NEWS
Israel allowed and encouraged Qatari funding of Hamas for years — a month before October 7 it asked for more
July 15, 2026 — Israel/Gaza
The mechanism: how it worked, materially
From 2018 until October 7, 2023, Qatar transferred cash to Gaza — physically, in suitcases, through the Israeli Erez crossing — peaking at around $30-35 million a month. The first shipment, $15 million, arrived in November 2018. According to Israeli sources, Qatar itself asked Netanyahu to put his funding requests in writing, anticipating he might later deny authorizing them. He did not: the Israeli security cabinet meeting that approved the mechanism, in August 2018, is documented, as is the cross-agency support maintained over the years by the IDF, military intelligence, Shin Bet, Mossad and the National Security Council.
The strategic logic: why, not just how
Netanyahu publicly justified the operation as humanitarian necessity — "preventing a disaster in Gaza." But his own March 2019 statement at a party meeting reveals a different calculation: keeping Gaza under Hamas and the West Bank under the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority would prevent any unified Palestinian national movement — and therefore any real possibility of a Palestinian state. Retired Israeli general Shlomo Brom summarized the logic: "One effective way to prevent a two-state solution is to divide the Gaza Strip from the West Bank." The choice had a precise origin: after the 2014 Gaza war, Netanyahu rejected a Saudi offer to rebuild the Strip by removing Hamas and replacing it with the Palestinian Authority — a deal that would have normalized relations with Riyadh — opting instead for the Qatari funding channel, despite repeated Mossad warnings.
How the money reached the weapons: the fungibility mechanism
Between 2012 and 2018 Qatar funneled roughly $1.1 billion into Gaza, officially earmarked for state salaries, fuel, and humanitarian aid. No one claims those funds went directly to Hamas's military wing — but, as a retired senior CIA analyst explained to the New York Times, "money is fungible: anything Hamas didn't have to pay out of its own budget freed up its own funds for other things." It's the same principle by which funding an organization's civilian expenses lets it divert its own resources to whatever that external funding doesn't cover — in this case, according to a Shin Bet investigation published in March, the tunnel network and arsenal used on October 7, 2023.
The attempt to bury accountability
In June 2022, Mossad chief Yossi Cohen publicly called the Qatari channel "a blessing." A month before October 7, in September 2023, Israeli officials met with Qatar's envoy to Gaza, Mohammed al-Emadi, to ask not for a reduction but for an increase in transfers. After the attack, Netanyahu blocked the formation of a state commission of inquiry into the political-security failures that made it possible, and removed Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, who had requested that commission — a removal Israel's Supreme Court ruled "unfair and unlawful."
Legal commentary
This episode does not constitute a single isolated violation of a specific treaty, but falls within the general obligation of states to prevent the financing of terrorist organizations, enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001). Here the obligation was not violated through negligence, but knowingly suspended for declared political calculation — according to the Israeli prime minister's own admission, not an external reconstruction.
Implications — symmetry test
This site has already condemned, without exception, the financing of non-state armed actors when that financing turned against the sponsors themselves or against third-party civilians. In Yemen: 73 UN staff still arbitrarily detained by the Houthis, as Hodeidah bleeds again, we documented how Iran, through the Houthis, supports a proxy that now acts according to its own autonomous agenda — attacks on commercial shipping, missiles against Israel — well beyond Tehran's original mandate. In Mali: army and Russian Africa Corps mercenaries arrange a corpse into a swastika after killing four civilians, we showed how Russia uses a paramilitary actor — the former Wagner Group — that commits systematic violations without Moscow answering for it directly.
The same standard applies here. The fact that October 7's ultimate victims were Israeli citizens does not exempt Israel from having chosen, knowingly and for declared political calculation, to financially fuel the organization that then carried out the massacre — nor from having subsequently tried to obstruct the accounting of its own political responsibility for it. A note of methodological honesty: the history of US sponsorship of proxies that later turned against their own sponsors (from the Afghan mujahideen onward) would deserve the same treatment — a piece of its own, with facts verified one by one, not yet published on this site.
Sources: The Times of Israel · The Times of Israel · CNN · Seattle Times · Haaretz · The Jerusalem Post · TIME · +972 Magazine