By Adam Kredo

(Free Beacon) Hamas operatives infiltrated dozens of U.N.-affiliated aid groups in Gaza between 2018 and 2022, embedding personnel into senior positions to direct humanitarian operations on the ground and ensure the groups served Hamas’s interests, internal security documents uncovered by Israeli forces and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.

The documents, authored by Hamas’s internal security apparatus, detail for the first time how the terror group systematically co-opted nonprofits affiliated with the United Nations and the governments of multiple Western countries, including the United States. They reveal how Hamas placed its allies into key positions throughout these nonprofits, ensuring they “can be exploited for security purposes in order to infiltrate foreign associations, their foreign senior personnel and their movements,” according to one December 2022 document among a tranche the NGO Monitor watchdog group published Wednesday.

The revelations come as the United States and other Western governments chart a course for humanitarian operations in post-war Gaza. The Trump administration has said the Hamas-tied U.N. Relief and Works Agency will not play a role in the region under President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan, but the framework authorizes the U.N. and other NGOs to play a role in the humanitarian aid process. If those groups include those Hamas has already penetrated, the terror group will control a lucrative aid pipeline that will help it stay in power.

Hamas’s scheme relies on a system of “guarantors,” or local Gazans—primarily Hamas loyalists and intelligence operators—who serve as points of contact between aid organizations and the terror group’s leadership. In order for NGOs to operate in Gaza, Hamas requires that its guarantors “hold senior administrative positions” within the aid groups. The arrangement ensures that Hamas has “access to the highest levels of the NGOs’ local branches and operations,” according to NGO Monitor’s analysis of the documents.

The guarantors also allow Western NGOs to informally coordinate with Hamas and bypass government restrictions on direct engagement with the terror group. An April 2022 Hamas intelligence report, for instance, makes clear that “American associations present in the Gaza Strip do not engage with the Gaza government directly, but via an intermediate individual” who offers the aid groups plausible deniability.

The December 2022 document lists the names and personal details for 55 individuals acting as guarantors at 48 separate NGOs in Gaza. The terror group identified at least 10 of the individuals it tapped for leadership roles within nonprofits as “Hamas members or supporters, or employed by Hamas-affiliated authorities.”

Those individuals include an administrative director with the United Kingdom-based Medical Aid for Palestinians whom the terror group described as a member of its military wing with a “circle of friends” within Hamas, a director with the nonprofit Human Appeal who is “affiliated with the Hamas movement” and held “several positions and management posts” within the terror group, and another administrative director with the Norwegian Refugee Council—which maintains an office in Washington, D.C., who “supports the Hamas movement” and served as a Hamas captain.

The documents show that other terror groups have gotten in on the action as well: The United States-registered Catholic Relief Services hired a Gaza director whom Hamas identified as a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Every nonprofit operation in Gaza, NGO Monitor notes in its report, is “required to adhere to strict Hamas security protocols, which include regular engagement with the terror group’s Ministry of Interior and National Security (MoINS) and Ministry of Social Development (MoSD).” Not a single aid group was “permitted to provide services or operate projects in Gaza without Hamas’s approval and maintaining an ongoing line of coordination with the abovementioned Hamas ministries.”

The system Hamas established, in addition to allowing it to infiltrate nonprofit organizations, provided the terror group the ability to secure military positions under the cover of aid work. A June 2021 intelligence document about an effort by Oxfam—a confederation of organizations that works on issues like poverty—to build an irrigation project in a “security sensitive” border area demonstrates the level of coordination.

“The project concerns irrigation of fruit trees … [which] are known to be a cover for resistance activities in border areas,” Hamas officials wrote, noting that Oxfam’s local implementing partner, Rai-Consult, “is affiliated with the Hamas movement.” The relationship between the organization and the terror group ensured that Oxfam implemented its project “in a manner consistent with maintaining and concealing tactically advantageous positions for [Hamas’s] forces,” according to NGO Monitor.

A June 2020 intelligence report from Hamas’s interior ministry further raises concerns about “aid organizations that employ Jewish individuals in key administrative positions.” The terror group names a Jewish media official for Oxfam’s Gaza-based operations as one of the charity’s “threats and insecurities.”

The new documents complement an earlier tranche of internal Hamas communications released in September that show that the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders knowingly set up shop in the same medical facilities the terror group used as command centers. Those disclosures generated allegations that the nonprofits knew they were operating alongside Hamas and allowed themselves to be pawns for the terror group, often while condemning Israel for conducting military operations at humanitarian sites.

“By choosing to stay quiet and cooperate with the regime, NGOs not only provide cover for Hamas’s abuses, they begin to internalize and adopt Hamas’s own agenda and propaganda,” according to NGO Monitor’s analysis of the new documents. “The result is an aid sector that, in many cases, no longer acts independently or impartially, but instead functions within a terror-controlled system and becomes an integral part of misinformation and disinformation campaigns.”