The strongest evidence that Hamas commandeered Gaza’s civil infrastructure does not come from Israel. It comes from the United Nations’ own boards of inquiry, from Amnesty International, from Reuters, Associated Press and Washington Post reporters walked through the tunnels themselves, from the internal analyses of the U.S. government — and from Hamas officials, who have stated the doctrine on the record. That is the record this article is built on. Where the public evidence for a widely repeated claim fell short, this article says so, in the same pages. A case this strong does not need its weak points hidden; hiding them is what allows the strong ones to be dismissed.

First, Hamas became the civil state

Commandeering usually suggests infiltration — a militant group burrowing into institutions it does not control. Gaza after June 2007 does not fit that picture. Hamas seized the territory and took over the state itself: every ministry, the municipal councils, the judiciary, and the internal security apparatus, including roughly 10,000 uniformed “blue” police, alongside its own health, education, interior, economy, and religious-affairs ministries [11]. By about 2010 it carried at least 35,000 salaried employees — a payroll estimated at some $300 million a year — and by 2014 the figure was roughly 50,000, about 24,000 of them civil servants and the rest in the security services [11]. The civil infrastructure of Gaza was not a neutral system Hamas abused from outside. For seventeen years, Hamas was the system: it hired the staff, ran the hospitals and schools as a government, collected the taxes, and policed the streets — while its military wing built a second, armed state inside and underneath the first.

The revenue machinery matched. Hamas taxed the economy it governed: customs and VAT collected on goods at the crossings, a cigarette tax of about three shekels a pack worth an estimated $80 million a year, fees on the smuggling-tunnel trade, and cash-before-pickup terms imposed on merchants [11]. During the current war, Gazan businessmen told the Washington Post that the system never stopped: imports taxed at 20 percent or more, the trucks of merchants who refused commandeered for resale, fuel taxed and seized [12]. In October 2026, merchants suspended imports entirely over a new Hamas fee of 10,000 shekels per truck; Reuters reported the accounts could not be independently verified, Hamas called the payment a voluntary fund contribution, and the fee was then reportedly withdrawn [19]. A government that can levy a per-truck fee on every import, mid-war, is not a fugitive militia. It is a tax state.

The underground city

Beneath that state, Hamas built the largest military tunnel network in the world relative to the size of the territory — routed, deliberately, under the civilian surface: homes, schools, mosques, hospitals, UN premises. The routing is not an Israeli allegation. UNRWA itself found the tunnels under its schools (below). Wire-service reporters were walked through a 700-metre tunnel running 18 metres beneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters, complete with a server chamber and banks of batteries [8]. Israeli officials have put the network at 350–450 miles with some 5,700 shafts; the precise figures rest on Israeli intelligence estimates and should be read as such, but no serious source disputes the scale in the hundreds of kilometres, or the heavy concrete construction visible to every journalist taken inside [8][11].

The doctrine behind the routing was stated by Hamas itself. A New York Times investigation in July 2024, built on Hamas’s own videos, captured documents, and interviews with Hamas members and Israeli soldiers, documented fighters operating in civilian clothes and weapons pre-positioned in “houses, mosques, sofas — even a child’s bedroom” [17]. And Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader, told RT Arabic on October 27, 2023 why the tunnels were not opened to the population Israel was bombing: the tunnels, he said, were “meant to protect us [Hamas] from the airplanes” — protecting refugee civilians, he added, “is the responsibility of the United Nations” [18]. There is no clearer statement of commandeering in the record: the shelter was for the movement; the civilians above it were somebody else’s problem — and, in the logic of the system, their exposure was part of the design.

Hospitals

The hospital file begins a decade before the current war, and it begins with Amnesty International. In May 2015, Amnesty documented that during the 2014 conflict Hamas used a disused outpatient clinic in the grounds of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City to detain, interrogate, and torture suspected collaborators — inside the perimeter of Gaza’s largest hospital, while it operated [1]. Whatever disputes attach to later claims, the use of al-Shifa’s grounds by Hamas’s security apparatus in wartime is documented by an organization nobody accuses of taking Israel’s side.

