How Israel Fostered and Funded Hamas

While Israel has been enacting a genocide against Palestinians, discourse around the broader Israel-Palestine conflict has become increasingly muddled. One of the main aspects of this discourse is the reductive view on the actors involved, stifling the acknowledgement of their complex interests, relations, and means of actions. In light of the recent Israeli bombardments of Qatar, one such subject has returned to the spotlight in online public discourse: Israeli involvement in the financing and strengthening of Hamas. By retracing the links between Hamas and Israel’s politics, from Hamas’ inception up until now, focusing on money flows and political support, some more light can be shed on this subject.

Israel’s support starts where Hamas begins: in the network of Ahmed Yassin, a Muslim Brotherhood-adjacent official who fostered opposition to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Mostly made up of members of his Mujama Al-Islamiya charity organization, Yassin’s network pleased the Israeli government by undermining PLO authority, especially in the Gaza Strip. Notable examples of this include the January 1980 riots during which Mujama Al-Islamiya members targeted leftist Palestinians, civilians they deemed “immoral” and the Red Crescent, whose office and library they burned. Testimonies have come forward claiming that Israeli governance of these territories sustained Mujama Al-Islamiya by avoiding any repression of the movement and favoring the organisation in its political conflict with the PLO. For example, they allegedly fired on purpose Board members of the Islamic University of Gaza opposed to Mujama Al-Islamiya’s more extremist and conservative religious views. The former Israeli governor of the Gaza Strip, Yitzhak Segev, only admitted to receiving funds from his government with the orders to redistribute it to Mujama Al-Islamiya. Yitzhak Mordechai, Head of the Southern Command from 1986 to 1989, was quoted by Israeli historian Uri Milstein as admitting to Israeli strategists’ support for Yassin’s network.

Ahmed Yassin’s network reformed itself during the first Intifada, becoming Hamas, and continued to benefit from a singular absence of Israeli crackdowns in a period rife with such practices. This tolerance stopped abruptly in 1989 when Hamas started overtly claiming attacks on Israelis. The following period includes a multitude of leaks and testimonies depicting the Israeli government, especially under the various Netanayahu administrations, as supportive of the Hamas takeover of the Strip. This included financing. In 1998, Netanyahu met with Mesut Yilmaz, the then-Turkish Prime Minister. Yilmaz was accompanied by Fevzi İsbasaran, a politician of long-lasting career, who later quoted Netanayahu offering Turkey to invest in Hamas’ bank accounts rather than the Palestinian Authority’s (PA). But it also meant consciously avoiding disrupting already established Hamas financing networks. In 2015, “Task Force Harpoon,” an Israeli financial investigative team, discovered a network of businesses and investments benefitting and owned by Hamas. The Israeli government was briefed by the terrorism finance task force, but no actions were taken. Diverging accounts, notably by the Times of Israel, pushed the discovery of the financing network to 2018, but this changes nothing in substance.

Indeed, no matter the intricacies of the designs, the double feature of financing and avoiding crackdowns on Hamas obeyed a general strategy of Israel. This strategy is best summed up by the following 2007 statement by Amos Yadlin, former general of the Air Force of Israel, revealed in a 2010 WikiLeak publication: “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.” Hamas violently took over the Gaza Strip a few days later. This quote will be referenced once more later on; focus will now be put on the final great sequence in Israeli financing of Hamas.

Qatar started sending money to the Gaza Strip on a monthly basis in 2018. Fifteen million dollars in cash were transported by suitcases into Gaza by the Qataris via Israel. The payments allegedly started after the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority’s decision to cut government salaries in Hamas-run Gaza. Israel accepted the Qatar-Hamas fund agreement despite PA objections. Later that same year, Meir Ben-Shabbat, (then National Security Advisor), received a note written in Hebrew by Yahya Sinwar (leader of Hamas) addressed to Netanyahu, titled “Calculated risk.” The note was part of Sinwar’s attempt to portray Hamas as open to a long-term truce. It also referred to the use of Qatari funds for government salaries and families in need.

The issue within this plan, which fostered criticism toward Netanayahu, was not humanitarian funds themselves, but the lack of fund usage verification, and his continued petitioning toward Qatar to continue the funding despite worrisome reports about Hamas activity. In February 2020, former Mossad Director Yossi Cohen and Israeli general Herzi Halevi, went to Qatar to plead for further payments for Hamas.Then, in September 2023, the Director of Mossad, David Barnea, went to Qatar to discuss the payments for Hamas. All of this occurred despite forewarning signals of Hamas’ October 7 attacks. A document titled “Detailed End-to-End Raid Training,” was distributed within the IDF in September 2023, describing in detail the series of exercises conducted by Hamas in preparation of a coordinated assault, as reported by Israeli news sources.

Overall, these events show the complexity and interconnection of actors involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict, which must be taken into account to better understand the succession of events, from the Intifada, the Gaza Civil War all the way to the October 7 attacks and the ongoing genocide.

The prevalent interpretation of this Israeli strategy is the “divide-to-conquer” approach. That is, the idea that fostering conservative extremism, the political antithesis to the secular nationalist leftism that has driven most of the Palestinian anticolonial fight for freedom, would allow Israel to weaken Palestinian factions. This would drive a wedge both politically (Fatah vs. Hamas) and geographically (West Bank and Gaza Strip) between the remaining Palestinian territories, strengthening Israel’s own apartheid policy. Fostering a conservative-extremist opponent also opened to the Israeli government new opportunities to attempt legitimization of their (unlawful) violence against Palestinians. The aforementioned statement by Yadlin on treating Gaza as an “hostile state” also points to this direction. Finally, in contrast to the relative normalization of the PA in global diplomacy, having a conservative religious opponent allows the hijacking of political discourse by using vocabulary and perspectives inherited from the “War on Terror,” falsely justifying actions based on “no leniency” policies. This leads to lack of distinction between civilians and armed forces, disregard for international law, mass murder of journalists and humanitarian workers,etc., which are all key elements of the ongoing genocide.