UN Agencies Still Withholding Employee Records in U.S. Probe of Hamas Ties to Gaza Aid Groups

An ongoing federal investigation into whether U.N. relief agencies in Gaza have been infiltrated by Hamas is stalling out, according to U.S. officials and diplomats cited by the Washington Free Beacon. Six U.N. bodies have had the requests sitting on their desks since December 2025, and none has fully complied.

The probe, run by the USAID Office of Inspector General under the name Operation Stop the Carousel, is a statutorily independent law enforcement office, separate from what remains of USAID itself. Investigators sent letters to six U.N. agencies asking for the names, contact information, and dates and places of birth of employees who worked on U.S.-government funded programs. They also asked each agency to detail its "interactions with Hamas."

More than three months after that deadline, a source briefed on the investigation told the Free Beacon that none of the six organizations had turned over the complete set of records requested. The World Health Organization, UNICEF, the International Organization for Migration, and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs gave only partial answers, according to nonpublic oversight findings submitted to Congress and reported by the Daily Wire. The World Food Programme has not submitted a final response. The U.N. Development Programme has not responded at all.

What investigators say they've already found

The inspector general's office has identified roughly 100 individuals affiliated with Hamas who received salaries funded through the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, known as UNRWA, according to the Free Beacon. It's the basis on which the investigation expanded, now covering roughly 1,500 UNRWA-linked individuals suspected of ties to terrorism.

Internal U.N. documents reviewed as part of the oversight process indicate that international investigators set aside intercepted communications and location data connecting aid workers to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, according to the Daily Wire, and did not evaluate whether those staffers held active status in Hamas's armed wing. A review process had relevant evidence in hand and chose not to act on it. It has not been independently verified beyond the sourcing described here, and UNRWA has previously said it has zero tolerance for staff involvement with any armed group and has taken steps to fire or investigate employees flagged by member states.

UNRWA has faced this accusation before. Israel has repeatedly said U.N. facilities in Gaza were used to store Hamas weapons, shelter fighters, and stage attacks. The agency has disputed characterizations that it is "fully infiltrated," and has said it lacks the independent forensic capacity of a national intelligence service to vet every employee against a foreign terrorist organization's membership rolls in real time. Running background checks on tens of thousands of local staff in a war zone, without cooperation from the local government or the terrorist organization itself, is a genuinely hard problem. Critics counter that difficulty of verification is not a reason to keep funding the agency without full transparency, and that if UNRWA cannot document who is or isn't a Hamas affiliate, U.S. taxpayer money should not keep flowing through it.

Washington's response

A senior State Department official told the Free Beacon that "this administration will not allow the U.N. to evade accountability in its handling of U.S. taxpayer dollars," calling the lack of cooperation "totally unacceptable." A senior American diplomat told the outlet the United Nations needs to cut ties "once and for all" from what the diplomat called "the cancerous UNRWA."

U.S. diplomats are pushing to route future Gaza aid work away from UNRWA entirely, toward alternative structures including the U.S.-backed Board of Peace and an Israel-based Civil-Military Coordination Center meant to prevent aid diversion, according to the Daily Wire.

On Capitol Hill, U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz backed a push from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in April to permanently end UNRWA's funding by statute. Cruz said the Free Beacon's earlier reporting "revealed that numerous U.N. agencies have been stonewalling the OIG's efforts to track their ties to terrorism and how they spent American aid," adding that they are "even refusing to disclose" basic staffing information.

What's unresolved

No criminal charges have been filed against any named individual or agency as a result of this investigation. No U.N. agency has been designated a foreign terrorist organization, though lawmakers are actively pushing for that status for UNRWA specifically. The inspector general's office has not published a public final report, and the figures on Hamas-linked personnel come from sources briefed on the investigation rather than a released document.

The open question is whether Congress moves to legislate an end to U.S. funding for UNRWA outright, a step Cruz has already proposed, or whether the agencies eventually comply with the outstanding records requests first. Six U.N. bodies have now had between three and seven months to respond to a straightforward request for employee names and contact details. None has provided the complete file.