November 2023 requires precision, because two different things are true at once. New York Times journalists escorted into al-Shifa verified a concrete tunnel shaft on the hospital grounds, with wiring and a ladder; they could not verify where it led [2]. In February 2024, the Times, reviewing classified Israeli documents, reported that the evidence “suggests Hamas used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel” of at least 700 feet running beneath the surgery centre, with bunkers, living areas, and a communications room [2]. Declassified U.S. intelligence in January 2024 assessed that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used the complex and the ground beneath it for command infrastructure, some command-and-control activity, weapons storage, and holding at least a few hostages [2]. That is the documented core, and it is substantial.

The larger claim — that al-Shifa sat atop a full command-and-control centre, as the IDF presented it publicly in November 2023 — was not established by the evidence Israel released. The Washington Post’s visual investigation of December 21, 2023 examined everything made public and concluded that the rooms connected to the tunnel showed no immediate evidence of military use, that none of the five buildings named appeared connected to the tunnel network, and that the evidence “falls short” of demonstrating a command centre beneath the hospital [3]. The same honesty applies at other hospitals: at Rantisi, presented items included a document the IDF described as a guard roster that was in fact a calendar; at Nasser Hospital, a released hostage’s account to AP — she and more than two dozen captives held there — is corroborated testimony about hostages, not about command facilities [2]. The article’s claim is therefore the one the record carries: Hamas used Gaza’s flagship hospital for cover, weapons, a hardened tunnel, and hostages. It does not need the word “headquarters,” and it does not use it.

Schools, and the UN’s own findings

If the hospital record is mixed, the schools record is not — because here the documenting body is the UN itself. In July 2014, UNRWA discovered rockets hidden in its Gaza schools three separate times — the first, about twenty rockets in a vacant school — and condemned the placement in terms it rarely uses [5]. The UN Headquarters Board of Inquiry that followed did not deal in allegations. Its summary, published in April 2015, found weapons stored in three UN facilities; found it probable that rockets were fired at Israel from two of them; and itemized what was found under the stairwell of the Nuseirat school: a 120mm mortar — tube, bipod, and baseplate — and twenty containers [6]. The same Board also found that Israeli strikes on seven UN schools killed at least 44 people [6]. Both findings are in this article for the same reason: a source that reports against its own side’s interest on one page earns belief on the other.

The tunnelling under schools continued in peacetime, when no one could call it wartime improvisation. On June 1, 2017, UNRWA announced it had discovered a tunnel running beneath two of its Gaza schools in Maghazi; it “protested to Hamas,” the authority in control, and moved to seal the passage [7]. In 2021 it found a cavity and possible tunnel some 7.5 metres beneath another school and condemned the potential use [7]. And in February 2024 the tunnel under UNRWA headquarters — escorted reporters from Reuters, AP, and the Wall Street Journal saw it firsthand, its shaft beside an UNRWA school — settled the physical question for the agency’s own flagship compound [8]. What remains genuinely unresolved is knowledge: UNRWA’s commissioner-general said the headquarters had been vacated on October 12, 2023 and the agency had not been informed of the tunnel, and called for an independent inquiry [8]. The tunnel is documented. Who inside the agency knew is not.

The same discipline governs the personnel question. The UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services, having investigated nineteen UNRWA staff named by Israel after October 7, reported in August 2024 that in nine cases the evidence obtained — “if authenticated and corroborated could indicate” — that the staff “may have been involved” in the attack; in nine cases the evidence was insufficient; in one, there was no evidence, and the employee rejoined the agency [9]. That careful wording is the finding, and it is damning enough at face value: the UN terminated nine contracts on evidence it described that way. The broader Israeli claim — that hundreds or more than a thousand UNRWA employees are Hamas operatives — is a different matter: the Colonna Review of April 2024 found Israel had provided no evidence for it, and the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of October 22, 2025 recorded that Israel “has not substantiated” the claim that a significant part of UNRWA’s staff are Hamas members [10]. Both halves belong in print. An agency penetrated at the level the UN itself acted on, and a headline figure the UN and the Court say was never substantiated, are not the same claim, and conflating them only weakens the true one.

