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 activity.
Many of the trucks, though traveling under increased protections and reduced restrictions introduced by Israel 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 is the everyday reality in Gaza. 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, who has led the We Want To Live protests in Gaza calling for an end Hamas’s 18-year rule and the 22-month war. "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 military 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 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.
"They’re Dragging Their Feet"
U.N. officials have said there is no proof that Hamas systematically diverts aid.
Eri Kaneko, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, acknowledged in a email that since Israel lifted a 10-week blockade of Gaza in May, most aid trucks have been looted before reaching U.N. warehouses. But she 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 have accused Israel of killing and starving Gazan civilians, including by preventing U.N. aid trucks from freely entering and moving around Gaza. Tom Fletcher, the head of UNRWA, in a statement on Thursday tentatively welcomed Israel's increased cooperation with the United Nations in recent days as "progress" but emphasized that "vast amounts of aid are needed to stave off famine and a catastrophic health crisis." He called for a "permanent ceasefire," echoing other U.N. officials and Hamas.
Israel has vowed not to end the war before defeating Hamas and bringing home the 50 living and dead hostages still held by the group. According to the military, there is no famine in Gaza and no limit on the amount of food that can enter the strip. The military has blamed food shortages in Gaza on Hamas theft and a lack of "will" by the United Nations, pointing to a longstanding backlog of hundreds of truckloads of aid awaiting distribution inside Gaza’s borders.
Two high-ranking officers said the United Nations has been slow-walking aid delivery in an attempt to manufacture a humanitarian crisis and put pressure on Israel to end the war.
"They’re dragging their feet big time," said the officer involved in strategic planning. "The people whose job it is to make the humanitarian situation better are not making the humanitarian situation better. They’re creating starvation in order to pressure Israel to stop the war."
Kaneko responded that "blaming the U.N. is a distraction from the very real problems that need fixing now."
"The reason aid isn’t getting through is because the U.N. is being denied the conditions we need to deliver it safely and effectively. Throughout this war, we’ve said over and over that without security guarantees, freedom of movement and sustained access, we can’t operate at scale necessary to meet the massive humanitarian needs," she said.
"To move aid from the Israeli crossings into Gaza, we need Israel to open the gates, allow safe passage, and stop the bombardment. Our drivers are navigating airstrikes, damaged roads, and criminal gangs. They need permits and security clearances, many of which are being delayed or denied."
"Hamas Doesn’t Want To Be Seen Stealing"
The Israeli military on Tuesday released what it said was footage of "Hamas terrorists looting an aid truck" days earlier. Israel has seen armed Hamas militants hijack several convoys of U.N. aid trucks in the past several weeks, according to a high-ranking Israeli military officer involved in coordinating U.N.-led aid distribution in Gaza.
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.
Saed, a Gazan researcher who has investigated the U.N. aid system for an international nonprofit group, said U.N. trucks drivers have often coordinated their shipments with Hamas in exchange for a cut of the aid. He asked that the group he works for not be named to protect his identity.
"The drivers of these trucks alert Hamas before they enter with the aid," he said. "They hand over a portion to Hamas and also take some for themselves and their people."
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 stolen about half of aid en route to U.N. warehouses while at the same time securing trucks against increasingly common hijackings by rival gangs and civilians.
"Hamas doesn’t want to be seen stealing all the U.N. aid from its own people, so it just takes half the aid," Meiri explained. "But it gets the other half of the aid in other ways."
Hamas has accomplished much of its theft of aid from inside the U.N. system. Nearly all U.N. employees in Gaza are locals, and, according to Israeli intelligence, at least 12 percent 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 many Gazans have joined or worked with Hamas during the war because "they need aid, they need employment."
"Hamas controls everything in Gaza," he said. "If you’re not Hamas, you can’t get anything."
The high-ranking Israeli military officer involved in strategic planning said Hamas has achieved "an element of infiltration" of the U.N. agencies and affiliated international nonprofit organizations in Gaza. He said the United Nations has also regularly paid Hamas "protection money" to secure its trucks, warehouses, and employees.
"We’ve seen it very clearly," the officer said. "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 recent months, the Israeli military began sending aid trucks on routes through northern Gaza where Hamas is thought to have less control in an effort to promote non-Hamas hijackings, according to the three high-ranking officers. The military did not deny the practice and declined to comment on whether it has continued this week.
"This System Is Costing Us Everything"
Once aid trucks have reached U.N. warehouses, U.N. employees and Gazan government officials who belong to or work with Hamas have overseen distribution of the cargo to members and loyalists.
"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 are 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 sites have shuttered, as the United Nations has confirmed. Any aid that Hamas has not allotted to its people it has sold via local merchants at ever-increasing prices, according to the Gazans.
"When you go to the market, you see the aid for sale," Saed said, describing the selection as flour, pasta, nuts, fruit, vegetables, oil, spices, and chocolate, often still in U.N.-branded packaging. "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."
Al-Natour said he has paid roughly $150 a day for food and $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."
"There is a food shortage in Gaza," Saed said, but U.N. warnings about famine are "exaggerations based on data from Gazan officials who follow Hamas's propaganda."
The Gazans agreed that most people in Gaza have turned against Hamas during the war. Al-Natour, who said Hamas has arrested him more than 20 times and repeatedly tortured him because of his activism, argued that the U.N. aid system must be replaced for Gazans to have a 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."
