Qatar sent millions to Gaza for years – with Israel’s backing. Here’s what we know about the controversial deal
Nima Elbagir Alex Platt
By Nima Elbagir, Barbara Arvanitidis, Alex Platt, Raja Razek, Nadeen Ebrahim, CNN and Uri Blau, Shomrim
Updated 4:16 AM EST, Tue December 12, 2023
Israeli and international media have reported that Netanyahu’s plan to continue allowing aid to reach Gaza through Qatar was in the hope that it might make Hamas an effective counterweight to the PA and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
PA officials said at the time the cash transfers encouraged division between Palestinian factions.
Major General Amos Gilad, a former senior Israeli Defense Ministry official, told CNN the plan was backed by the prime minister, but not by the Israeli intelligence community. There was also some belief that it would “weaken Palestinian sovereignty,” he said. There was also an illusion, he added, that “if you fed them (Hamas) with money, they would be tamed.”
Shlomo Brom, a former deputy to Israel’s national security adviser, told the New York Times that an empowered Hamas helped Netanyahu avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state, saying the division of the Palestinians helped him make the case that he had no partner for peace in the Palestinians, thus avoiding pressure for peace talks that could lead to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
The former State Department official said that after the 2014 war, Israel felt it was better off with Hamas controlling Gaza as opposed to multiple Islamist groups, or leaving it in a political vacuum.
“It was our impression that the Israelis were comfortable with keeping Hamas in power in a weakened form,” the official said. “Our understanding was that Hamas was the lesser of a whole bunch of bad options in Gaza,” the official added, noting that at least the competing PA could keep Hamas out of the West Bank.
Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, told CNN Sunday that after years of flagging his concerns to the Netanyahu government when he was minister of education, he stopped the suitcase cash transfers when he became prime minister in 2021.
“I stopped the cash suitcases because I believe that horrendous mistake – to allow Hamas to have all these suitcases full of cash, that goes directly to reordering themselves against Israelis. Why would we feed them cash to kill us?” Bennett asked.
The cash payments stopped, but the transfer of funds to Gaza continued under Bennett’s leadership, according to the New York Times.
An Israeli official told CNN that any suggestion that Netanyahu wanted to maintain a “moderately weakened” Hamas was “utterly false” and that he had acted to weaken Hamas “significantly.”
“He led three powerful military operations against Hamas which killed thousands of terrorists and senior Hamas commanders,” the official said. “Successive Israeli governments before, during and after Netanyahu’s governments enabled money to go to Gaza. Not in order to strengthen Hamas but to prevent a humanitarian crisis by supporting critical infrastructure, including water and sewage systems to prevent the spread of disease and enable daily life.”
edition.cnn.com
What they fail to mention is that each operation against Hamas was preceded by a Hamas attack facilitated Israel. That is the essence of the terrorism double game played by US, UK, NATO, Israel, etc. In Israel's case, it needs a Palestinian attack in order to justify a military crackdown and the creation of a new buffer zone to expand settlements. |
