The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began distributing food in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, May 27. The sites, at Rafah, at the strip’s southern end, and at the nearby Morag Corridor, a security corridor established in April by the Israeli military, are managed by private American contractors, with Israeli soldiers securing the perimeters. Inside, Palestinian contractors screen recipients for Hamas connections, 50 people at a time, and hand out boxes of food.
The Israeli-American plan to supplant the United Nations and European nongovernmental organizations as the supplier of food and medical aid to Gaza is underway. The GHF claimed success and said it had distributed the equivalent of 462,000 meals on the first day. The media focused on the disorder at Rafah, where crowds had rushed the distribution area, causing Israeli soldiers to fire warning shots into the air. The U.N. Human Rights Office claimed that 47 people were injured.
The GHF’s distribution began a week after Israel launched Operation Gideon’s Chariots, a renewed ground offensive. With 58 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a plan to establish Israeli “security control” over the strip by dissecting it into several zones and separating civilians from combatants. Displacing the U.N. from Gaza’s food chain is part of the plan to displace Hamas from Gaza.
Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the stridently pro-Palestinian Norwegian Refugee Council, said the GHF was run by “ex-CIA and ex-military people” and that it “militarized, privatized, politicized” aid. All true, but aid to Gaza has always been militarized, privatized, and politicized. From 1967 until 2023, it was privatized and politicized by the U.N. and the European NGOs and by their donors: an odd motley of Arab tyrants, Islamic charities, and Western government agencies and NGOs, the United States Agency for International Development among them. It was militarized after 2005, when Israel’s withdrawal made the Palestinian Authority the aid organizations’ partner, and further militarized after 2007, when Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority.
The extent of the aid agencies’ complicity became clear after Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The biggest, UNRWA, or the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, was hardwired into an Islamist army dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews everywhere. In February 2024, the Israel Defense Forces discovered that Hamas had installed a data center directly beneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters and tapped electricity cables into UNRWA’s supply.
The Wall Street Journal reported that six UNRWA employees had taken part in the Oct. 7 massacres, rapes, and kidnappings, while another half dozen were implicated in the slaughter as Hamas “operatives.” Citing Israeli intelligence analysis, the outlet said seven of the 12 were primary or secondary teachers in UNRWA schools. About 10% of UNRWA’s Gaza staff, some 1,200 people, were active members of Islamist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Nearly half of UNRWA’s employees had close relatives with Hamas links. While 15% of Gaza’s male adults had links to Hamas, 23% of UNRWA’s male employees did. UNRWA was more radical than a general population that is among the most radicalized on the planet.
In July 2024, a decadelong investigation by UN Watch concluded that UNRWA staff had continued to aid Hamas after Oct. 7. The British Israeli hostage Emily Damari said after her release that she had been held in UNRWA facilities and denied medical care. Hamas has stored weapons in UNRWA facilities, attacked Israeli soldiers from UNRWA schools, and stolen fuel and food from UNRWA depots.
Hamas monopolizes every aspect of Gaza’s economic and political life. UNRWA and the other 12 U.N. agencies operating in Gaza became Hamas’s partners. Often, they did it willingly. They turned a blind eye to Hamas’s exploitation of their facilities, cash, and food donations and repeated Hamas’s propaganda to the world.
British complicity
In March 2024, Thomas Fletcher, the ex-British diplomat who is the U.N.’s undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief, claimed that more than a million Palestinians in Gaza were “at risk” from famine. The Israelis, the first people in history to be expected to feed the enemy that wished to destroy them, insisted that they were sending in aid to Gaza and blamed Hamas for monopolizing the distribution of the aid, including by stockpiling it to profit from the resulting rise in prices. The U.N. bodies have consistently rejected Israel’s argument.
On May 20, Fletcher told BBC Radio that “14,000 babies” would die in the following 48 hours due to Israel withholding aid from Gaza. It turned out that Fletcher had misrepresented predictions from an NGO called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which speculated that 14,000 children might experience acute malnutrition in Gaza over the next year. Even the BBC, which had not queried his assertion at the time, issued a correction.
The Israeli foreign ministry accused Fletcher of spreading a “blood libel.” Meanwhile, social media had spread Fletcher’s fantasy around the world. Credulous British parliamentarians and journalists performed their outrage, promoting Fletcher’s story under a photograph of a starving Yemeni child. This was the political climate in which the heavily online Elias Rodriguez allegedly killed Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.
