In February 2023, weeks after an earthquake killed thousands in Syria, 100 trucks of humanitarian aid sat stranded. Not because roads were blocked. Because Assad’s regime demanded more than half the cargo. Turkish-backed groups blocked another 30.

Children froze. Tents sat in warehouses. This wasn’t an aberration. It was the pattern: a system that feeds wars while claiming to fight them.

When President Trump dismantled USAID, the establishment reacted with horror. The Lancet estimated 14 million could die. Shuttering 86% of programs overnight was not reform. It was demolition without a blueprint.

Trump’s diagnosis was not wrong. The multilateral pipeline was compromised structurally. But shutting down the operating room while the patient was still open on the table left the field to the same actors who had corrupted it. Nothing was built in its place. In that vacuum, Hamas regroups. The Houthis consolidate. Every armed actor who profited from the aid economy waits for the spigot to reopen.

But the problem is older than Trump and bigger than USAID. For 60 years, humanitarian aid and conflict resolution have been treated as separate disciplines. That disconnect is what allowed the aid pipeline to become a revenue stream for armed actors.

A recent paper by Hebrew University researchers examined eight conflict zones and found that in the most acute cases, over 80% of aid never reached its intended recipients.

Agencies struck quiet deals with armed groups. Field reports downplayed diversion to protect funding. In Yemen, the WFP uncovered fabricated beneficiary lists and aid sold on the open market. In Gaza, captured Hamas documents show the group directed up to 25% of aid to its military wing. When Israel cut off flows, Hamas couldn’t pay its fighters. The aid wasn’t just stolen. It was the terror economy’s revenue stream.

UNRWA is the crown jewel of this dysfunction. The only refugee agency on earth that grants status by inheritance, with no generational limit. In 1950 it served 750,000 refugees. Today it registers nearly 6 million. Over 2 million hold Jordanian citizenship.

The USAID Inspector General linked three UNRWA employees to the October 7 attacks and affiliated 14 others with Hamas. The Geneva-based UN Watch documented 490 verified cases of employees with documented terror or extremism ties.

Every other refugee population is handled by UNHCR, which works to end refugee status. UNRWA does the opposite. Its mandate runs “until a just and durable solution is found.” Translation: forever.

That disconnect is the gap. And in it, every armed group in the region has learned to thrive.

The UN’s own coordinator for Yemen admitted it last month: “We can take the edge off it, we can save lives, but we cannot stop the underlying dynamic which is creating all these needs.”

That is not a resource problem. It is a missing discipline. Here is what that discipline demands.

Aid in a conflict zone that does not include deradicalization is not neutral. It is assistance to the regime that controls the classrooms.

In Gaza, aid that feeds bodies while Hamas feeds minds is aid to Hamas. In Yemen, food distribution that strengthens Houthi control over who eats is a military operation with a humanitarian label.

Every program should map the conflict economy before a dollar is spent. Who benefits? Which armed actors gain leverage? What is the program doing to shorten the conflict?

Digital tracking from donor to recipient should be standard. The WFP’s Building Blocks system already tracks aid transfers to individual beneficiaries. What is missing is the decision to make it policy. Priority funding should go to organizations that control delivery end to end. When militias block transparency, the response should be suspension, not compliance.

The aid establishment will call this politicizing aid. But aid routed through armed actors is already political. The question is whether we design the politics or let the warlords design it. The organizations that kept their own teams on the ground and refused to hand the keys to local militias should be the blueprint.

Trump saw what the establishment refused to see. But the execution left the patient on the table with no surgeon in the room.

What is needed now is something that has never existed: a framework that treats aid, education, deradicalization, and conflict resolution as one strategy, measured not by how many people it sustains but by how many conflicts it ends.

The aid profession will point to 25 years of “conflict-sensitive” programming. But conflict sensitivity, by its own definition, does not require peace as a goal. It asks aid workers not to make things worse. In the field, practitioners themselves now call it a box-ticking exercise that perpetuates the very system it was supposed to reform. In Arabic, the term was translated as “allergy to conflict.” That is exactly what it became: an architecture for avoidance.

The world spent 60 years and roughly half a trillion dollars learning that aid can feed a war. It spent 25 more learning to be sensitive about it. It has yet to spend a single dollar designing a system to end one.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)