all of the aid,” said Moumen Al-Natour, a 30-year-old lawyer in the Gazan capital, on Tuesday. “Today, the aid went on sale in the black markets at very high prices.”
Al-Natour said a childhood friend, seeking to feed his family, joined a mob of hungry Gazans trying to loot the trucks and was trampled to death along with others.
Such Hamas-dominated violence and graft surrounding U.N. aid deliveries in Gaza is typical, several dozen civilians, Israeli officers, and others on the ground told the Washington Free Beacon.
They described a daily reality in Gaza in which Hamas effectively controls U.N.-led aid operations in Gaza and seizes nearly all the incoming food to feed its members and loyalists and finance its terrorist regime. Rather than confront the problem, the people said, U.N. officials, under the guise of neutrality, have sided with Hamas in vilifying Israel and opposing alternative initiatives for aid distribution, prolonging the war and the suffering of Gazans.
Even as both the United Nations and Hamas claim to represent the interests of the Palestinian people, Gazans increasingly believe the alliance between the two is leading them to ruin.
“Hamas has unfortunately been able to infiltrate the mechanism of the United Nations for a long time,” said Al-Natour. “They take all the aid for their own people and leave nothing for the civilians. This is how they maintain their criminal government even as their popularity has collapsed.”
U.N. officials, echoed by international media and world leaders, have long blamed Israel for failing to distribute adequate aid in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of causing mass hunger and death among Gazan civilians by blocking U.N. aid trucks and advancing alternative solutions. Those condemnations have intensified in recent days.
The Gazan civilians and Israeli officers told a different story, one in which the United Nations and Hamas share overlapping operations and interests in Gaza.
“We’ve seen it with our own eyes and intelligence,” said an Israeli lieutenant colonel with broad knowledge of operations in Gaza. “The U.N. aid is being stolen by Hamas. It is making this war longer and making the situation worse for the people of Gaza.”
“I don’t know if the United Nations and Hamas are exactly working together, but they’re working for the same purpose—and actually for the same reasons. They both want control and money,” he said.
The lieutenant colonel, like most of the Israeli officers who spoke to the Free Beacon, asked to remain anonymous in order to disclose sensitive information. Most of the Gazans also requested anonymity for fear Hamas would kill them.
How Hamas Controls the U.N. System
Israel on Tuesday released footage that it said showed armed Hamas operatives looting an aid truck last week. An Israeli colonel involved in coordinating U.N.-led aid distribution in Gaza said that in the past several weeks, Hamas militants have hijacked several U.N. convoys in the same way shown in that footage.
In each case, the colonel said, the militants intercepted convoys soon after they left the buffer zone in northern Gaza en route to U.N. warehouses just a few miles deeper into the strip and took about 40 percent of the cargo. The militants redirected trucks carrying that aid to warehouses not run by the United Nations. They then let the rest of the convoy continue to the U.N. facilities.
This is Hamas’s general practice when it comes to hijackings. Eli Meiri, an Israeli reserve colonel who has overseen operations to secure aid distribution throughout Gaza, explained that Hamas “doesn’t want to be seen stealing all the U.N. aid from its own people, so it just hijacks half the aid.”
But, he said, “Hamas gets the other half of the aid in other ways.”
Like any good political crime syndicate, Hamas does much of its theft within the U.N. system, using well-placed operatives, loyalists, patronage, and the threat of violence. Nearly all U.N. employees in Gaza are locals, meaning they live under the sway of Hamas. At least 12 percent are members of the organization or affiliated terrorist groups, according to Israeli intelligence, and several participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which started the Gaza war.
Once the aid reaches U.N. warehouses, U.N. employees and Gazan government officials who belong to or work with Hamas take control, several Gazans said.
“Many trucks arrive at the warehouses, but all the aid that goes inside disappears,” said Saed, a Gazan expert on the U.N. aid system.
Earlier in the war, the United Nations and the Gazan government distributed some basic food items, like flour and hummus, to civilians at shelters, schools, mosques, and other sites, several Gazans said. But since the end of a ceasefire in March, U.N. aid distribution has almost entirely stopped. What aid Hamas does not hand out to its members and loyalists it gives to local merchants, who sell the items at ever-increasing prices and pay a heavy tax to Hamas, according to the Gazans.
