For years, international NGOs and humanitarian agencies told the world they were working “neutrally” in Gaza. But according to newly declassified Hamas documents, that neutrality never existed.

In a conversation with HonestReporting, NGO Monitor vice president Olga Deutsch explains how Gaza was run not as a normal territory, but rather as a tightly controlled police state where Hamas oversaw almost every aspect of international aid. “No one was neutral or independent in Gaza,” she says. “Hamas controlled everything.”

The documents, seized by the IDF and later declassified, come from Hamas’ own ministries. They show a system in which Hamas approved NGO staff, tracked individual employees, and controlled which projects and grantees received funding.

The “Guarantors” Inside Humanitarian Groups

At the heart of this system is something Hamas called the “guarantor.”

Every international organization working in Gaza had a local liaison, many of whom held senior roles inside the NGOs, and at least some of them were identified as Hamas members or affiliates. That person had two jobs: report back to Hamas on what the organization was doing, and make sure foreign staff didn’t see what Hamas didn’t want them to see.

The guarantors watched staff behavior, tapped phones, monitored social media, and filed detailed reports. Those reports graded organizations as “cooperative,” “medium cooperative,” or “non-cooperative” — but even “non-cooperative” groups still had to toe Hamas’ line if they wanted to operate at all.

It wasn’t just about skimming food or supplies. Hamas treated NGOs as a strategic asset: a way to control the population, gather intelligence, and cover military activity. Aid groups working on agriculture near the Israeli border were of particular interest, because those areas overlapped with Hamas infiltration routes and surveillance of the fence.

One internal report describes a Norwegian Refugee Council delegation visiting an elderly couple whose apartment floor was shaking from below. The couple suspected Hamas was digging a tunnel. The delegation, escorted by Hamas officials, ignored the complaint and moved on. No warning was issued, no public statement was given when the delegation later returned home. Just silence.

Why Gaza Is Different — and Why That’s Not an Excuse

Deutsch acknowledges that working under a terror regime poses real risks for aid workers. But she rejects the idea that this explains everything, or excuses anything.

In other conflict zones, she notes, the same organizations have no problem openly labeling groups like Boko Haram or Al-Qaeda as terrorist organizations, even while negotiating access on the ground. In Gaza, by contrast, Hamas is often softened into “militants” or “fighters,” while Israel is frequently accused of crimes that are never substantiated.

Gaza is also structurally unique. In many war zones, international staff live in fortified compounds separate from the local population. In Gaza, NGOs live and work inside the civilian areas, making it easier for Hamas to monitor their every move — and harder for them to claim they don’t know what was going on.

But whatever the operational challenges, Deutsch says the line was clearly crossed when organizations not only adapted to Hamas rule but then turned around and accused Israel of crimes while hiding what they knew about Hamas’ tactics.

From “Neutral NGOs” to Narrative Warfare

The documents also confirm what Israel has long said about Hamas’ use of hospitals and medical centers.

According to Deutsch, Hamas records show that every hospital and medical center in Gaza had a Hamas wing, with at least one tunnel linked to many of these sites. All the international organizations working there knew that Hamas used protected civilian infrastructure for meetings, medical treatment of operatives, and military activity.

Yet when the IDF struck near these sites after October 7, many of the same humanitarian groups were among the first to accuse Israel of targeting civilians or attacking hospitals, without mentioning Hamas’ presence at all.

Deutsch says part of the problem is what NGO Monitor calls the “halo effect.” NGOs are treated by journalists, politicians, and the public as uniquely trustworthy — as if their reports are objective, apolitical snapshots of reality.

In practice, many of these organizations arrive in Gaza with political assumptions already formed by the media and activist networks back home. They then produce reports that reinforce those assumptions, which are eagerly picked up by international outlets and quoted as fact.

Journalists have told Deutsch they “have to stay neutral,” which, in the Israel-Hamas context, means refusing to label Hamas a terrorist organization even when their own governments have done so. At the same time, these outlets unquestioningly quote casualty figures and narratives that originate with Hamas-controlled institutions.

The result is a vicious cycle: NGOs produce politicized reports, the media amplifies them, and then new NGO staff and donors absorb those narratives as the starting point for their own “humanitarian” work.

From Durban to October 7: This Didn’t Start Yesterday

The entanglement of NGOs, politics, and anti-Israel campaigning is not new. NGO Monitor itself was founded after the 2001 UN Durban Conference in South Africa, where international NGOs embraced the edict that “Zionism is racism” and committed themselves to using human rights language as a strategic weapon against Israel.

What has changed, Deutsch argues, is the intensity. In the last decade, and especially since October 7, accusations that once lived on the fringes — genocide, apartheid, deliberate starvation — have moved into the mainstream language of humanitarian organizations.

At the same time, record levels of antisemitic incidents in North America and Europe have not been treated by major human rights giants as a central human rights crisis, even as those same organizations repeatedly single out Israel.

What the Documents Show — And Why It Matters Now

The Hamas documents at the center of NGO Monitor’s report were seized by the IDF in Gaza and later declassified. Most come from Hamas’ Ministry of Internal Security — the same body responsible for policing dissent, internal surveillance, and managing foreign organizations. A smaller number are linked to the ministries of education and agriculture, where project activity overlapped.

NGO Monitor translated and analyzed thousands of pages, connecting Hamas’ internal tracking of NGOs with publicly available information on the same organizations and their funding.

Deutsch says the timing of the report is critical. As the international community debates how to rebuild Gaza, estimates for reconstruction have reached around $70 billion. If that money is channeled into the same systems that existed before October 7, she warns, the world will simply rebuild the infrastructure that allowed Hamas to thrive.

For individual donors who want to help civilians but fear enabling Hamas or politicized NGOs, Deutsch’s advice is simple: do basic due diligence.

Check an organization’s public statements and social media. See what it says about Israel, Gaza, and the war. Ask whether it operates in Gaza or the West Bank, and what projects it funds there. If the group regularly accuses Israel of genocide, apartheid, or deliberate starvation, that should trigger serious questions.

“Money should be conditional,” she says. “The same logic you use to choose a doctor or a school should apply to the charities you support. Don’t send money blindly.”

A Moment of Choice

Deutsch has been presenting this report in parliaments and policy forums across Europe. For her, the stakes go far beyond the Israeli–Palestinian arena.

The way NGOs, governments, and media handle Gaza’s reconstruction will signal whether the international system is willing to confront how human rights and humanitarian language have been weaponized, or whether it will simply pour money back into an unreformed structure controlled by a terror group.

“If we don’t learn from what these documents show,” she says, “we’re not just failing Israelis or Palestinians. We’re undermining the credibility of humanitarian work and the democratic societies that depend on it.”

To read the full report and learn more about the organization’s critical work, visit ngo-monitor.org

HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.