Dismantle the UN Aid State

The UN is the poster child of a bloated, self-perpetuating aid system—one that empowers terrorists, obstructs relief, and fights harder to preserve its monopoly than to feed the hungry

What I witnessed in Gaza during my brief embed with the Israel Defense Forces last weekend wasn’t a lack of aid—it was a refusal to deliver it.

Just a few kilometers inside the strip, pallets of flour, bottled water, diapers, medical supplies, and jars of baby food—provided by the World Food Programme, UNICEF, and donor countries—sat untouched while people just miles away searched for their next meal. In total, nearly 600 trucks’ worth of aid were sitting idle. Enough to feed 1,000,000 people for nearly two weeks, or 500,000 for almost a month.

These provisions weren’t being blocked by Israel. They had already crossed into Gaza with full coordination from the Israel Defense Forces, a small portion of the over 1.86 million tons of humanitarian aid Israel has facilitated into Gaza since October 7, an unprecedented amount delivered by a country to a population governed by its wartime enemy.

The holdup wasn’t logistics, security, or weather.

They were stalled because the United Nations refused to deliver them. Why? Because the supreme aim for the UN isn’t helping Gazans. It’s maintaining control over the humanitarian system that keeps it relevant, of the machinery that funds and justifies its existence.

The UN and its vast ecosystem of aid agencies have spent decades building a sprawling, unaccountable empire in Gaza. At the heart of this network is UNRWA, the agency that has run Gaza’s aid-state since Hamas violently wrested control of the strip from the Palestinian Authority in 2007.

To a casual observer, UNRWA looks like the most well-intentioned humanitarian agency. It bills itself as “humanitarian, neutral, and impartial.” In fact, it is deeply tied into Hamas.The organization has formally partnered with Hamas in administering Gaza’s food, schools and hospitals over the past two decades.

But the UNRWA-Hamas relationship goes far beyond logistics and administration. UNRWA has employed Hamas operatives, including some who took part in the October 7 massacre. In August 2024, the agency fired nine staffers over possible involvement in the attack, a move Israel condemned as grossly inadequate given that it had provided evidence linking more than 100 UNRWA employees to Hamas. In addition, Israeli authorities published a comprehensive report in April 2025 which it claims shows that 1,462 of UNRWA’s 12,521 employees in Gaza are tied to terror groups.

UNRWA facilities across Gaza have repeatedly been found to host terrorist infrastructure. According to UN Watch, this includes testimony from former Israeli hostages who said they were held by Hamas inside UNRWA buildings; weapons caches discovered in UNRWA clinics; and Hamas compounds uncovered inside UNRWA schools and beneath its Gaza City headquarters. These violations date back to at least 2014, when the UN itself admitted that Hamas had fired rockets from inside UNRWA schools.

Who pays for all this? Western taxpayers—primarily Americans and Europeans—via billions in annual government funding. The Congressional Research Service writes that US funding to UNRWA since 1950 amounts to $7.3 billion. In 2023 alone, the Biden Administration’s funding accounted for nearly 30% of the agency’s contributions from donors. In early 2024, the Biden administration froze funding to UNRWA after Israeli intelligence presented sufficiently credible evidence of UNRWA staff involvement in October 7.

The Trump Administration is taking this effort one step further. According to Fox News, the State Department told Congress that "the Administration has determined UNRWA is irredeemably compromised and now seeks its full dismantlement."

The UN’s failures in Gaza have been common knowledge for decades. But they were ignored by policymakers, diplomats, and media institutions who chose to look the other way, because acknowledging them would have meant taking on an entrenched international bureaucracy—and risking being accused of undermining Palestinian welfare.

October 7 made ignoring all of this untenable. And not just because UNRWA employees participated in the massacre. It became abundantly clear that Hamas was actively depriving Gazans of aid, and doing so in concert with the UN.

More recently, the U.S. and Israel backed an alternative: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a new initiative designed to bypass Hamas and restore integrity to aid distribution in Gaza. Contrary to some reporting, GHF claims it was never intended to replace the UN or other traditional aid organizations.

As GHF put it in a July 29 statement: “A common misconception about GHF is that we were established to replace the UN and traditional aid organizations. That is not the case. GHF’s work complements, not supplants, those organizations.” The group also noted that it had “secured a commitment from Israel to allow aid into Gaza under the existing mechanisms, including the UN” before launching operations. But even as a supplemental model, GHF posed a direct threat to the UN’s longstanding monopoly on humanitarian operations in Gaza—and that alone was enough to provoke backlash.

