Qatar provides Hamas a legitimate channel for its own money

For the past ten years, Hamas has been struggling to find ways to channel funds into the Gaza strip. The main reason for this difficulty was Hamas’ status as a terrorist entity. Indeed, rather than taking care of the growing humanitarian catastrophe and economic crisis, Hamas preferred to divert these funds toward maintaining and developing its terrorist infrastructure, pay its operatives, procuring weapons and equipment and for further development of Hamas’ military tunneling project. In an attempt to solve the Palestinian terrorist organization’s difficulties to transfer funds to Gaza, Khaled Mashaal, Hamas’ political leader, has made repeated appeals to his Qatari patrons. The solution found was that Qatar would transfer Hamas’ funds disguising it is a “donation” made to the Gaza Strip in wake of the rising Israeli-Hamas tension.

In recent months we are witnessing a repeat of this scheme. For the past year the Palestinian terror organization, Hamas, has received substantial aid in funds from Qatar that, at least publicly, are benchmarked in order to rebuild the Gaza Strip’s failing infrastructure.

The aid from Qatar, totaling the amount of 180 million dollars is divided to several payments. Three such payments were already delivered in cash into Gaza by a special envoy from Qatar – Muhammad el Amadi.

In reality, the money that the Qataris are bringing into Gaza is Hamas’ own. The origin of this funds is derived from Hamas’ own financial resources – real-estate, communications and investments. These funds are accumulated and waiting in various bank accounts in the middle east which the Qataris agreed to handle and transfer to Hamas in exchange for a large commission and for further bolstering Qatar’s own image as the protector of the Palestinian cause.

In this way, Hamas succeeds to transfer its own money and further fund its terrorist agenda using Qatar.