Israel: UNRWA is Using Hamas to ‘Protect’ Aid Trucks

Israel accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of using Hamas to “protect” humanitarian aid trucks entering the Gaza Strip, with the result that much of the aid was stolen and not distributed to needy civilians.

Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, told reporters Wednesday that reports of Israel restricting aid to Gaza were “misleading,” and that there was virtually unlimited capacity at Israeli border crossing points for aid into Gaza.

Levy noted that 2,735 tons of food had entered Gaza the day before — three pounds per person, he said — and that Israel had achieved a “record” capacity of 277 aid trucks per day, checking as many as 44 trucks per hour for banned weapons.

The border crossings, Levy said, were being “underutilized by donor states at the moment.” The problem was that the United Nations “is struggling to distribute aid at the pace Israel is letting it in,” citing UNRWA in particular.

Israel has said that UNRWA is aligned with terrorists, noting the involvement of UNRWA employees in the October 7 attack in Israel. It has said that UNRWA should be replaced in Gaza by United Nations agencies not tainted by line to terror.

Asked by Breitbart News whether UNRWA’s problems were due to its own incompetence, or to Israeli pressure, Levy said: “UNRWA was doing a cataclysmically bad job of distributing aid even before the revelations. … And the reason is UNRWA is not an aid agency.” He added that UNRWA was established to provide “education, health and welfare services … to those [Palestinians] falsely classified as refugees” several generations after fleeing the 1948 war.

It “was not to be an aid distribution agency in a war zone,” he said, noting that the UN has other agencies to perform that function.

Levy then added that “UNRWA has been relying on Hamas for the protection of aid convoys” within Gaza.

Indeed, video of aid trucks entering Gaza appears to show armed men mounting each truck as it enters:

Levy noted that “the whole [UNRWA] organization is riddled with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives.”

He said Israel was “constantly exploring options” as alternatives to UNRWA, “from private sector convoys to airdrops.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.