Aid: the tax state, the diversion cases, and the claim that fails

The commandeering of aid runs through the same machinery as everything else: control of the crossings and the economy. The documented instances are specific. In October 2023, UNRWA itself posted that personnel of the Hamas-run Health Ministry had taken fuel and medical supplies from its Gaza compound; the posts were later deleted [7]. Under the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism after 2014, more than 680,000 tonnes of cement entered under UN monitoring — and in April 2016 Israel suspended private-sector cement imports for seven weeks, UN OCHA recorded, “following a diversion of cement from the legitimate intended beneficiaries” [15]. In the World Vision case, Gaza director Mohammed el-Halabi was convicted by an Israeli court in June 2022 of diverting funds to Hamas; World Vision’s own independent audit found no diversion, the alleged sum of roughly $50 million exceeded the organization’s entire ten-year Gaza budget of about $22.5 million, and UN human-rights experts condemned the trial’s fairness — the conviction, the audit, and the condemnation have to be cited together, and together they make the case contested, not established [16]. The material conversion, by contrast, is on Hamas’s own film: in 2021 the Qassam Brigades published video of its men digging up water pipes to convert them into rocket bodies; AP reported the salvage practice, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s leader boasted of it to Reuters — with the caveat that the lines in the famous footage were abandoned pipes, and no documented case ties the practice to live, donor-funded civilian water mains [17].

And then the claim this article declines to make, because the research killed it: that Hamas systematically stole UN humanitarian aid during the current war. In July 2025, Reuters reported a USAID Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance internal analysis that reviewed 156 theft and loss incidents between October 2023 and May 2025 and found “no reports alleging Hamas” benefited from U.S.-funded supplies; fewer than one percent of supplies were affected, and at least 44 incidents were caused directly or indirectly by Israeli military action [13]. The same month, the New York Times reported that two senior Israeli officers and two other officials said the military had never found proof that Hamas regularly stole UN aid, that the UN system had been “largely effective,” and that Hamas had stolen from some smaller organizations [13]. UN OCHA states it has no evidence of systematic diversion of UN aid to Hamas; a USAID inspector-general investigation into “credible allegations” of interference and diversion remains open, which is an investigation, not a finding [14]. What is real, at scale, is looting: UNOPS recorded that about 88 percent of 2,604 UN trucks entering from May 19, 2025 were intercepted — “peacefully by hungry people or forcefully by armed actors” — a collapse of order the UN pointedly does not attribute to Hamas [13]. The honest sentence is the stronger one: Hamas taxed, controlled, and skimmed Gaza’s economy as its government for seventeen years, and diverted specific documented consignments; the sweeping claim of systematic theft of UN aid in this war is not supported by the best available evidence, including evidence from the U.S. and Israeli sides. Articles that print it anyway hand every critic of the documented record a free victory.

Mosques, universities, and the rest of the surface

The remaining sectors follow the pattern at lower evidentiary altitude, and are labelled accordingly. The New York Times’s July 2024 doctrine investigation documented weapons cached in mosques as a recurring practice across the territory [17]; individual mosque cases — a 2014 stockpile with tunnel entrances in a Khuza’a mosque’s basement prayer room — rest on Israel’s own war reporting and are IDF-sourced only [17]. The Islamic University of Gaza’s institutional embedding is a matter of public record — founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s founder, with sixteen Hamas legislators on its teaching staff over the years, including Ismail Haniyeh; the further claim of weapons research-and-development laboratories on campus has been asserted by Israel since 2008, denied by the university, and never independently verified [20]. Gaza’s Civil Defence sits structurally inside Hamas’s Interior Ministry — its spokesman’s statements are Hamas-government statements by organizational design; Israel’s further claim that the spokesman is a Qassam battalion operative rests on seized documents it has not opened to independent verification [11]. And on ambulances — a claim repeated constantly in this debate — this research found no independently documented instance, and one documented false accusation from 2014 that an Israeli broadcaster had to retract. The absence is recorded here rather than filled.

What the record establishes

Strip away everything contested and the structure still stands, because it was never resting on the contested parts. A movement seized a territory’s entire civil state — ministries, police, courts, payroll, taxes — and held it for seventeen years. It built a tunnel city under the civilian surface and said, on the record, that the tunnels were for its fighters and the civilians were the UN’s responsibility. The UN found its rockets in UN schools, its mortar under a school stairwell, its tunnels under the schools and under the UN’s own headquarters. Amnesty found its interrogators working inside the flagship hospital’s grounds; the New York Times found its weapons and hardened tunnel inside the hospital itself. It taxed every truck and every pack of cigarettes, skimmed the economy it governed, and converted civilian pipe into rockets on its own cameras. That is commandeering — not as a metaphor, and not as an Israeli brief, but as a matter of record compiled substantially by the very institutions that report most critically on Israel. The claims that failed verification — the command centre as presented, the systematic aid theft, the thousand-man infiltration — should be retired by everyone who wants the true claims believed. The documented record is worse than the embellished one, because the documented record is undeniable.

