Jerusalem, 25 June, 2025 (TPS-IL) — Hamas are controlling the food supply as a tactic to garner more teenage recruits, an aid worker in Gaza and experts have told TPS-IL.
In recent weeks, claims of a famine and repeated pressure on Israel to provide food for people in the Gaza strip has led to the establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an American-funded initiative that works alongside Israel to feed Gazans.
As the focus of world news shifted to the Iran-Israel conflict, TPS-IL spoke to experts and people on the ground to understand what is really happening with the food supply in Gaza.
“Hamas control aid, it’s one of their things. We see it all, Hamas act physically. This is not intelligence.” A member of Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), told TPS-IL. “…Hamas takes the aid in Gaza.”
COGAT works to get the food trucks into Gaza. GHF works alongside them, and many other security contractors to deliver meals, something the UN aid agencies are vocal in opposing, claiming that to work with Israel lacks ‘impartiality’.
GHF claims to have delivered more than 42 million meals to date, and continues to operate daily, despite having five of their volunteers murdered by Hamas while doing so.
One expert told TPS-IL that Hamas controls the strip with the aim of ensuring teenagers end up in their ranks. Dr Igal Shiri, who works at the counterterrorism institute Meir Amit, said: “Hamas completely control the area [the Gaza strip].
“Even though there is the massive attack, and you can see Aza is destroyed, with most of Gaza under bombing, they continue to control the civilians. They still control the area with aggression, even under attack.
“Every little bit of food – they stole it. When they get the food, they get the power. The young people in Gaza are not working.
“There is no school, no university, and they have no effective way to earn money, so Hamas has the power. They can pay children 15 shekels to do what they want.”
He went on to explain that the control starts with the food, but eventually infiltrates every aspect of life in Gaza: “It’s a problem because they still control Gaza, even after 18 months of war.
“The control is also based on the way of thinking of the people there. Since 2007, Hamas controlled the strip, everything is from therm, and the way they build.
“So basically the people are Hamas. They control the food first, then the money, but the people still think Hamas is the strong power, and that’s why it’s difficult to change the authority there.
“Someone in 2007 who was five, today his blood still belongs to Hamas, and he’s gotten their way of thinking from the mosque, the street, etc. For Hamas it’s really easy to recruit boys when they already think like they do.
“After 2007, 10,000 people joined Hamas. It’s really easy because they need money and they can pay them little. On top of the recruitment, they threw 500 people from the rooftops, so people are too scared not to join them.”
Accurate recruitment figures for Hamas are not obtainable due to the unreliability of Hamas reporting, but Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in January that the US government believed Hamas had recruited almost as many as it had lost since the beginning of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
Other sources claim as many as 15,000 new recruits were added to the group since October 7.
Shiri continued to outline how Hamas use media manipulation to wildly exaggerate claims of starvation, which eventually trickles down into them controlling food supplies: “It’s a narrative that they’re starving.
“People are not starving there, if you really look at the supply, it’s more than a lot of places, but the way they think is ingrained in them since 1948.
“It’s a powerful way of acting, as a victim, they get a lot of money, and they did even before 2007. With that money – they didn’t build factories, they just prepared themselves against the battle of Israel.
“If they really cared [about providing for their people and building a country], they would build schools and factories, but they put thousands of billions into constructing tunnels and we have to think why? For 20 years, all they thought about was October 7.
“So they have problems with electricity and warfare, but not food. Some places, the people do struggle, like in the North, but in the towns, it’s easy.
“We got pictures from inside, you can see the food. So they are not starving, but its good to say you are and show pictures of children in the hospital, because that gives them power.”
He then explained how Hamas steal and hoard food to manipulate prices: “When the trucks go in, Hamas takes all the stuff and puts it in the tunnels. They’ve got enough money and enough food, and they then sell at a high price, which is really a problem. They control the food and the price.”
Another expert, Dr Nesya Rubinstein- Shemer, who wrote a book on Hamas’s ideology and is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar Ilan University, told TPS-IL that the control of food has been a tactic of terror groups even before Hamas was founded.
She explained: “The history of Hamas goes back further than it’s establishment in 1987; their roots began as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 in Egypt.
“The Muslim Brotherhood was founded on the [Islamic ideological] basis of ‘dawah’ – the concept of conquering the hearts of the people and reaching for a firm basis in the population, before trying to achieve a role in the state.
“Muslim Brotherhood belongs to political Islam. The end goal is to gain political power, but they believe that to do that, they first have to gain control over the population.
“Muslim Brotherhood did this first, because the population had it very hard from a social point of view, so they established social structure to help society and provide places to eat, food for the poor, medical treatment, summer camps for youth – a whole kind of social engagement with the population to gain control and support.
“The main aim was to achieve ideological support, to achieve help from the population in whatever they need.
“After eight years, they established 150 branches all over Egypt, because this is what the population needed, so this is how they gained influence.”
This, she said, is where Hamas garnered it’s food-control tactics: “Hamas did the same in Gaza, before it was established.
“Ahmed Yassin was the establisher of Hamas, but before they were established in 1987, in 1973, Yassin established another organisation El Mujjma El Islami – this organzation gained control of the population through the establishment of institutions like mosques, kindergartens, schools, and he offered aid in clothes, and food.
“Then came the Hamas movement. Hamas now has perfect control over the population because they control food and humanitarian aid. Many people from Hamas worked in UNWRA.
“The message put out by Hamas to the people, over time was that ‘if you are loyal to Hamas, you can get what you need like fuel, medical supplies, food’ – basically everything Israel gave them over the years.”
She went on to detail how Hamas continue to use food to maintain control: “Hamas are acting as a gatekeeper to the food supply. Additionally, if you [regular Palestinians] resist Hamas, you will be the last in line [for food].”
Finally, she told TPS-IL how Hamas use the image of starvation to maintain control: “Now what they’re doing is perpetuating the narrative of hunger in the world.
“They have Al Jazeera in six languages, which works 24/7 in supplying pictures. Hamas don’t care if the population die and suffer – on the contrary, it serves them, because then the world sees and it is translated into political pressure on the world to step in.
“Jihad also means fighting through media. This makes all the countries isolate Israel because it is demonised in the world media. This is very problematic.
“Hamas presents the idea of liberation and people don’t understand they are a terror organization. People don’t know the meaning of ‘the river to sea’.
“Hamas is a murderous terrorist organisation, which pretends to fight for the liberation of Palestine…
“Since 2005, there wasn’t a single [Israeli] soldier in Gaza – they [Hamas] chose to take money and make tunnels and to buy missiles in order to attack Israel. They are not freedom fighters, and there is no solution [to be made with them].
“Now the situation is very problematic because they use world media to create a bad image of Israel and it’s challenging.” GHF was contacted for comment.