A few days later, a report from the Israel-based NGO Monitor showed the extent to which Fletcher’s former colleagues at the Foreign Office in London were complicit with Hamas. In November 2022, a memo from Britain’s Consulate General in Jerusalem set out a four-year plan for donating cash totaling £21 million, or about $28 million, to the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), Gaza, and east Jerusalem. The purposes sound noble in an abstract way but are utterly divorced from the reality of life under Hamas: empowering women and girls, promoting “climate resilience,” and boosting “culture and public discourse” to help the creation of a Palestinian state. The minister of the day, James Cleverly, was a Conservative.
In Gaza, the cash would be distributed by UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, via its Children’s Fund. “UNICEF plans to work closely with the Ministry of Social Development and humanitarian cash actors, including through coordination platforms,” the Foreign Office plan noted. The Ministry of Social Development is controlled by Hamas. The U.K. Foreign Office identified this as a “reputational” risk but continued with the plan.
According to the U.N. Financial Tracking Service, the U.K. gave UNICEF approximately $23.1 million for the Palestinians in 2024. The revelations about U.N. complicity with Hamas, and Hamas’s control and diversion of Gaza aid, made no difference. “We will continue to support UNICEF’s work in Gaza which is focused on the delivery of child-sensitive social protection and cash assistance,” a Foreign Office document said in April 2024.
UNICEF’s most recent report, from Nov. 28, 2024, says that the Children’s Fund started sending money to Palestinians in Gaza “six days after the first bombings pounded the Gaza Strip.” No mention is made of the bloodbath that drew Israel into a war for its survival, Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, let alone the kidnappings and other barbarities that broke every law of war, or the rocket fire into Israel from Gaza. We read that normal markets have “all but collapsed,” that food has become “scarce,” and that prices are “skyrocketing.” UNICEF refrains from explaining that Hamas has collapsed food markets, raised prices, and created scarcity by monopolizing the distribution of aid that has entered Gaza.
UNICEF’s report said 890,000 people, including 400,000 children, have received cash from the fund. The distribution is managed in partnership with the Hamas-run Ministry of Social Development in Gaza. The ministry gives the fund a “beneficiary list.” The fund transfers stipends of 1,000 Israeli shekels, about $270, through one of the “co-ordination platforms” mentioned in the British Foreign Office’s report, an e-wallet system named RapidPro. The e-wallet notifies recipients of their credit on their cellphones, and they collect the cash from “a vendor” or by “visiting a UNICEF-sanctioned agent.” UNICEF does not describe Hamas’s criteria for the beneficiary list, how the vendors are selected, or whether UNICEF vets its agents for links to Hamas.
UNICEF’s chief partner in these transfers is Ghazi Hamad, the minister for social development in Gaza. On Oct. 24, 2023, just over two weeks after the Oct. 7 massacres and kidnappings, Hamad told Lebanese television that he sought the “annihilation of Israel” and said that Oct. 7 was “just the first time. … There will be a second, a third, a fourth.” In November 2024, the month that UNICEF issued its report, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated Hamad and five other “senior Hamas leaders” as “individuals involved in supporting the terrorist group’s fundraising efforts and weapons smuggling into Gaza.” Hamad, the indictment stated, had previously served as a senior official “overseeing border crossings” into Gaza. These crossings were “one of the primary ways” that Hamas smuggled in the weapons that were used on Oct. 7, 2023, and the construction materials for building “an extensive tunnel network they intentionally dispersed among Palestinian civilians.”
Bradley T. Smith, acting undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said that the “seemingly” legitimate, public-facing roles of Hamad and the other leaders masked “terrorist activities” such as managing the “transfer of money and goods into Gaza” and securing “additional revenue” to support Hamas’s war effort. If Hamas members and their families are among those receiving UNICEF transfers, then UNICEF and the RapidPro e-wallet are implicated in supporting Hamas’s war.
From Gaza to Tampa
RapidPro, the digital mechanism for notifying Palestinians in Gaza that UNICEF cash is incoming, is an open-source software. It was designed, UNICEF says, in collaboration between UNICEF and Nyaruka, a Rwandan software firm. The European Commission’s website also calls Nyaruka a Rwandan firm. This sounds like an inspiring case of tech innovation in a developing nation emerging from the shadow of genocide. But that isn’t really true.
Nyaruka is registered to a post box in Kigali, Rwanda, and has a couple of Rwandan junior employees on its website. But the company was founded by an American and a Frenchman. Its software developer is an Irishman. One founder, Eric Newcomer, is based in Seattle. The other, Nicolas Pottier, is based in Leavenworth, Washington. Nyaruka’s software developer Rowan Seymour is, he says, an Irish-educated “lefty,” though he at least seems to live in Rwanda. Everything else on Nyaruka’s website leads to the U.S.