When GHF launched in May with a commitment to deliver millions of meals to Gazans through secure, Hamas-free distribution, it wasn’t welcomed. It was attacked.

On July 5, two GHF aid workers were injured when a grenade was thrown at their vehicle while they were en route to a distribution site. GHF stated that the attack was carried out by Hamas-affiliated operatives seeking to disrupt the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Then, in a major incident on July 16, 20 Palestinians were killed at a GHF-run distribution site in Khan Younis, 19 of whom were trampled and one stabbed. “We have credible reason to believe that elements within the crowd – armed and affiliated with Hamas – deliberately fomented the unrest,” GHF said in a statement.

Hamas has worked to undermine the foundation in other ways as well, including by placing bounties on GHF personnel. Its Health Ministry has repeatedly issued dramatic and unverified accusations that both the IDF and GHF personnel are opening fire on civilians during the daily, often chaotic, aid distributions. The Ministry claims that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed at or near GHF distribution sites. The IDF, in response, says it has only fired warning shots when individuals approached soldiers or aid convoys. GHF has stated that its armed contractors have used only non-lethal measures, such as pepper spray or warning shots fired in the air, to prevent dangerous crowd surges.

What this narrative ignores is that the other distribution processes employed this far are just as – if not more – chaotic and violent. Just this week, for example, the Daily Wire released a video showing swarms of Gazans overrunning multiple trucks belonging to the UN, while the IDF released footage of armed Hamas operatives looting an aid truck. “Contrary to Hamas’s false claims that the individuals in the video are security personnel,” the IDF said, “they are in fact Hamas terrorists who arrived to seize the aid from Gaza’s residents.”

But the UN, ever the willing megaphone, amplifies the Health Ministry’s narrative, with a complicit media giving them generous airtime.

Even more counterproductively, the IDF claimed this past week that the UN has insisted it will only distribute aid if the process is secured by Gaza’s “Blue Police,” a sanitized way of describing Gaza’s Hamas-run police force. Back in November 2024, a UN spokesperson stated that their workers would become “an even greater target” if surrounded by “armed soldiers from one of the two parties in this conflict.”

Why then would the UN oppose another group handing out food and rely on Hamas’ police force to secure distribution, even after repeatedly accusing the terror group of stealing aid? Why would it echo Hamas’ unproven claims of “aid massacres,” despite the IDF and GHF denying them, and rail against GHF for doing the very thing the UN is supposed to do?

Because GHF’s success is existentially threatening to the UN’s model. If GHF works, the entire paradigm collapses. No more “working through partners” who happen to be terrorists. No more junkets and photo ops for UN officials who get feted around the world for overseeing human misery. And most importantly, no more Hamas exploiting aid to fill its coffers and maintain domination.

In 2024 alone, Hamas made over $500 million from the aid racket, according to both Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and US House Speaker Mike Johnson—by extorting civilians, skimming off the top, and using food as a tool for recruitment. Johnson has said this revenue accounts for half of Hamas’s annual budget.

According to a U.S. official quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Hamas made shutting down the GHF the second item on its cease-fire negotiation list—which tells you everything you need to know about how UN aid fuels Hamas and how successful the initiative has truly been. Another official added that GHF has “caused Hamas more fear than anything else has in the past two years.” That’s because GHF does what no UN body dares to do: deliver aid directly to civilians, cutting out the Hamas middleman.

The UN’s own data reveals just how broken the system has become: between May 19 and July 27, only 13 percent of all aid trucks that entered Gaza actually reached their intended destinations. The rest were intercepted or diverted inside Gaza.

While the UN’s system collapses under the weight of its own dysfunction, GHF distributes aid daily—and films it. Their videos show the (far from perfect) delivery of hundreds of thousands of aid packages per day, totalling nearly 100 million so far.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza isn’t the narrow result of Israeli policy, but of the international system that treats Hamas like a partner and those trying to bypass Hamas like traitors. And while media outlets and the United Nations insist Israel is starving Gaza, it’s actually the UN that is failing to distribute aid. Not because of war. Not because of the siege. But because of pride, politics, and power.

The fight over aid in Gaza isn’t just about food. It’s about who controls the narrative— and who profits from it.