(Wall Street Journal) Rory Jones - Hamas has raised tens of millions of dollars by skimming off humanitarian assistance and taxing economic activity stirred by trade with Gaza, according to independent researchers and current and former Western security officials. International aid "was designed to be humanitarian in nature, but money is fungible, and that also allows Hamas to divert money from providing for its people to support its war machine," said Alex Zerden, a former senior U.S. Treasury national security official. On Wednesday, President Biden announced the U.S. would send $100 million in humanitarian assistance to provide essential needs to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. He warned Hamas not to steal or divert the humanitarian aid. If history is any guide, that will be hard to police. Western intelligence shows that Qatari funding was siphoned off by Hamas for its military operations. The international community, too, funded schools and hospitals run by UN agencies, helping Hamas avoid actually paying for the costs of governing the territory it controls. Western officials say that Iran, besides providing arms and intelligence, has been giving Hamas around $100 million annually in recent years specifically for its military operations. "Iran is complicit in this attack [on Israel] in a broad sense because they have provided the lion's share of the funding for the military wing of Hamas," said U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan. "The international community became ready to help Hamas govern Gaza and they were allowing funds to flow into Hamas' pocket. Everybody knew that," said Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, a former head of research for Israeli military intelligence. "The idea was that we help Hamas govern Gaza so that Hamas will provide some sort of quiet and responsible leadership and they will not be engaged in terror attacks. That was the logic behind it, totally ignoring the fact that Hamas is a terror organization."
2023-10-20 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive