Hamas terrorists were captured on video taking control of 47 of 100 aid trucks entering the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.
“It’s no secret that Hamas takes control of humanitarian aid. We’ve already published here tapes of Hamas, in which you hear them say themselves they have no more room in their warehouses,” Channel 12‘s Almog Boker reported on Wednesday evening.
“But this evening we also bring special documentation of what it looks like from inside, with cameras that are tracking it in real time,” he said.
The footage shows Hamas first taking over the trucks, including attacking the drivers. Then the trucks are driven through Rafah with armed terrorists riding on them. If any citizen approaches the trucks, they are immediately fired upon, Almog reported. Gunshots can be heard in the background of the footage.
Humanitarian aid, meant to prevent starvation among Gazans, has instead become a lifeline for Hamas and its continued control of the Strip.
“Control over humanitarian aid is control over the citizens. Hamas and [its leader Yahya] Sinwar exercise almost absolute control over what happens with humanitarian aid, and this is how they control the population,” Boker reported.
He noted the IDF on Tuesday killed a handful of terrorists trying to take control of some aid, but said that the army’s efforts haven’t been enough.
In a report in mid-September, Boker noted that Hamas resells the aid to the population to finance recruitment, with 3,000 terrorists having been added to Hamas’s payroll in northern Gaza.
The Israeli government is aware of the problem.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the issue at a Sept. 4 press conference, promising that Israel would in time deny the terrorist group of its ability to use the aid for financial gain.
He noted that Israel has largely deprived Hamas of cash by taking control of the Rafah border crossing, leaving Hamas with humanitarian aid as its only money source.
“They don’t have [Rafah]. So we’re choking them. But there’s one thing that they have, which is the distribution of food,” Netanyahu said.
“We let all those trucks come in, and Hamas’s strategy is to steal, hoard and gouge. That’s what they do. … They steal the food. They charge exorbitant prices from the Gazans. And that’s how they continue, [or] they hope to continue, to survive. And we have to take that away from them,” he said.
The prime minister did not provide a timeline for when that would occur.
Israelis on both the right and the left have condemned the ongoing aid theft by Hamas, particularly with 101 Israeli hostages still in captivity.
The Tzav 9 (“Order 9”) protest group has led the movement against Jerusalem’s decision to allow aid into the Strip.
“We’ve been saying this all along: We cannot on the one hand fight the enemy and on the other hand feed it and give it the oxygen it needs to fight us another day,” the group said.
“We understand the civilians need humanitarian aid and we are not against it—but where Hamas is in place, no aid should pass,” it added.
The Israeli government has been under pressure from the Biden administration to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza from the war’s start, with President Joe Biden promising that if aid ended up in the hands of Hamas it would cease.
Nevertheless, the White House has continued pressing Israel to increase the flow despite admitting publicly that Hamas—a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization—seizes much of the aid.
On Wednesday’s call between U.S. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which an Israeli retaliatory attack on Iran was the main agenda item, the president again brought up the “the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” according to a White House summary of the call.