“We built the tunnels to protect ourselves from airplanes … the refugees, the UN is responsible for protecting them.” The now infamous statement by Musa Abu Marzuk of Hamas, in a television interview of October 2023, illustrates a severe problem that has developed in the interplay between humanitarian aid and militant groups in the Middle East. In even the best cases, the aid allows these groups to evade responsibility for civil affairs while pursuing their agenda of mayhem—but in fact, the terrorist groups often go much farther than this, and actually rely on aid streams to fund and equip the gunmen that commit their atrocities. Humanitarian aid has become a lifeline for these groups, enabling their deadly attacks.
Over the fifteen years during which it has controlled the Gaza Strip, Hamas has honed exploitation of aid into a science. The group does not generally expropriate aid items directly, but rather uses its control of the government apparatus in Gaza to ensure that donor funds are siphoned off, either directly to Hamas or to entities it controls. For example, the strip’s private security companies are all licensed by the Hamas Ministry of Interior, and their staff must be approved and trained by the ministry. UN and other aid group facilities therefore end up paying Hamas to guard them. Hamas also imposes high taxes on goods in the strip, including food staples, meaning that a substantial portion of the salaries paid to local aid agency employees winds up in Hamas’s coffers. Given the enormous role played by UN and other international groups in Gaza, taxes paid by their employees likely account for a substantial fraction of Hamas’s revenues.
Notably, despite its tight control of many aspects of life in the Gaza Strip, Hamas has resisted imposing any formal licensing or inspection regime on building contractors. This arrangement facilitates a multiplicity of unregulated contractors, who are well placed to help divert building supplies for the construction of tunnels or other military projects, without leaving much in the way of a paper trail.
Read the rest of the story at Quillette, here.