 

Sources

[1] Amnesty International, report on Hamas abuses during the 2014 Gaza conflict (May 2015) — torture and interrogation in a disused outpatient clinic in al-Shifa Hospital grounds. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/knowledge-hub/all-resources/hamas-tortured-and-killed-palestinian-collaborators-during-gaza-conflict-new-report/

[2] New York Times, reporting on al-Shifa Hospital (Nov 2023; Feb 12, 2024, reviewing classified Israeli documents); declassified U.S. intelligence assessment (Jan 2, 2024); AP reporting on Nasser Hospital hostage testimony (Feb 2024).

[3] Washington Post, visual investigation of the al-Shifa evidence (Dec 21, 2023): the publicly released evidence “falls short” of a command-and-control centre.

[5] UNRWA, statements condemning the placement of rockets in its Gaza schools (July 2014). https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/unrwa-strongly-condemns-placement-rockets-school

[6] UN Headquarters Board of Inquiry, summary (April 2015) — weapons in three UN facilities, probable firing from two, the Nuseirat mortar; also at least 44 killed in Israeli strikes on seven UN schools. https://unispal.un.org/pdfs/554E1CC298B3BFEF85257E44005ABD18.pdf

[7] UNRWA, condemnation of the tunnel beneath two Maghazi schools (June 1, 2017); Zaitoun school cavity (2021); UNRWA posts on Health Ministry removal of fuel and medical supplies (Oct 2023, later deleted). https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/unrwa-condemns-neutrality-violation-gaza-strongest-possible

[8] Reuters / AP / Wall Street Journal, escorted reporting on the tunnel beneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters (Feb 2024), with UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini’s response. https://atolltimes.mv/post/world/7627

[9] UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, investigation statement on UNRWA staff (Aug 5, 2024). https://www.un.org/unispal/document/unrwa-investigation-statement-05aug24/

[10] Colonna Review of UNRWA neutrality (April 2024); International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion (Oct 22, 2025), para. 118.

[11] Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “Gaza’s Economy: How Hamas Stays in Power” — civil government, payroll, police, and taxation under Hamas. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/gazas-economy-how-hamas-stays-power

[12] Washington Post (July 2025) — Hamas wartime import taxation and truck commandeering, per Gazan businessmen.

[13] Reuters (July 25, 2025) — USAID Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance internal analysis of 156 aid-loss incidents; New York Times (July 2025) — senior Israeli officers on the absence of proof of systematic UN-aid theft; UNOPS truck-interception figures.

[14] USAID Office of Inspector General, Gaza-related oversight work (open investigation). https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/USAID%20OIG%E2%80%99s%20Gaza-Related%20Oversight%20Work%2012.03.25%20%282%29.pdf

[15] UN OCHA, “Cement imports resume to the private sector in Gaza” (2016) — suspension following diversion of cement from intended beneficiaries. https://www.ochaopt.org/content/cement-imports-resume-private-sector-gaza

[16] Israeli court conviction of Mohammed el-Halabi (June 2022); World Vision independent audit (no diversion found); UN human-rights experts’ condemnation of the detention and conviction. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/un-human-rights-experts-condemn-israels-arbitrary-detention-and-conviction-of-palestinian-aid-worker-press-release/

[17] New York Times investigation of Hamas’s fighting doctrine (July 13, 2024); Al-Qassam Brigades video on converting water pipes to rockets (2021), with AP and Reuters reporting.

[18] Mousa Abu Marzouk, interview with RT Arabic (Oct 27, 2023) — tunnels built to protect Hamas fighters; civilian protection “the responsibility of the United Nations.”

[19] Reuters (Oct 15, 2026) — merchants suspend imports over Hamas per-truck fee; accounts not independently verified; fee reportedly withdrawn. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-says-commercial-goods-no-longer-entering-gaza-after-merchants-suspend-2026-10-15/

[20] Chronicle of Higher Education — the Islamic University of Gaza, its Hamas ties, and the unverified weapons-laboratory claims. https://www.chronicle.com/article/ties-to-hamas-raise-questions-about-the-role-of-bombed-university-in-gaza-117426/