Hamas has profited by at least a half billion dollars from humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip, Channel 12 reported on Tuesday.
Approximately 200 aid trucks enter the Palestinian enclave daily. “It’s actually become the main oxygen pipeline for the terrorist organization,” reported Channel 12‘s Almog Boker.
Hamas steals the humanitarian aid and sells it to the population. It then uses the money to finance recruitment, Boker said, noting that 3,000 terrorists have been added to Hamas’s payroll in northern Gaza.
Israelis on both right and left have condemned the ongoing aid theft by Hamas, their anger rekindled by last week’s murder of six Israeli hostages in captivity.
The Tzav 9 (“Order 9”) protest group has led the movement against Jerusalem’s decision to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Strip.
“It is up to the entire nation to stand up so that this miserable and intolerable reality will end. We’ve been saying this all along: we cannot on the one hand fight the enemy and on the other hand feed it and give it the oxygen it needs to fight us another day,” the group said.
“We understand the civilians need humanitarian aid and we are not against it—but where Hamas is in place—no aid should pass,” it added.
Although the estimated $500 million that Hamas is reaping was first reported back in May, the government treats the aid as proof of its positive conduct towards Gazan civilians, with spokespeople for the Prime Minister’s Office regularly counting off the number of trucks entering the Strip during press briefings.
However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the issue of Hamas exploiting aid for its benefit at a Sept. 4 press conference in Jerusalem, promising that Israel would in time strip the terrorist group of its ability to use the aid for financial gain.
He noted that Israel has largely deprived Hamas of cash by taking control of the Rafah border crossing, leaving Hamas with humanitarian aid as its only source of funds.
“They don’t have [Rafah]. So we’re choking them. But there’s one thing that they have, which is the distribution of food,” Netanyahu said.
“We let all those trucks come in, and Hamas’s strategy is to steal, hoard and gouge. That’s what they do. … They steal the food. They charge exorbitant prices from the Gazans. And that’s how they continue, [or] they hope to continue, to survive. And we have to take that away from them,” he said.
The prime minister did not provide a timeline for when that would occur.
The Israeli government has been under pressure from the Biden administration to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza from the war’s start, with President Joe Biden promising that if aid ended up in the hands of Hamas it would cease.
Nevertheless, the White House has continued pressuring Israel to increase the flow despite admitting publicly that Hamas—a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization—seizes much of the aid.
On June 14, the U.S. State Department sanctioned Tzav 9, which it called “a violent extremist Israeli group that has been blocking, harassing and damaging convoys carrying lifesaving humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
The State Department said that the Israeli government “has a responsibility to ensure the safety and security of humanitarian convoys,” calling the aid “vital to preventing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza from worsening and to mitigating the risk of famine.”
