How Hamas Exploits Foreign Aid

By Avi Bell & Erielle Davidson

Friday, October 27, 2023

 

This past Sunday, trucks carrying medical supplies, food, and water entered through the Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza. President Biden has pledged $100 million for similar types of aid from the U.S., and the U.N. and various European governments have called for more.

 

At first blush, the arrival of this second aid convoy into a besieged and bombarded Gaza would appear to be cause for celebration. In fact it is quite the opposite. Hamas has a long history of diverting humanitarian aid to its own terrorist enterprise. Permitting aid to enter Gaza now — rather than facilitating the evacuation of civilians — only enables Hamas to use those resources for their own ends, thus prolonging its offensive against Israel and causing more casualties. Aid to Gaza means supplying Hamas. It is a gruesome mistake.

 

It would be hard to overstate the catastrophic degree to which Hamas has manipulated the sympathies of the international community to its own benefit, using Gazan civilians as cannon fodder and human shields in its genocidal war against the Jewish state, and then using the civilians’ resulting plight to extract more resources and more funding from various governments and international organizations to fuel its terrorist activities.

 

Hamas relies on a variety of methods when stealing aid, including good old-fashioned interception of delivery. For instance, in the current conflict, Hamas reportedly stole from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) 24,000 liters of fuel and medical supplies meant for refugees in Gaza City. For reference, UNRWA gives more than $1 billion each year to Palestinian causes. In a now-deleted thread of posts on X (formerly Twitter), UNRWA shared that people claiming to be from the Hamas-run “Gaza Ministry of Health” had loaded the materials onto trucks and absconded with them. UNRWA had not seen the stolen resources since. In the same dark vein, a backpack found abandoned in a truck used during the October 7 massacre was discovered to have contained first-aid kits issued by UNICEF for humanitarian use. That is, the terrorists had taken them for their own use in committing the savage rampage.

 

Hamas has been creative in its theft, too. Back in 2016, Hamas instituted a lottery for Qatari-donated homes for Palestinian civilians. After “awarding” the homes, Hamas then charged the people $40,000 for each apartment, claiming they needed the money for basic electricity and water hookups in the apartment buildings or to provide housing for less fortunate families. It was a lucrative scam, with Hamas pocketing $36 million in Qatari funds. As a 2010 report for Congress by Jim Zanotti noted, Hamas has similarly sold high-demand commodities like sugar, tea, and coffee, donated by charities and others, at a highly inflated price within Gaza as part of a larger, long-term money-laundering scheme.

 

Sometimes, Hamas members are capable of patient waiting, as in they will wait a bit for resources to be utilized before destroying or exploiting them. Earlier this month, the Telegraph reported that Hamas had dug up miles of EU-funded water pipes to use in building rockets that it could then fire at Israeli civilians. Unsurprisingly, Hamas has been using water pipes in this way for years, despite the fact that Gaza can’t supply enough water for its residents — a fact that humanitarian advocates seem to divorce from Hamas’s weapons arsenal.

 

When Hamas can’t transform the infrastructure components donated by bleeding-heart Europeans into weapons, it will instead simply hide its weapons in said infrastructure. Indeed, UNRWA repeatedly has had to evacuate U.N.-funded schools in Gaza upon learning that Hamas was deliberately storing its weapons nearby. Even now, Hamas leaders are hiding from the Israel Defense Forces in hospitals and refugee camps funded by the U.N. in the hopes of both exploiting Israel’s efforts to spare civilians and stoking international outrage when Hamas’s human shields become the collateral damage of legal strikes. Indeed, Hamas’s use of human shields — which serves as a centerpiece of its sociopathic war strategy — relies heavily on humanitarian facilities funded by international organizations.

 

And then there is the more complex tack of infiltrating aid organizations in Gaza by either assuming leadership roles within the organizations or finding someone already within the organization sympathetic to Hamas and willing to embezzle aid on behalf of the terrorists. In 2016, a Palestinian engineer named Waheed al Borsh who was working for the United Nations Development Program was arrested for diverting U.N. funds to build a jetty for Hamas’s naval force. Al Borsh’s indictment came on the heels of the discovery that a Gaza manager for the charity World Vision was funneling millions to Hamas in order to assist in the purchase of arms and in the construction of military bases. In 2022, Mohammad el Halabi was sentenced to twelve years in prison for that crime. The UNRWA is well known for employing Hamas terrorists. In 2004, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Peter Hansen, announced, “I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don’t see that as a crime.” A 2009 report by former UNRWA legal counsel James Lindsay suggested that Hamas’s penetration of the U.N. agency was so complete that it controlled the staff union.

 

And finally, of course, there are the aid organizations that are simply a front for Hamas. Gaza reportedly has 600 millionaires and some billionaires — and many of them became such by skimming humanitarian aid while amassing fortunes abroad. Hamas has registered a number of fictitious workers and soldiers who receive paychecks from donors abroad, which are then pocketed by Hamas leaders. To that end, funds kept in foreign accounts for Hamas have been embezzled by individual Hamas members within the organization.

 

Similar charitable fronts with direct ties to Hamas bring in millions each year and operate out of Europe and the Persian Gulf states, as noted in Zanotti’s report. In 2003, even before Hamas came to power in Gaza, the U.S. Department of the Treasury labeled five different charities, four of which were in Europe, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) because they “provide[d] support to Hamas.” The famous Saudi Arabia–based charity “Union of Good” was formally singled out in 2008 by the Treasury as an SDGT for funneling tens of millions of dollars to Hamas right after the start of the Second Intifada. According to the Treasury, the Union of Good “act[ed] as a broker for Hamas by facilitating financial transfers between a web of charitable organizations — including several organizations previously designated under E.O. 13224 for providing support to Hamas — and Hamas-controlled organizations in the West Bank and Gaza.” The Treasury noted that “some of the funds transferred by the Union of Good have compensated Hamas terrorists by providing payments to the families of suicide bombers.”

 

The ugly reality is that Hamas has found countless ways to exploit aid, making it impossible for any aid convoy to escape being diverted to their control. The idea that one can avoid diversion to Hamas by using the U.N. or existing organizations is simply laughable. So long as Hamas remains in power in Gaza, we can be certain that any humanitarian aid will be a boon for Hamas and its terrorists. Hamas members have professionalized the process of siphoning aid for themselves, in part because the international community seems to maintain a boundless idealism vis-à-vis Hamas that is wholly divorced from reality.

 

It was a grave mistake not to press Egypt to admit evacuated Gazan civilians instead of sending supplies into Gaza. Trapped Gazans will be subjected indefinitely to the grim uses of a now amply resourced Hamas. This predicament was avoidable, but much of the international community was not prepared to admit that its dream of a reformed Hamas was ludicrous from the get-go. But it’s not too late to change course.