Hamas has managed much of its theft of aid not by attacking the U.N. system but instead by exploiting and even protecting it. By Andrew Tobin, The Washington Free BeaconEvery 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 terrorists have hijacked the cargo, the Gazans said, and what aid has arrived at the warehouses has disappeared into a patronage system controlled by Hamas.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, U.N. officials have effectively aligned with Hamas, prolonging the 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 even as their popularity has collapsed.”Al-Nator said Hamas has arrested him more than 20 times for organizing the We Want To Live protests and repeatedly tortured him.U.N. officials, echoed by international media and world leaders, have long accused Israel of causing mass hunger and death in Gaza, saying Israeli authorities have prevented aid trucks from moving freely into and around the strip.Those condemnations have continued in recents days, even as the number of U.N. trucks entering Gaza’s population centers has surged.The Gazans and Israeli officers told a different story, one in which the United Nations and Hamas share overlapping operations and interests in Gaza, belying U.N. claims to be neutral.“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. They both want control and money,” he said.“We know there’s an element of infiltration in these international organizations. We’ve seen it very clearly. 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.'”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 military officers to discuss politically sensitive information, and the Gazans for fear that Hamas would kill them.How Hamas Controls the United Nations in GazaThe Israeli military on Tuesday released footage that military officers said showed armed Hamas operatives looting an aid truck last week.A high-ranking Israeli military officer involved in coordinating U.N.-led aid distribution in Gaza said Hamas terrorists in the past several weeks have hijacked several U.N. convoys.In each case, according to the officer, the terrorists intercepted convoys just south of the Israeli military-controlled buffer zone in northern Gaza and stole about 40 percent of the cargo.The terrorists 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 instead by 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.Among the U.N. employees identified by Israel as Hamas terrorists were a number of drivers of aid trucks.Many have coordinated their shipments with Hamas in return for protection and a cut of the cargo, according to Saed, a Gazan researcher who has investigated the U.N. aid system.“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.”Once the aid 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 several Gazans and Israeli military officers.“Many trucks arrive at the warehouses, but all the aid that goes inside disappears,” Saed said.“Hamas has control of the warehouses because these are its people inside,” said Meiri.After Israel lifted a 10-week blockade of Gaza in May, 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.Earlier in the war, the United Nations and Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Social Development distributed some basic food aid to civilians at shelters, schools, mosques, and other sites, according to several Gazans.But since the latest ceasefire collapsed in March, aid distribution has all but ended, they said, confirming U.N. assessments, and any goods that Hamas has not allocated to its members and loyalists it has sold via local merchants at ever-increasing prices.“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.”Mohammad, a 35-year-old graphic designer who lived in locations across Gaza during the war before relocating to Cairo in April, “If you’re not Hamas, you can’t get anything. Hamas is controlling everything in Gaza. No one can move in Gaza without the permission of Hamas.”Gazans reported paying steep fees to Hamas-employed cash agents to buy pilfered aid.With Gaza’s economy and banking system largely destroyed by the war—making it nearly impossible for civilians to withdraw cash—the agents, most of them teenage boys, have accepted digital transfers to Hamas-linked bank accounts in exchange for bills, charging a 45 percent fee, several Gazans said.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.”How Hamas Controls the Media in GazaU.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, adding, “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 a statement, U.N. Relief and Works Agency called allegations that Hamas diverts aid a “pretext to justify the aid distribution system” launched in southern Gaza three months ago by Israel in partnership with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an upstart American aid organization, “which falls far from abiding to the humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law.”International news outlets, including the New York Times, have played up the notion that Hamas’s routine theft of aid is in doubt.That has only been possible because, with foreign journalists largely barred from entering Gaza, Hamas has aggressively regulated the flow of information out of the strip.“You cannot go on social media and say, ‘Fuck Hamas,’ or, ‘Hamas is stealing aid,'” said Mohammad. “If someone says something that Hamas does not approve of, he may lose his life.”The Gazans said many of the local reporters and even translators for international news outlets are Hamas members, as the Israeli military has partially documented.“People say that journalists say the facts, but not in Gaza,” Mohammad said.In many cases, Hamas’s manipulation of international media has started with the United Nations. Saed pointed for example to frequent headlines about U.N. warning of famine in Gaza.“The U.N. is exaggerating based on data from Gazan officials who follow Hamas’s propaganda,” he said. “However, there is a food shortage in Gaza for the reason we discussed earlier: Hamas.”The post How the ‘neutral’ UN is helping Hamas oppress Gazans and fool the world appeared first on World Israel News.