CAIRO — As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, organized gangs are stealing much of the aid Israel allows into the enclave, operating freely in areas controlled by the Israeli military, according to aid group officials, humanitarian workers, transport companies and witnesses.

Officials said criminal looting has become the greatest impediment to distributing aid in the southern half of Gaza, home to the vast majority of displaced Palestinians. Armed bands of men have killed, beaten and kidnapped aid truck drivers in the area around Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, the main entry point into Gaza’s south, aid workers and transport companies said.

The thieves, who have run cigarette-smuggling operations throughout this year but are now also stealing food and other supplies, are tied to local crime families, residents say. The gangs are described by observers as rivals of Hamas and, in some cases, they have been targeted by remnants of Hamas’s security forces in other parts of the enclave.

An internal United Nations memo obtained by The Washington Post concluded last month that the gangs “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” or “protection” from the Israel Defense Forces. One gang leader, the memo said, established a “military like compound” in an area “restricted, controlled and patrolled by the IDF.”

Aid organizations say Israeli authorities have denied most of their requests for better measures to safeguard convoys, including appeals for safer routes, more open crossings and permission to allow Gaza’s civilian police to protect the trucks. Israeli forces within view of the attacks have also failed on multiple occasions to intervene as looting was underway, aid workers, U.N. officials, transport workers and truck drivers say.

The Israeli military has denied the allegations, saying in a statement that its troops have carried out “targeted countermeasures” against the looters “with an emphasis on targeting the terrorists and preventing collateral damage to the aid trucks and the elements of the international community.” The IDF is “working to enable and facilitate the transfer of aid,” the statement added.

In the latest major incident, 98 out of 109 trucks carrying U.N. food aid from Kerem Shalom were ransacked by armed men overnight Saturday, according to U.N. humanitarian agencies and Gaza businessman Adham Shuhaibar, who had eight trucks in the convoy. The looters shot at the trucks and detained a driver for hours, Shuhaibar said. A statement from UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said the attack caused “injuries to transporters” and “extensive vehicle damage.”

Muhannad Hadi, U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territories, said “Gaza is basically lawless. There is no security anywhere.” Israel is “the occupying power,” he said, so “this is on them. They need to make sure that the area is protected and secured.”

This story is based on more than 20 interviews with representatives from a range of international aid organizations, Palestinian businessmen involved in the transport of goods, and witnesses to attacks on humanitarian convoys. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their access to Gaza or the safety of their staff. The Post also reviewed previously unpublished U.N. documents on the scale of the looting crisis and spoke with the gang leader aid groups believe is the main culprit behind the attacks.

What began in the spring as a largely random phenomenon of desperate civilians stealing from trucks has now morphed into an organized criminal enterprise, aid groups say, and the gangs responsible have become increasingly violent and powerful — compounding the struggle to deliver food, hygiene items and cold-weather supplies to 2 million displaced and hungry people as winter approaches.

In October, the amount of assistance reaching Gazans fell to its lowest point since the early stages of the war, even as U.S. officials demanded that Israel surge aid across the enclave or risk losing some military support. While the threat of famine is most severe in the north, the entire population now faces acute food insecurity, a U.N.-backed panel found this month.

COGAT, the Israeli military’s civilian affairs department for the Palestinian territories, has justified restrictions on the flow of goods by alleging repeatedly that Hamas is stealing aid and preventing it from reaching civilians.

As Washington urges Israel to allow more trucks into Gaza, looting has become the greatest obstacle to distributing the limited aid that does make it in, according to a U.S. official, who added that Hamas is not behind the attacks — an assessment that was widely shared by those operating on the ground.

“We have not seen any physical interference from Hamas anywhere in our programs, north or south,” an official from a major international aid organization said.

Rise of the gangs

Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza more than a year ago, after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that left 1,200 dead. Hamas and other militants took about 250 people hostage. Israel’s war has flattened much of Gaza; killed more than 43,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; and displaced 1.9 million — 90% of the population.

