The chief oversight body responsible for tracking American foreign assistance is compiling evidence that Hamas systematically steals U.N. aid in Gaza, including by placing terrorist operatives into U.N. facilities, and conducting active investigations into the issue, undercutting a recently leaked U.S. Agency for International Development “report” that found no evidence of such theft.
The investigations center on occasions in which Hamas “commandeered U.N. aid trucks,” embedded terrorist operatives in “U.N. agencies or at U.N. facilities,” and ensured humanitarian goods were “directly delivered to Hamas officials,” senior U.S. officials and congressional staffers briefed on the issue told the Washington Free Beacon. The USAID inspector general’s office has obtained evidence of those practices and is investigating “credible allegations of Hamas interference, diversion, and theft of humanitarian aid in Gaza,” according to a memo on the inspector general’s “Gaza-related oversight work” that was transmitted to Congress and obtained by the Free Beacon.
Though the Trump administration dissolved USAID itself earlier this year, USAID’s inspector general’s office is an independent entity that Congress established in 1980 to provide oversight of U.S. foreign aid programs. That office remains in place as its investigators probe “diversion, fraud, product substitution, smuggling, and other misconduct compromising lifesaving humanitarian assistance intended for civilians in Gaza,” the memo states.
Those probes—and the evidence of widespread Hamas aid theft informing them—stand in stark contrast to an internal USAID “report” that was leaked to Reuters in late July. It found “no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies,” the outlet reported.
That report was not conducted by USAID’s inspector general but rather by career USAID staffers, who “completed” it in late June, days before the Trump administration formally shut down the agency. The staffers based their report on official information from U.N. agencies, senior U.S. officials familiar with it told the Free Beacon. The inspector general probes, by contrast, are based on information from a variety of sources that include “aid workers and other whistleblowers on the ground who may not feel comfortable reporting through their employers’ reporting chain due to fear of retaliation,” according to a source familiar with the office’s operations.
One former investigator in the inspector general’s office said he “directly observed” how Hamas manipulates aid channels in Gaza, including “multiple cases where aid was clearly not reaching its intended targets, and in many cases, being diverted to hostile actors.”
The inspector general has opened at least four active audits into USAID’s mismanagement in Gaza.
One probe centers on USAID’s inability to “vet, screen, and prevent terrorist organizations or individuals engaged in terrorist activity from working for USAID-funded implementing partners or receiving other forms of USAID-funded assistance,” according to the July 30 internal memo. A second is probing “whether USAID had processes in place for assessing, mitigating, and monitoring selected fraud risks in cash assistance awards to NGOs in the West Bank and Gaza.”
The inspector general’s office has additionally been working to prevent “UNRWA staff associated with Hamas from circulating to other U.S. government-funded aid organizations.” It found evidence “connecting three current or formal UNRWA employees to the October 7 terror attacks and affiliating 14 other current or former UNRWA employees with Hamas.” It was unable, however, to confirm that UNRWA fired those employees. Though the U.N. provided a report on the matter to the inspector general’s office, the report “redacted the names of subjects, rendering the report unusable,” the office said in an April investigative summary.
The inspector general is also reviewing additional evidence that Hamas launched mortars at aid delivery sites, fired grenades at aid workers, and opened gunfire on crowds of Gazan civilians seeking food, according to those briefed on the matter.
A spokesman for the inspector general’s office confirmed the investigations and told the Free Beacon it will “continue to partner with the Department of Justice to hold accountable organizations and individuals that divert—or fail to report the diversion of—taxpayer-funded humanitarian aid intended for those in need.” A senior State Department official, meanwhile, said the “available intelligence” uncovered through those probes confirms that a “significant portion” of U.N. aid in Gaza is “diverted, looted, stolen, or ‘self-distributed'” by Hamas.
“There is endless video evidence of Hamas looting, not to mention members of the aid-industrial complex who have admitted that looting exists by reporting it as ‘self-distribution,’ in a poor attempt at an aid corruption coverup,” the official said. “There has been widespread violence and chaos at U.N. aid sites and border crossings—which has received shockingly little mainstream media coverage because it does not fit the international aid complex narrative.”
A senior GOP congressional staffer responsible for tracking foreign assistance confirmed that offices on Capitol Hill have been briefed on the inspector general’s latest findings and are reviewing the initial evidence.
The State Department’s assessment is aligned with sources on the ground in Gaza who spoke to the Free Beacon in July, detailing first-hand accounts of Hamas hijacking U.N. aid trucks, stealing supplies, and reselling them on the black market. At least 12 percent of all U.N. employees in Gaza are members of Hamas or other terrorist organizations, according to Israeli intelligence. U.N. truck drivers often coordinate their shipments with Hamas in exchange for a cut of the aid, one Gazan researcher who has investigated the U.N. aid system for an international nonprofit group told the Free Beacon.
“The drivers of these trucks alert Hamas before they enter with aid,” said the researcher, Saed. “They hand over a portion to Hamas and also take some for themselves and their people.”
Hamas’s grip on aid distribution has prompted many Gazans to join or work with the terror outfit because “they need aid, they need employment,” added 35-year-old graphic designer Mohammad, who lived in several locations throughout Gaza during the war before relocating to Cairo.
“Hamas controls everything in Gaza,” he told the Free Beacon. “If you’re not Hamas, you can’t get anything.”
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