You Can’t Steal 189 Trucks in Gaza
As I write this, I’m on a plane heading home from Taiwan, listening to the Motown Station on Amazon Music and responding to Signal and WhatsApp messages between brief conversations with flight attendants. My heart is in a dozen places at once.
Please keep my daughter and granddaughter in your prayers. They’re currently on the roof of their home in Tokyo because of a tsunami warning following the massive earthquake off the coast of Russia. And please, please pray for our Christian families at Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza, where shells have been landing within meters of the compound all day. That small church has become a refuge and a bullseye all at once.
In the midst of these very real, very personal emergencies, I’ve been watching a narrative spread—one that sounds damning at first, but falls apart the moment you apply reason. The claim is that Hamas is stealing 25% of the humanitarian food aid entering Gaza. A quarter of the aid. Not just a few sacks, not a few trucks. But one in four full-sized 40-foot container trucks—month after month—vanishing into Hamas’s hands.
Now, we should start with the obvious: Hamas and other criminal gangs have stolen aid. That’s not up for debate. But this new narrative goes far beyond that. It claims that every month, 189 trucks—carrying nearly 5,000 metric tons of food—are being stolen, moved, unloaded, stored, and guarded by Hamas. And that this is all happening without creating a single visible or undeniable footprint.
That’s not just a lie. It’s logistically and militarily impossible.
To put it in perspective, it takes roughly 755 container trucks each month to provide just 1,000 calories a day to Gaza’s population of 2.2 million people. A quarter of that is 189 trucks. That’s an entire convoy. You don’t move 189 trucks in a besieged, flattened urban strip without being seen. You don’t hide them in tunnels already packed with weapons and hostages. You don’t reroute them in the middle of drone surveillance, satellite monitoring, and signals intelligence from one of the most capable militaries on earth.
And this isn’t theoretical. To pull off this kind of theft, Hamas would need nearly 2,000 men—drivers, armed escorts, unloaders, guards, commanders, engineers, and logistics teams. It would require weeks of planning, reliable fuel supplies, civilian silence, and perfect operational security. And that’s just for one month. To sustain it month after month? It would be the largest food-theft operation in modern history—bigger than the black markets of Syria, Sudan, or Somalia.
And what about the storage? You can’t just bury thousands of tons of food in the sand. You need clean, ventilated space, reliable concealment, and round-the-clock armed protection. Gaza doesn’t have that. Even if you found a way to stash the food, the population would know. People talk. Civilians notice when trucks go missing or when food reappears behind guarded gates. Rumors fly. Photos leak. And all it takes is one intercepted radio call or drone pass to blow the operation wide open.
But here’s the thing: no such evidence has surfaced—not from UNRWA, not from Israel, not from independent NGOs on the ground. That’s not because people are afraid to speak. It’s because this scale of theft is fiction. It’s propaganda, and it’s dangerous.
Yes, Hamas is guilty of many things. But claiming they are stealing a quarter of the food aid during a humanitarian crisis is not just incorrect—it distracts from the real work of accountability, diplomacy, and aid protection. It muddies the waters. It turns reason into rhetoric.
You can’t steal 189 trucks of food each month in Gaza without making a spectacle of it. And this is not a spectacle the world has seen.
Pray for peace. Pray for clarity. And don’t let anyone weaponize exaggeration in the middle of real suffering. People are hungry. People are dying. We owe them the truth.
In Christ,
Jason Jones