Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the Gaza Strip have been thoroughly infiltrated by Hamas, according to a new report. Pictured: Ambulances donated by Rahma Worldwide on August 7, 2024 in Khan Yunis (southern Gaza). A recently revealed Hamas document from 2022 reported that Rahma Worldwide's Gazan director "is now affiliated with the Hamas movement." (Photo by Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images)

Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the Gaza Strip have been thoroughly infiltrated by Hamas, according to a new report by NGO Monitor: Puppet Regime: Hamas' Coercive Grip on Aid and NGO Operations in Gaza. The report is based on Arabic-language documents, retrieved by Israel's military, spanning the years 2018-2022, from Hamas's Gaza Interior Security Mechanism (ISM), a unit within the Hamas Ministry of Interior and National Security.

"The evidence confirms that NGOs in Gaza do not operate independently or neutrally," NGO Monitor found. "Rather, they are embedded in an institutionalized framework of coercion, intimidation, and surveillance that serves Hamas' terror objectives."

On an everyday basis, NGOs need permission from Hamas to do their work in Gaza.

"All NGOs operating in Gaza are required to adhere to strict Hamas security protocols, which include regular engagement with the terror group's Ministry of Interior and National Security... and other ministries relevant for specific projects... NGOs – both local and international, including ones operating under the auspices of UN projects – are not permitted to provide services or operate projects in Gaza without Hamas' approval... NGOs are compelled to comply, ensuring that their activities do not contradict Hamas' authority and narrative or obstruct its military agenda."

Hamas also inserted "guarantors" – local Gazans approved by Hamas, or themselves Hamas members or affiliates – into high positions in the respective NGOs to serve as points of contact between Hamas and the NGOs. Hamas required its "guarantors" to be placed at the highest administrative levels of the NGO, such as director, deputy director, or board chair.

This led to ethically questionable dispositions on the part of these NGOs: The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), for instance, an Oslo-based NGO operating in Gaza, among other places, chose to simply ignore concerns from a Gazan that his floor was collapsing because of a terror tunnel being built underneath. According to the NGO Monitor report:

"As part of an NRC program, funded by the UK and EU, to provide cash assistance to families selected by Hamas-controlled Ministry of Social Development, an NRC delegation, including the Gaza head and five other employees, visited a beneficiary's apartment. The resident was chosen... 'since he is elderly, weak sighted and his partner has a broken pelvis,' and the 'poor shape of his apartment's floor and one of the walls was about to collapse.'

"During the visit, the beneficiary asked whether 'the reason that the floor collapsed was that there was a tunnel' beneath his home. According to the NRC senior official, 'neither the foreign delegation nor the association's employees asked whether there was a tunnel under the civilian's... apartment which caused the floor to collapse, rather it was the apartment's owner who asked the researchers... nevertheless the researchers did not reply to him'".

The NRC had a Gazan administrative director, according to NGO Monitor, who "supports the Hamas movement but is not affiliated with the movement," and "He is employed by the government of Gaza and has the rank of Naqib (Hamas rank for captain)..."

At least some of these NGOs are funded by US taxpayers: One of NRC's top donors, donating 17.2% of the Norwegian outfit's total income in 2024, was the USAID Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, formerly the U.S. government's lead agency supposedly for coordinating and delivering international disaster aid, and thankfully since dismantled by the Trump administration.

This cozy relationship between Hamas and the NGOs is compounded by what the author and journalist Matti Friedman has previously described as another highly problematic cozy relationship between the media and the NGOs – a relationship that means NGOs are never supposed to be exposed to media scrutiny:

"In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups [NGOs, activists and international organizations, ed] was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not... seek to analyze or criticize them... these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps... and foreign reporters."

According to Friedman, in 2014, the Associated Press, in fact, went so far as to ban interviews with NGO Monitor:

"The bureau's [Associated Press] explicit orders to reporters were to never quote the group [NGO Monitor] or its director... Gerald Steinberg. In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor."

Friedman registered that the media themselves were intimidated by Hamas into reporting only what the terror organization wanted:

"During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. "

Similarly, the mainstream media has largely refused to acknowledge that, as reported in a recent study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, 60% of the "journalists" killed during the fighting in Gaza were Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives or affiliates.

In September, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) coordinated an international campaign allegedly involving 150 media outlets to "condemn the crimes against Palestinian reporters perpetrated with impunity by the Israeli army". The organization claimed:

"According to RSF data, more than 210 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip in nearly 23 months of Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territory. At least 56 of them were intentionally targeted by the Israeli army or killed while doing their job."

According to the Meir Amit Center, out of 266 people identified as journalists or media workers killed in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and November 30, 2025, at least 157 were either members of or affiliated with terrorist groups, primarily Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Regardless, the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States (AFPC-USA), at its gala in Washington, DC last month, posthumously honored 10 reporters employed by Qatar's state-owned Al Jazeera who had been exposed as terrorists, among them a Hamas sniper, the head of a Hamas unit responsible for rocket attacks against Israel, and a member of Hamas elite Nukhba forces.

Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst eulogized the terrorists at the gala:

"These fearless and tenacious Palestinian journalists in Gaza who don't have the luxury to leave when reporting becomes too dangerous. May we not forget their sacrifice and contributions to our industry."

Robert Williams is based in the United States.