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 across the Gaza Strip, where Israel has implemented daily pauses in military operations.
Many of the trucks, though traveling under enhanced Israeli protections introduced on Sunday, have not reached U.N. warehouses, according to Gazans on the ground. Once the trucks have arrived in the population centers, armed Hamas militants have hijacked the cargo, the Gazans said, and what aid has arrived at the warehouses has disappeared into a patronage system controlled by the Palestinian terrorist group.
Most Gazans have been forced to buy the aid at exorbitant prices from merchants handpicked and heavily taxed by Hamas.
"Fifty trucks arrived yesterday at warehouses in Gaza City, and Hamas stole all of the aid," Moumen al-Natour, a 30-year-old lawyer in the northern Gaza capital, said 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 hungry mob trying to loot the trucks and was trampled to death along with a number of other civilians.
Gazans and Israeli military officers say this has been the reality in Gaza since fighting resumed in March. Hamas exerts near-total control over U.N.-led aid operations and seizes nearly all the incoming goods to feed and finance its terrorist regime, according to the people. Rather than confront the problem, the United Nations has effectively aligned with Hamas, prolonging the Gaza war and the suffering of Gazans, the people say.
"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 while their popularity is collapsing."
"We’ve seen it with our own eyes and intelligence," said a high-ranking Israeli officer involved in strategic planning. "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," he added. "They both want control and money."
The United Nations last year raised nearly $3 billion dollars for its humanitarian operations in "the Palestinian territories," about 90 percent of which went to Gaza.
Most of the dozens of people who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon in the course of this reporting asked to remain anonymous—the Israeli officers to discuss politically sensitive information, and the Gazans for fear Hamas would kill them.
"No Excuses Left"
U.N. officials have insisted 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."
Kaneko acknowledged that since Israel lifted the blockade, most aid trucks have been looted before reaching U.N. warehouses. But he attributed the looting to "people desperate to feed their families, saying, "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."
U.N. officials, even as they have professed neutrality, have been largely silent on Hamas's role in the war while fiercely condemning Israel's. They have often alleged that Israel is killing and starving Gazan civilians, including by preventing U.N. aid trucks from freely entering and moving around Gaza. Tom Fletcher, the top U.N. humanitarian official, in a statement on Thursday tentatively welcomed Israel's increased cooperation before adding that additional "vast amounts of aid are needed to stave off famine and a catastrophic health crisis."
Israeli officials have countered by questioning the United Nations' commitment to feeding Gazans, pointing to hundreds of truckloads of food awaiting collection inside Gaza's borders. Since soon after Israel lifted a 10-week blockade of Gaza in May, there has been no official limit on the amount of food that can enter Gaza. In addition to the safe routes and humanitarian pauses, Israel this week opened new border crossings into Gaza and coordinated daily airdrops of food into the strip.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said, "The U.N. has no excuses left."
"What has interdicted the supply of humanitarian aid is one force: Hamas," he said. "Stop lying. Stop finding excuses. Do what you have to do."
Two Ways To Steal
The Israeli military on Tuesday released footage that military officers said showed armed Hamas operatives looting an aid truck last week. A high-ranking Israeli officer involved in coordinating U.N.-led aid distribution in Gaza said Hamas militants in the past several weeks have hijacked several U.N. convoys.
In each case, according to the officer, the militants intercepted a convoy just south of the Israeli military-controlled buffer zone in northern Gaza and stole about 40 percent of the cargo. The militants redirected trucks carrying that amount of aid to warehouses run by affiliates and let the rest of the convoy continue to U.N warehouses, he said. This has been standard practice for Hamas when it comes to hijackings.
Eli Meiri, an Israeli reserve colonel whose armored battalion has specialized in securing aid distribution during the war, estimated that Hamas and affiliated gangs have lately hijacked about half of arriving aid trucks en route to U.N. warehouses. Gazans gave similar or higher estimates.
"Hamas doesn’t want to be seen stealing all the U.N. aid from its own people, so it just hijacks half the aid," Meiri explained. "But it gets the other half of the aid in other ways."
Hamas has managed much of its theft of aid not by attacking the U.N. system but by instead exploiting and even protecting it. Nearly all U.N. employees in Gaza are locals who live under Hamas’s sway. According to Israeli intelligence, at least 12 percent of the employees are members of Hamas or other terrorist groups.
Mohammad, a 35-year-old graphic designer who lived in several locations throughout Gaza during the war before relocating to Cairo in April, said Gazans join Hamas because "they need aid, they need employment."
"If you’re not Hamas, you can’t get anything," he said.
According to Saed, a Gazan researcher who has investigated the U.N. aid system, even many U.N truckers drivers who are not Hamas members coordinate their shipments with the group in return for protection and a cut of the cargo.
"The drivers of these trucks alert Hamas before they enter with the aid," Saed said. "They hand over a portion to Hamas and also take some for themselves and their people."
"We know there’s an element of infiltration in these international organizations. We’ve seen it very clearly," said the high-ranking officer involved in strategic planning. "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.'"
In the past few months, the military began sending aid trucks on routes through northern Gaza where civilians might be more likely to succeed in hijackings, three high-ranking Israeli military officers said. The military did not deny the practice and declined to comment on whether it has continued this week.
The Inside Game
Once the trucks have reached U.N. warehouses, U.N. employees and Gazan government officials who belong to or work with Hamas have taken control of the aid, according to Gazans and Israeli military officers.
"Many trucks arrive in Gaza, I see them every day passing by the house where I live," Saed said. "But none of the aid reaches the people."
The Israeli military on Friday released photographs that it said were taken in recent months and showed Hamas terrorists "feasting underground" in their tunnel network. Visible in the background of one of the photos were U.N. World Food Program aid boxes.
"Hunger? Only on screens and for propaganda purposes," the military's chief Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee wrote in an X post sharing the photos. "The poor in Gaza? Left to pick up the crumbs."
Before the end of the latest ceasefire in March, the United Nations and Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Social Development distributed some picked-over food aid to civilians at shelters, schools, mosques, and other sites, Gazans said. But in the past five months, aid distribution has all but ended, as the United Nations has confirmed. Any aid that Hamas has not allotted to its members and loyalists it has sold via local merchants at ever-increasing prices, 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, describing the selection as flour, pasta, hummus, fruits, vegetables, nuts, oil, salt, sugar, chocolate, and some hygiene products. "If you ask a trader where he got these items from, he will tell you the name of someone from Hamas or whose family works with Hamas."
Mohammad, a 35-year-old graphic designer who lived in several locations throughout Gaza during the war before relocating to Cairo in April, said, "If you’re not Hamas, you can’t get anything."
Al-Natour said he has paid about $150 a day for food and roughly $135 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."
According to Saed, "There is a food shortage in Gaza," but "the U.N. is exaggerating based on data from Gazan officials who follow Hamas's propaganda."
Al-Natour, who said Hamas has arrested him more than 20 times and repeatedly tortured him for organizing protests calling for an end to its rule, said the United Nations system must be replaced for Gaza to have any chance at a better future.
"This system is costing us everything," he said. "We demand a different system, a fair system that serves the people, not Hamas."
