Penn Raine: UNexpected

Last week, much to my surprise, a senior UN official accused Hamas of interfering with humanitarian deliveries in Gaza. The report claimed that Hamas operatives forcibly entered World Food Program sites, assaulted aid workers and took supplies which were to have been distributed to Gazans who face serious shortages.

The statement came from the grandly titled UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Dr Ramiz Alakbarov, who added that he was not reporting isolated incidents but a systemic approach to the disruption of aid supplies.

It does not precisely claim that Hamas is on-selling the supplies to benefit their own war chest, supplies that would have been given out for no charge, but this is the only logical reason to disrupt such an aid operation. It’s also reported that the stolen aid is stockpiled and much of the food items are spoiled or damaged which suggests stupidity rather than cunning. As expected the situation is complicated and worsened by cartels who also operate in this unstable region, routinely fixing prices and restricting civilian access, a situation that the aid agencies attempt to bypass.

My surprise was not because Hamas has been called out, rather that longstanding ‘misappropriation’ has taken so long to become any legacy media headlines, and that it was a UN Special Rapporteur who did it, given their previous coyness to look closely at Hamas’s part in the Gaza supply crisis, and their enthusiasm for pointing the finger at Israel, as I have previously commented on.

Not unexpected however has been the usual media suspects’ silence on the UN statement- looking at you, BBC. The New York Times, to give it credit, has u-turned on its vigorous 2025 refutations that food thievery was occurring in Gaza by its own officials. The NYT is one of a few democratic media outlets that show any interest in this story as the others appear still to be muddled about how to support ordinary Gazans and at the same time repudiate the brutal terrorist regime that controls them.

Al Jazeera, also unexpectedly, did report on the UN statement but frames the story thus: ‘Hamas denies UN accusations over Gaza aid distribution interference.’

The Hamas comms team has amusingly labelled the denied ‘interference’ as ‘police operations targeting smuggling’.

UN admits Hamas is stealing aid in Gaza; Natasha Hausdorff considers implications

The video contains, amongst wider commentary, a clip from August 2025 in central Gaza of armed Hamas operatives taking over a large aid convoy in broad daylight. The convoy is representative of the substantial quantities of lifesaving food assistance that has entered the area since the ceasefire. As an example, agencies such as the World Food Program calculate that 1.78 tonnes of food was received between October 2025 and early June 2026.

WFP estimates that 80 metric tonnes per month are necessary for Gaza’s population to receive appropriate nutrition and that three times this amount is currently being donated from aid agencies, including from Israel.

However, critics of the Middle East’s only democracy have insisted that it still needs to do ‘more’ even though under international humanitarian law they are not required to do anything at all.

The states that have required Israel to answer in both the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice to the charges of causing starvation in Gaza could usefully look closer to home.

Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.