The problem with Gaza reconstruction is not simply how much money will be spent. It is whether anyone in Washington has the political courage to ensure American taxpayers are no longer subsidizing the same failed systems that helped produce the Hamas massacre of Israelis (and Americans as well as nationals of over 30 other countries) on October 7, 2023, in the first place.
If Team Trump does not course-correct, and especially if a future Democratic administration or Democratic Congress swings the pendulum back toward a pre–October 7 approach to aid to Palestinians, the United States is setting Israel up for another cycle of violence. Whether Gaza is governed by Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, or some repackaged successor structure under the supervision of the Board of Peace, the deeper political culture and humanitarian incentive systems remain largely untouched.
That is the uncomfortable reality almost nobody in the international community wants to admit.
“Pay-for-slay” structures that reward terrorism are in direct violation of US law, the Taylor Force Act. Yet the Palestinian Authority continues to provide lifetime stipends to terrorists and their families. The glorification of violence in schools and media persists. Textbooks have not been changed in decades and still teach the language of terror and the elimination of the Jewish people from the land of Israel. Eliminationist rhetoric toward Israel, with unending use of language to globalize the intifada, continues unabated. Suppression of dissent is a constant. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Authority, and other unaccountable Palestinian leaders clamp down on anyone who might stick their head up to protest corruption, honor killings, and the abuse of humanitarian systems. That does not skirt the bounds of terrorism; it is terrorism.
Yet Washington’s foreign-policy establishment and the sprawling humanitarian bureaucracy still behave as though more aid alone can stabilize Gaza. This flawed thinking failed catastrophically before October 7, and there is little evidence that policymakers, the UN, and self-righteous NGOs have truly reckoned with why. Meanwhile, 50 Americans were murdered by Gazans on and after October 7, 2023. And the terrorists’ funding came, in part, from American taxpayers’ dollars.
To its credit, one of the few parts of the federal government that has aggressively confronted this reality has been the USAID Inspector General’s office. Even after the dismantling of USAID as an independent agency, the watchdog apparatus focused on foreign assistance continues to operate — and what it is uncovering should alarm every taxpayer.
The Inspector General has already referred 21 individuals tied to Hamas-linked activity at UNRWA (the UN agency solely focused on Palestinians) to the State Department for placement on a government-wide blacklist. This referral is normally reciprocated by the UN system but has not yet been tested. It is intended to prevent these individuals from quietly resurfacing at other aid organizations. According to reporting by the New York Post, investigators believe there may be hundreds more Hamas-affiliated UNRWA personnel under scrutiny.
That should have been a five-alarm fire in Washington.
Instead, too many international organizations reacted defensively, as though oversight itself were the scandal. Organizations like Doctors without Borders and others who regularly were vetted by Hamas to operate in Gaza only claim process foul when the Jewish State requires the same. The humanitarian establishment has spent years demanding ever-larger flows of Western aid while resisting meaningful accountability whenever abuses are exposed.
Some, like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), UNICEF, and multiple NGOs, operated programs and provided material support to programs in hospitals used by Hamas for terror operations, as reported as early as 2014 in outlets like the Washington Post. Not only did they never once do their duty to humanitarian principles by raising objections and immediately ending programs until neutrality was restored, but they also willingly allowed their humanitarian reputations and logos to be used as cover for terrorist activity, paving the way to the mass atrocities on October 7th.
Now the Foreign Assistance Inspector General has launched “Operation Stop the Carousel,” an effort specifically designed to prevent Hamas members and other extremists from simply rotating between NGOs and U.N. agencies under different titles and payroll systems. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) praised the watchdog effort during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, while House members highlighted the investigations during House hearings on UN accountability.
Congressional appropriators are reportedly considering cutting as much as $1.8 billion in total UN funding, including provisions denying taxpayer dollars to organizations that refuse to cooperate with Inspector General investigations. That is not “anti-humanitarian.” It is basic due diligence. And if the diligence turns up more corruption and misappropriation of funds, then more funding to the UN should be cut. American taxpayers have every right to ask whether aid money intended for civilians has instead helped sustain the very institutions, patronage networks, and ideological machinery that perpetuate terror.
For decades, the international system incentivized permanent dependency rather than reform. Refugee status became hereditary and effectively permanent. The only legitimate use of the term “refugee” is to provide protection for the displaced–not to provide cover for the savages of October 7th. The large, stringless awards to UNRWA and the corrupt ICRC, with oversight outsourced to the feckless UN oversight system, resulted in the murders of 50 Americans whose taxes funded their murderers and bought the UN vehicles that dragged their bodies back to terror tunnels in Gaza. Radical actors learned they could weaponize civilian suffering while much of the world looked away. Billions of dollars from American taxpayers flowed with astonishingly little scrutiny.
This is why oversight matters so much now. In March, the Foreign Assistance Deputy Inspector General, Adam Kaplan, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on waste, fraud, and abuse in foreign assistance programs, including the urgent need for stronger UN reforms. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch (R-ID) has even proposed expanding the Inspector General’s jurisdiction to create a broader watchdog for all foreign assistance programs across multiple federal agencies.
That is exactly the kind of structural reform Washington should be pursuing, and it will leave taxpayers better off in the future. But oversight alone will not be enough unless the political class is willing to confront the larger problem: the incentives themselves.
No reconstruction effort will succeed if aid continues flowing into systems that tolerate terrorism, glorify martyrdom, suppress internal reformers, and treat accountability as optional. No amount of money can rebuild Gaza if the underlying ideology and governing incentives remain intact.
President Trump has the political capital to force a reckoning with these institutions in a way previous administrations never seriously attempted. But time is running short, and there is little visible evidence that the bureaucracy is moving with the urgency this moment and Trump’s own standards demand.
The danger is not merely waste. The danger is that Washington, the United Nations, and the broken humanitarian industry will drift back toward the same pre–October 7 assumptions that failed so catastrophically before: send more money, ask fewer questions, avoid uncomfortable truths, and hope stability somehow emerges on its own.
That is not compassion. It is negligence.
If the United States is going to help finance Gaza’s reconstruction, then Americans deserve ironclad guarantees that their tax dollars are not subsidizing terror networks, extremist indoctrination, or corrupt patronage systems masquerading as humanitarianism.
Otherwise, reconstruction will simply become the down payment on the next war.
Bonnie Glick was the Deputy Administrator and COO of the US Agency for International Development in the first Trump Administration and is now a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, DC.