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<\/a>Hamas Ran Gaza\u2019s Aid System \u2014 and NGOs Helped Keep the Secret<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\nHonestReporting Staff<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n For years, international NGOs and humanitarian agencies told the world they were working \u201cneutrally\u201d in Gaza. But according to newly declassified Hamas documents, that neutrality never existed.<\/span><\/p>\n In a conversation with HonestReporting, NGO Monitor vice president Olga Deutsch explains how Gaza was run not as a normal territory, but rather as a tightly controlled police state where Hamas oversaw almost every aspect of international aid. \u201cNo one was neutral or independent in Gaza,\u201d she says. \u201cHamas controlled everything.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The documents, seized by the IDF and later declassified, come from Hamas\u2019 own ministries. They show a system in which Hamas approved NGO staff, tracked individual employees, and controlled which projects and grantees received funding.<\/span><\/p>\n At the heart of this system is something Hamas called the \u201cguarantor.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Every international organization working in Gaza had a local liaison, many of whom held senior roles inside the NGOs, and at least some of them were identified as Hamas members or affiliates. That person had two jobs: report back to Hamas on what the organization was doing, and make sure foreign staff didn\u2019t see what Hamas didn\u2019t want them to see.<\/span><\/p>\n The guarantors watched staff behavior, tapped phones, monitored social media, and filed detailed reports. Those reports graded organizations as \u201ccooperative,\u201d \u201cmedium cooperative,\u201d or \u201cnon-cooperative\u201d \u2014 but even \u201cnon-cooperative\u201d groups still had to toe Hamas\u2019 line if they wanted to operate at all.<\/span><\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just about skimming food or supplies. Hamas treated NGOs as a strategic asset: a way to control the population, gather intelligence, and cover military activity. Aid groups working on agriculture near the Israeli border were of particular interest, because those areas overlapped with Hamas infiltration routes and surveillance of the fence.<\/span><\/p>\n One internal report describes a Norwegian Refugee Council delegation visiting an elderly couple whose apartment floor was shaking from below. The couple suspected Hamas was digging a tunnel. The delegation, escorted by Hamas officials, ignored the complaint and moved on. No warning was issued, no public statement was given when the delegation later returned home. Just silence.<\/span><\/p>\n Deutsch acknowledges that working under a terror regime poses real risks for aid workers. But she rejects the idea that this explains everything, or excuses anything.<\/span><\/p>\n In other conflict zones, she notes, the same organizations have no problem openly labeling groups like Boko Haram or Al-Qaeda as terrorist organizations, even while negotiating access on the ground. In Gaza, by contrast, Hamas is often softened into \u201cmilitants\u201d or \u201cfighters,\u201d while Israel is frequently accused of crimes that are never substantiated.<\/span><\/p>\n Gaza is also structurally unique. In many war zones, international staff live in fortified compounds separate from the local population. In Gaza, NGOs live and work inside the civilian areas, making it easier for Hamas to monitor their every move \u2014 and harder for them to claim they don\u2019t know what was going on.<\/span><\/p>\n But whatever the operational challenges, Deutsch says the line was clearly crossed when organizations not only adapted to Hamas rule but then turned around and accused Israel of crimes while hiding what they knew about Hamas\u2019 tactics.<\/span><\/p>\n The documents also confirm what Israel has long said about Hamas\u2019 use of hospitals and medical centers.<\/span><\/p>\n According to Deutsch, Hamas records show that every hospital and medical center in Gaza had a Hamas wing, with at least one tunnel linked to many of these sites. All the international organizations working there knew that Hamas used protected civilian infrastructure for meetings, medical treatment of operatives, and military activity.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet when the IDF struck near these sites after October 7, many of the same humanitarian groups were among the first to accuse Israel of targeting civilians or attacking hospitals, without mentioning Hamas\u2019 presence at all.<\/span><\/p>\n Deutsch says part of the problem is what NGO Monitor calls the \u201chalo effect.\u201d NGOs are treated by journalists, politicians, and the public as uniquely trustworthy \u2014 as if their reports are objective, apolitical snapshots of reality.<\/span><\/p>\n In practice, many of these organizations arrive in Gaza with political assumptions already formed by the media and activist networks back home. They then produce reports that reinforce those assumptions, which are eagerly picked up by international outlets and quoted as fact.<\/span><\/p>\n Journalists have told Deutsch they \u201chave to stay neutral,\u201d which, in the Israel-Hamas context, means refusing to label Hamas a terrorist organization even when their own governments have done so. At the same time, these outlets unquestioningly quote casualty figures and narratives that originate with Hamas-controlled institutions.<\/span><\/p>\n The result is a vicious cycle: NGOs produce politicized reports, the media amplifies them, and then new NGO staff and donors absorb those narratives as the starting point for their own \u201chumanitarian\u201d work.