Most people probably believe that Gaza is full of international aid organizations. After all, dozens of aid NGOs from around the world – such as Norwegian Refugee Council and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) – as well as UN agencies like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) operate in Gaza and are quite visible in the media.
The commonplace image is of aid agencies full of altruistic and courageous staff from France, Sweden, Ireland, Germany, or Canada, working on the ground as directors, teachers, doctors, translators, and other jobs to provide for the humanitarian needs of the local population.
But the reality is very different.
Technically, it is true that plenty of international NGOs and UN agencies are operating in Gaza, many subsisting on funding from Western governments. But, there is no UN agency or international NGO that works “independently” in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
Consider UNRWA, which is supposed to “deliver education, health and mental health care, relief and social services, microcredit and emergency assistance” in Gaza. The UN does not send large international missions to run these services. According to UNRWA’s 2021 Annual Report, only 0.1 percent of staff in Gaza (13 out of nearly 12,000) were not locals – 99.9 percent were Palestinians. In all the areas where UNRWA operates, international staff comprised a meager 0.7 percent of the agency.
The number of international staff at the Norwegian Refugee Council (7.4 percent of the 121 employees in the West Bank and Gaza) and Médecins Sans Frontières (14.4 percent of the 368 employees) are higher, but still reflect a predominantly local Palestinian composition.
Why does this matter?
Gaza has been controlled for more than 15 years by Hamas, which has infiltrated every institution there, erasing the possibility that any of these organizations are actually operating independently. As is well known, Hamas is a designated terrorist organization whose goal is to destroy Israel. There is not a single aspect of life in Gaza – including UNRWA and other institutions supposedly dedicated to humanitarian and educational agendas – that has not been exploited to its core in order to advance hateful ideologies and terror objectives.
This reality has been highlighted repeatedly since Oct. 7. Horrifically, a released Israeli hostage testified that he was held in Gaza by an UNRWA teacher for nearly 50 days. (UNRWA called this an “unsubstantiated claim,” apparently preferring to engage in reputation management rather than weeding out endemic terror among its ranks.) And there are many examples of local UNRWA employees who have posted antisemitic materials on social media and applauded brutal terror attacks against Israelis.
A doctor employed by Médecins Sans Frontières, who was reportedly killed in an Israeli airstrike, was an activist from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group and worked at a PFLP-affiliated medical center. This is from the same NGO that, in October, “emptied our stocks” in Gaza and handed over the material to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health.
The German outlet Tagesspiegel reported Friday that Palestinian employees of multiple German organizations operating in Gaza were refused entry into Germany after being evacuated, due to “security concerns.”
Additionally, Israeli forces have discovered weapons hidden beneath UNRWA equipment, while UNRWA- and UNICEF-marked medical and other supplies have been found in Hamas tunnels and among the gear discarded on Oct. 7 by terrorists in Israeli border towns. In a separate incident, UNRWA admitted that Ministry of Health personnel “removed fuel and medical equipment from the Agency’s compound in Gaza city.” Reflecting the influence of Hamas, UNRWA later denied the claim after public outcry.
These incidents are not new. Hamas’ and other terror groups’ exploitation of humanitarian institutions in Gaza has been documented for years. In 2016, Israel arrested the Gaza manager for World Vision, an international aid NGO, for diverting funds, materials, and services to Hamas. He was later convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
The problems at UNRWA have also been ongoing for years — from textbooks full of antisemitism and incitement, to teachers preaching hate and inciting terror, to abusing school grounds for terror tunnels and ammunition caches. In 2021, UNRWA’s Gaza Director was forced to flee the Strip and resign after he admitted in an interview that previous IDF strikes appeared to be “precise” and “sophisticated.”
UNRWA is so completely embedded in the Gaza terror infrastructure that there is even an official unionized body of UNRWA employees who are affiliated with the PFLP.
Even the few international staff sent to Gaza are manipulated and under constant threat to conform to the local terrorist agendas and stay silent while funds and facilities are exploited and diverted to serve Hamas’ ends.
To be sure, in theory, international organizations could benefit immensely from local employees’ expertise, knowledge, social and communal connections, and cultural familiarity in order to work more efficiently with communities that need services and aid. This expertise could help guide international staff, who are supposed to bring other strengths, including political neutrality and objectivity. In the Palestinian context, though, this strategy is entirely counterproductive.
Even with the best of intentions, international aid bodies cannot operate freely in areas controlled by thuggish, brutal terror groups. Until the international community of NGOs and UN agencies acknowledge and confront this grim reality, they will continue to contribute to the local morass instead of improving conditions in Gaza.
Daniel Segal is a Researcher at NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org), a Jerusalem-based research institute.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.