According to its website, USAID supplied at least $641 million of the $1.2 billion in humanitarian aid America has provided to the Palestinians since October 7, 2023. In fact, the USAID inspector general led a delegation to Israel to oversee this aid on the week of January 20. The problem is that the agency usually works through local institutions, and in the Middle East and elsewhere these are not always so humanitarian as they seem.

An investigation by Gabby Deutch and Lahav Harkov gives a sense of both the good and the evil done by USAID. A few examples suffice:

One organization that received USAID funds directed $2 million to another group that arranged meetings between Palestinian teens and convicted terrorists. Another USAID grantee produced a documentary criticizing U.S. anti-BDS laws. . . . USAID has also provided funding to top Israeli medical institutions including Shaare Zedek Medical Center and Hadassah hospitals in Jerusalem.

In another investigation, based on conversations with several current and former officials, Adam Kredo takes a look at the destructive ways USAID has been spending its money. It seems that much of the agency’s corruption occurred during the recent directorship of the Israel-hating former UN ambassador Samantha Power:

In November 2022, for instance, USAID awarded $100,000 to a Palestinian activist group whose leaders hailed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terror group. Just six days before Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel, USAID handed $900,000 “to a terror charity in Gaza involved with the son of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.”

USAID’s hostilities toward the Jewish state, however, ran deeper than the agency’s grantmaking. Under Samantha Power, . . . agency officials fought pro-Israel policymaking at the State Department, often urging their colleagues at Foggy Bottom to pare down statements that praised the Jewish state, former officials said. In 2021, during a period of conflict with Hamas, Power herself refused to meet with Israel’s ambassador unless Israel reached a cease-fire with the Iran-backed terror group.

Nor are these problems restricted to Israel and Gaza. Isabel Vincent and Benjamin Weinthal report that “USAID humanitarian packages were found amid a cache of weapons owned by the terror group Hizballah in Lebanon.”

Ron Ben-Yishai, reporting from a visit to IDF forces in the Gaza Strip, analyzes the state of the fighting, and “the persistent challenge of eradicating an entrenched enemy in a complex urban terrain.”

Hamas, sensing the war’s end, is mounting a final effort to inflict casualties. The IDF now controls 65 percent of Gaza’s territory operationally, with observation, fire dominance, and relative freedom of movement, alongside systematic tunnel destruction. . . . Major P, a reserve company commander, says, “It’s frustrating to hear at home that we’re stagnating. The public doesn’t get that if we stop, Hamas will recover.”

Senior IDF officers cite two reasons for the slow progress: meticulous care to protect hostages, requiring cautious movement and constant intelligence gathering, and avoiding heavy losses, with 22 soldiers killed since June.

Two-and-a-half of Hamas’s five brigades have been dismantled, yet a new hostage deal and IDF withdrawal could allow Hamas to regroup. . . . Hamas is at its lowest military and governing point since its founding, reduced to a fragmented guerrilla force. Yet, without complete disarmament and infrastructure destruction, it could resurge as a threat in years.

At the same time, Ben-Yishai observes, not everything hangs on the IDF:

According to the Southern Command chief Major General Yaron Finkelman, the IDF is close to completing its objectives. In classical military terms, “defeat” means the enemy surrenders—but with a jihadist organization, the benchmark is its ability to operate against Israel.

Despite [the IDF’s] battlefield successes, the broader strategic outcome—especially regarding the hostages—now hinges on decisions from the political leadership. “We’ve done our part,” said a senior officer. “We’ve reached a crossroads where the government must decide where it wants to go—both on the hostage issue and on Gaza’s future.”