<\/span><\/p>\n The entanglement of NGOs, politics, and anti-Israel campaigning is not new. NGO Monitor itself was founded after the 2001 UN Durban Conference in South Africa, where international NGOs embraced the edict that \u201cZionism is racism\u201d and committed themselves to using human rights language as a strategic weapon against Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n What has changed, Deutsch argues, is the intensity. In the last decade, and especially since October 7, accusations that once lived on the fringes \u2014 genocide, apartheid, deliberate starvation \u2014 have moved into the mainstream language of humanitarian organizations.<\/span><\/p>\n At the same time, record levels of antisemitic incidents in North America and Europe have not been treated by major human rights giants as a central human rights crisis, even as those same organizations repeatedly single out Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n The Hamas documents at the center of NGO Monitor\u2019s report were seized by the IDF in Gaza and later declassified. Most come from Hamas\u2019 Ministry of Internal Security \u2014 the same body responsible for policing dissent, internal surveillance, and managing foreign organizations. A smaller number are linked to the ministries of education and agriculture, where project activity overlapped.<\/span><\/p>\n NGO Monitor translated and analyzed thousands of pages, connecting Hamas\u2019 internal tracking of NGOs with publicly available information on the same organizations and their funding.<\/span><\/p>\n Deutsch says the timing of the report is critical. As the international community debates how to rebuild Gaza, estimates for reconstruction have reached around $70 billion. If that money is channeled into the same systems that existed before October 7, she warns, the world will simply rebuild the infrastructure that allowed Hamas to thrive.<\/span><\/p>\n For individual donors who want to help civilians but fear enabling Hamas or politicized NGOs, Deutsch\u2019s advice is simple: do basic due diligence.<\/span><\/p>\n Check an organization\u2019s public statements and social media. See what it says about Israel, Gaza, and the war. Ask whether it operates in Gaza or the West Bank, and what projects it funds there. If the group regularly accuses Israel of genocide, apartheid, or deliberate starvation, that should trigger serious questions.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cMoney should be conditional,\u201d she says. \u201cThe same logic you use to choose a doctor or a school should apply to the charities you support. Don\u2019t send money blindly.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Deutsch has been presenting this report in parliaments and policy forums across Europe. For her, the stakes go far beyond the Israeli\u2013Palestinian arena.<\/span><\/p>\n The way NGOs, governments, and media handle Gaza\u2019s reconstruction will signal whether the international system is willing to confront how human rights and humanitarian language have been weaponized, or whether it will simply pour money back into an unreformed structure controlled by a terror group.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIf we don\u2019t learn from what these documents show,\u201d she says, \u201cwe\u2019re not just failing Israelis or Palestinians. We\u2019re undermining the credibility of humanitarian work and the democratic societies that depend on it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n To read the full report and learn more about the organization\u2019s critical work, visit\u00a0ngo-monitor.org<\/a><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em> Hamas Ran Gaza\u2019s Aid System \u2014 and NGOs Helped Keep the Secret HonestReporting Staff Palestinians buy vegetables at a market in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, November 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS\/Mahmoud Issa For years, international NGOs and humanitarian agencies told the world they were working \u201cneutrally\u201d in Gaza. But according to newly declassified Hamas documents, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[33,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126770"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=126770"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126793,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126770\/revisions\/126793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=126770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=126770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=126770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n![](\"https:\/\/www.algemeiner.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/v2025-11-14T080111Z_1_LYNXMPELAD0AW_RTROPTP_4_ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS-HAMAS-GOVERNMENT.jpeg\")
Palestinians buy vegetables at a market in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, November 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS\/Mahmoud Issa<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nThe \u201cGuarantors\u201d Inside Humanitarian Groups<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Why Gaza Is Different \u2014 and Why That\u2019s Not an Excuse<\/strong><\/h4>\n
From \u201cNeutral NGOs\u201d to Narrative Warfare<\/strong><\/h4>\n
From Durban to October 7: This Didn\u2019t Start Yesterday<\/strong><\/h4>\n
What the Documents Show \u2014 And Why It Matters Now<\/strong><\/h4>\n
A Moment of Choice<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\nHonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watch<\/i>dog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias \u2014 where a version of this article\u00a0first appeared.<\/a><\/i><\/span><\/h4>\n
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