Civil order began to collapse in February, as Israel targeted civilian police officers who had been guarding humanitarian convoys, citing their affiliation with the Hamas-run government. Desperate civilians and criminals began rushing trucks to steal supplies, causing a slowdown in deliveries. Initially, according to aid workers, many of the looters were hungry people trying to feed their families.

In May, Israel seized and shut down the Rafah border crossing with Egypt — which had been Gaza’s main lifeline — reducing the number of aid trucks able to enter the enclave. The majority of humanitarian traffic shifted to Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, which leads to a part of southern Gaza where powerful Bedouin families, some involved in organized crime, have long held sway.

By the summer, a lucrative black-market trade in smuggled cigarettes — banned by Israel from entering Gaza during the war — was booming, with organized gangs attacking trucks to search for them.

Tobacco became a dominant form of currency. A pack of 20 cigarettes now goes for around $1,000, according to Georgios Petropoulos, head of the Gaza office for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, calling it a “cancer” that’s “crept into our supply chain.”

He said cigarettes, originally hidden in produce, were now being found inside cans of food, showing that smuggling begins in factories, with much of the contraband believed to originate in Egypt. The smuggling route runs through the Sinai Peninsula and is linked to the Egyptian branches of the Bedouin tribes in Gaza, aid organizations and transport company executives said.

A spokesman for the Egyptian foreign press office did not respond to a request for comment.

U.N. officials say they have repeatedly asked Israel to clamp down on cigarette smuggling — or let cigarettes in legally — to ease the looting epidemic, but discussions have been fruitless.

In a video filmed by one humanitarian worker in June, and shared with The Post, four men stood or sat on an open-bed truck, one of them using a sharp object to cut into a carton of U.N. aid. They were searching for cigarettes, the worker said.

Over the summer, the United Nations and international aid organizations lost $25.5 million worth of humanitarian goods to looting, according to an Oct. 28 PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Post.

Israel cut commercial supply lines to Gaza last month, saying militants were benefiting from the trade, and the number of aid trucks it permitted to enter the Strip plummeted to near record lows. Nearly half of the already diminished food aid the World Food Program moved along the southern Gaza route was stolen, according to the presentation, which was given by OCHA to a group that includes U.N. agencies, nongovernmental organizations and donor countries, including the United States.

Gangs used to discard the aid on the road for civilians to pick over after locating stashed cigarettes, an international aid worker said. Now, “in a lot of cases they hijack the entire truck and take it to a warehouse” to resell food and other goods at exorbitant prices on the black market, they added.

Who ultimately profits from the smuggled or stolen goods remains murky. Israeli officials, who have often accused Hamas of hijacking aid and commercial deliveries to enrich itself, acknowledged last week that crime families were behind some of the looting.

“Some looters have connections to Hamas, and some do not,” an Israeli official told journalists at a briefing on Nov. 11, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The man aid groups believe to be the ringleader of the most prolific gang spent time in a Hamas jail on criminal charges before the war, said Adham Shuhaibar’s brother Nahed, the president of the private transportation association in Gaza.

The internal U.N. memo obtained by The Post identified Yasser Abu Shabab — a member of the Tarabin tribe, which spans southern Gaza, the Negev Desert in Israel and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — as “the main and most influential stakeholder behind systematic and massive looting” of aid convoys.

Operating from the eastern part of Rafah, Abu Shabab leads an outfit of about “100 thugs” who attack trucks bringing food and other supplies into Gaza, Nahed Shuhaibar said. He described how the gang sets up berms to waylay convoys along the Israeli-controlled route from Kerem Shalom, where they wait with Kalashnikovs and other weapons.

In one incident in early October, about 80 of Shuhaibar’s 100 aid trucks were attacked and the goods inside stolen by Abu Shabab’s men, he said. The gang has killed four of his drivers since May, he added, most recently in an attack on Oct. 15. Another driver who was attacked last month remains in the hospital with broken arms and legs, Shuhaibar said.