Nyaruka was co-founded in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2010 by Newcomer and Pottier and began by developing free SMS text software for NGOs. Nyaruka’s rudimentary website does not contain a Rwandan address or phone number, or even an email address for inquiries. Its X account has been dormant since 2015. It has a chatbot, which mutated from a blonde to a Rwandan named Gloria, and told me they didn’t offer phone support. But Nyaruka’s Resistbot page gives an American address, 802 E. Whiting St, Tampa, Florida, and a Washington, D.C.-area number that takes no messages.
On Nyaruka’s website, you can find TextIt (“the leading bot platform”) and Resistbot, which is an open-source software for sending text and email blasts to “elected officials.”
Resistbot is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group founded by Eric Ries and Jason Putorti in San Francisco in 2017. Its landing page is illustrated by a cartoon of the U.S. Congress. Click “Officials,” and you open a map of the U.S. that leads to the names and photographs of every U.S. senator and congressional representative. Click “Guide,” and you find a list of keywords that will help the bot compose your messages: House, Court, Moms, Abortion, Guns.
Click “Petitions,” and you find samples of Resistbot petitions, all of them concerning American politics, and all of them left-wing: “Reject Trump Regime’s amoral and fiscally irresponsible murder budget,” “Oppose Trump’s regressive ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ harming vulnerable Americans,” and “Investigate Trump’s unethical $TRUMP token cryptocurrency corruption scheme.”
The address on Nyaruka’s website is registered with the Tampa Bay Chamber as the office of Embarc Collective (“Rise With Us”). Embarc Collective, its website says, “supports the most driven and focused tech entrepreneurs in Florida.” Nyaruka, Resistbot, and TextIt are not listed on its members page. None of the faces on Embarc’s “Team” page look Rwandan.
Why is RapidPro, a UNICEF-sponsored software possibly implicated in terrorist funding in Gaza, closely associated with left-wing chatbots in the U.S.? And why are the chatbots hosted on an opaque Rwandan website?
No one at Embarc replied to my inquiries. Gloria stopped talking to me when I asked about Hamas and Ghazi Hamad. Instead, Rowan Seymour mailed back: “You should direct any questions about UNICEF’s work in Gaza to UNICEF themselves.” TextIt, he said, is a commercial version of RapidPro: “Two names for the same generic open source chatbot building software.” He did not answer my questions about Resistbot and the Embarc Collective.
No doubt nothing illegal has occurred here. It does show, however, that UNICEF’s facade of virtue is paper-thin, or whatever the digital equivalent is. That facade collapsed on Oct. 7. What happens next, and whether aid to Gaza can be kept out of Hamas’s hands and even used to create an alternative future, depends on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Aid to last
Israel is fighting in Gaza under a unique set of conditions. This is the first war in history in which the party that did not begin the war is expected to feed the party that started the war and remains dedicated to destroying the hand that feeds it. That expectation stems from the similarly unique paradigms of Israel’s pre-Oct. 7 handling of hostilities with the Palestinians. But Oct. 7 shifted the paradigm within Israeli society. Israel’s allies have not fully internalized this, and Netanyahu has been strategically discreet about its implications.
Regardless, planning for the day after the war began immediately. On Sunday, May 25, the New York Times reported that an “informal network” of Israeli “officials, officers, reservists, and business people” had, in the absence of a declared exit strategy from their government, begun brainstorming how aid could complement the military campaign to displace Hamas from Gaza and even shape its political future. The Israelis decided that displacing Hamas meant displacing U.N. agencies and pro-Palestinian NGOs, many of them European, as the distributors of aid. After Donald Trump’s electoral victory in November 2024, the plan became a real possibility.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a nonprofit group created by a former U.S. Marine, Jake Wood. He said the company received small donations from Israel and $100,000 from a European country. These are insufficient to cover the costs of feeding as many as 1 million people. More money must be coming from somewhere. The operations are run by Safe Reach Solutions. Its leader, Philip F. Reilly, is a former CIA officer who was one of the first American agents to land in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and became the station chief in Kabul. He then moved into the private sector, including with Orbis, the Virginia-based consulting firm that advised on the GHF’s Gaza operations.
The Europeans, the U.N., and the aid agencies unanimously oppose its existence. They are prepared to accept Hamas in power after the war and insist on restoring the U.N. and NGO monopoly on aid distribution. Wood resigned the day after the New York Times article appeared. His replacement, John Acree, is a former senior manager at USAID. Irony aside, the GHF’s unsteady start shows how difficult its path will be. Whoever controls the aid controls the Palestinians in Gaza. The Trump administration’s European allies want that to be Hamas and the U.N.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.