Hamas’s Demand That UN Handle All Humanitarian Aid to Gaza a Stumbling Block as Cease-Fire Talks Heat Up

As negotiations over a Gaza cease-fire deal heat up, United Nations-based agencies are dismissing Israeli allegations that Hamas confiscates humanitarian aid deliveries for its own use. Prime Minister Netanyahu and American officials are expressing optimism that a deal can soon be struck for a 60-day cease-fire that will include more aid to Gaza. While UN and European officials hope that such a deal would help ease suffering among the Strip’s population, Israelis worry that as in the past, aid confiscation will help Hamas to resurge militarily. “It’s kind of a newly introduced issue, and I have so far not seen the evidence that this has happened,” the World Food Program deputy director, Carl Skau, who just returned from Gaza, told the Sun Friday. “Never in our engagement with the Israeli authorities has diversion or interference by Hamas been an issue.”Yet, one reported stumbling block to the cease-fire negotiations is Hamas’s demand that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation stop its operations, and that the UN will have full control of humanitarian aid. In May, the GHF, an Israeli- and American-backed charity, started distributing food in the southern part of the Strip. The premise of the operation is to dole out food directly to Gazans, and ensure that it does not end up in Hamas’s hands. “We met last week with WFP’s country director and his team to propose a plan to help them feed the north of Gaza,” the organization wrote in a statement Friday. “Right now, nearly all their trucks are being looted and their aid is not reaching the people who need it.”Asked if the more than 70 million meals that the GHF has distributed in Gaza helps ease shortages in the Strip, Mr. Skau said, “I don’t know enough to be able to speak to that.”Israel and the European Union signed a deal Thursday to increase aid to Gaza. It means “more crossings open, aid and food trucks entering Gaza, repair of vital infrastructure, and protection of aid workers,” the EU foreign policy chief, Katja Kallas, wrote on X. “We were not a party to the discussions between the EU and Israel,” the UN spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told the Sun Friday. “We welcome the announcement and the content of it.” He acknowledged that “certain member states, certain groups of member states such as the EU, have some influence, more than we do.”Last year the Israel Defense Force declassified intercepted Hamas phone conversations and documents that showed “systematic takeover of humanitarian aid that enters the Strip and turning it to a source of monitory profit,” a Hebrew-language website, Ynet, reported. “Hamas sees itself as the responsible party for aid rationing in Gaza,” the IDF spokesman’s office told Ynet. “It seizes trucks in order to confiscate aid that was intended for civilians. Documents show that Hamas allotted between 15 and more than 25 percent of the looted goods for its own use, and that it could raise that percentage according to its needs.”Mr. Skau of the WFP acknowledges two incidents in which armed men confiscated trucks a year ago. “We reported that to partners, to member states and to the Israelis, and we took action, and we mitigated risks for that to happen again,” he said. In his most recent trip, he added, he noticed on a street corner “someone putting up a small table and selling a few kilos of potatoes. And I don’t know where that came from.” Mr. Skau claims the issue of aid theft had not been raised earlier, but he says the Israelis did bring it up recently. The WFP has ways to “mitigate” the problem, he said: “We work in many complex environments. We have many years of experience, and so we have ways of trying to avoid the risk for that to happen.” Since its founding the GHF, which so far has operated only in areas Israel mostly controls, has delivered more than 70 million meals at sites around Rafah and Khan Yunis in the southern strip. It has offered to cooperate with WFP in the northern strip as well, but so far the food agency has declined to cooperate. “I wrote your staff to be in touch but received no reply,” the GHF director, Reverend Jonnie Moore, said in an X post directed at the WFP chief, Cindy McCain. “Why won’t you let your team work with us? GHF is far from perfect but we are getting millions of meals of food into Gaza daily (with no mass diversion of our trucks). We welcome your advice & collaboration.”The UN claims that GHF is violating its principles of aid delivery: “humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence.” Yet, Hamas’s insistence that only the UN will be charged with aid deliveries indicates that Turtle Bay itself could have been violating those principles.

Hamas’s Demand That UN Handle All Humanitarian Aid to Gaza a Stumbling Block as Cease-Fire Talks Heat Up

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