“When you go to the market, you see the aid that was supposed to be delivered to the people for sale,” Saed said. “If you ask a trader where he got this food from, he will tell you the name of someone from Hamas or whose family works with Hamas.”
To buy pilfered aid, Gazans must pay steep fees to Hamas-employed cash agents. With Gaza’s economy and banking system largely destroyed by the war—making it nearly impossible for civilians to access whatever money they do have in accounts—the agents, most of them teenage boys, accept digital money transfers to Hamas-linked bank accounts in exchange for cash, charging a 45 percent fee.
Al-Natour said he pays $150 a day for food and another $150 to cash agents to provide a single modest meal for his family of 10 each day, rapidly drawing down savings he accumulated before the war.
“We haven’t eaten meat since the ceasefire,” he said. “Our bodies are growing thin. We are struggling to survive.”
The Worst of the Bunch
U.N. agencies and charities in Gaza have reached varying degrees of accommodation with Hamas, according to several-high ranking Israeli military officers. The most accommodating, they said, has been the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), with which Israel officially cut ties earlier this year over its ties to Hamas.
According to the lieutenant colonel, UNRWA, which has by far the biggest staff of any U.N. agency in Gaza, refused to cooperate with Israeli intelligence to purge its ranks of Hamas terrorists during the war. He said many of the agencies pay Hamas to allow them to operate in Gaza.
“We know there’s an element of infiltration in these international organizations. We’ve seen it very clearly,” said the lieutenant colonel. “There’s also the element of so-called protection money, where Hamas gets money or food from the organizations and what it gives them in return is protection, as in, ‘We won’t kill you,’ or, ‘Your operations will remain safe.'”
U.N. officials have repeatedly said there is no proof that Hamas systematically diverts aid.
Eri Kaneko, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said in a statement: “Our humanitarian operations are structured to ensure that when enabled and facilitated, aid reaches those who need it—and only them.”
“Since the Israeli authorities allowed the U.N. to resume bringing limited aid into Gaza on 19 May, most trucks carrying food have been understandably offloaded by people desperate to feed their families,” he said. “This is what happens when aid is not allowed to enter at the scale and speed necessary to meet the needs of civilians across Gaza.”
In an unsigned statement to the Free Beacon, UNRWA said allegations of aid diversion by Hamas “are used as a pretext to justify” an Israeli initiative in partnership with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an upstart American aid organization, to create an alternative to the U.N. system. The statement said the initiative, which seeks to feed civilians without allowing Hamas to control the aid, “falls far from abiding to the humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law.”
A Tinted Window
There is a stark contrast between the above accounts of Hamas’s grip on aid distribution and accounts provided in U.S. mainstream media outlets, many of which, including the New York Times, have contended there’s no evidence Hamas routinely steals aid. That’s because those outlets almost exclusively report from outside of Gaza—and Hamas works to control who on the ground interacts with journalists outside of the strip, according to multiple Gazans.
Freelance journalists and photographers within Gaza are either affiliated with or influenced by Hamas, they said. So are interviewees. And when outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post reference the Gaza Health Ministry and its death tolls, they are, of course, referencing Hamas.
A now-infamous New York Times piece headlined, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation” provides an example. It included a front-page photo of an emaciated child alongside the caption: “Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutaqaq, about 18 months, with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, who said he was born healthy but recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition.” Mohammed was not born healthy—he suffers from cerebral palsy, and a photo the Times did not publish appears to show his three-year-old brother in good health.
The Times addressed that information in a vague editors’ note—released via its communications account on X, which boasts less than 100,000 followers, rather than its main account, which boasts more than 50 million—that acknowledged Mohammed has “pre-existing health problems” but did not expand on them. None of the Times journalists credited with writing the piece reported from Gaza; only Saher Alghorra, who provided its images, worked on the ground in the strip.
Some mainstream U.S. coverage has painted a different picture, albeit with caveats. A Washington Post piece published last week quoted Gazans who recounted Hamas schemes to divert aid, extort local merchants, and kill those who refuse to cooperate. At the same time, it quoted a U.N. World Food Programme official who said “that systematic aid diversion by Hamas ‘has not been an issue for us so far in this conflict.'”