“The hallmark now, as opposed to two months ago, is that there’s a real pronounced violence,” Petropoulos said. “The truck drivers we hire are beaten, maimed, killed.”

The Post reached Abu Shabab, the alleged gang leader, by phone last month. He denied that his men carry weapons or attack drivers. And while he acknowledged that he and his relatives “take from the trucks,” he insisted they do not touch “food, tents, or supplies for children.”

His operation was born of desperation, he said: “Hamas has left us with nothing, and their armed men occasionally come and shoot at us,” he said. “Let those who accuse us of working with Israel say what they want,” he added. “Israel doesn’t need us.”

In densely populated areas farther inside Gaza where Hamas security forces still operate, though with a greatly reduced footprint, they punish merchants who procure goods from Abu Shabab to sell at inflated prices, Nahed Shuhaibar said. “Things are under control” in areas Hamas controls, he said. “The only challenge facing us is the area where Abu Shabab is located” — a part of Gaza that is “under Israeli protection,” he added.

Israel did not respond to questions from The Post about Abu Shabab and his alleged criminal activities.

Gaza’s most dangerous road

For months, Israel approved only one route for all aid entering through the Kerem Shalom crossing: a rough road running from the cargo pickup point through a desolate patch of southeastern Gaza.

One humanitarian worker who regularly travels the route said looters typically station themselves a little over a mile and a half from the crossing. Others recounted seeing men and boys even closer to the entry point, some armed with sticks, rods and guns.

While traveling in a humanitarian convoy during a visit to Gaza this month, Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said he saw a group of men carrying sticks less than half a mile from the aid pickup point. Mattresses intended for displaced people were strewn along the road, cut to pieces by thieves searching for cigarettes. Several trucks were attacked later that day, he said.

Adham Shuhaibar and Qaher Hameed, the owner of another transportation company in Gaza, each said their trucks were pillaged just over 500 yards from Israeli military posts.

The Israeli military “sees them and silently monitors everything that happens,” Hameed said.

Egeland, whose organization provides humanitarian relief and psychosocial support for children in Gaza, said “it’s not possible to do anything” in the enclave without Israel’s knowledge.

While the gangs carry out their work openly, local escorts employed by logistics companies were “shot at repeatedly” by Israeli forces in early October, the U.N. memo said, describing one incident involving a quadcopter drone.

Meanwhile, suspected Hamas fighters carrying weapons in other parts of Gaza are generally taken out immediately by the Israeli military, aid workers said. The IDF frequently releases drone surveillance footage of such targeted strikes.

U.N. officials say they have confronted their Israeli counterparts over the lack of security around Kerem Shalom: “At one point we told [Israeli officials], what is that meant to make us think if the only place in Gaza where an armed Palestinian can come within 150 meters of a tank and not get shot is there?” Petropoulos said.

Humanitarian groups have repeatedly asked Israeli authorities to approve other crossings and routes that would allow them to bypass the gangs. For months, they recounted, those entreaties were ignored: “The only route they give us is directly through the looters,” one aid worker said.

When the World Food Program tried to clear another road for humanitarian use in recent months, its team came under fire on several occasions, according to Alia Zaki, a spokeswoman for the agency.

The new route was finally approved by Israel last month, and some aid trucks have begun using it. But looters have already adapted, targeting convoys there as well, Zaki said.

Janti Soeripto, chief executive of Save the Children, said the only way to truly address Gaza’s humanitarian crisis would be to flood the enclave with aid and commercial supplies — undercutting the price gouging that fuels the looting.

“A lot of the disorder goes away when you actually get humanitarian access,” she said.

Aid groups say the lives of untold Palestinians could depend on it.

Morris reported from Berlin, Harb from London, Berger from Jaffa, Israel, and Balousha from Toronto. Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv and Meg Kelly in Washington contributed to this report.