The head of Sida, Sweden’s foreign aid agency, Jakob Granit, will be summoned to appear at a parliamentary hearing following revelations that his organization gave millions of dollars to a Palestinian group with ties to Hamas, a senior lawmaker in Stockholm said on Sunday.
Mattias Karlsson of the right-wing Sweden Democrats party, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Swedish Parliament, announced the move in the Expressen newspaper.
The hearing is intended to answer questions on whether funding by Sida for a group called the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) went to Hamas.
“Either Sida has not had control or they have actively turned a blind eye to the dangers. In both cases, it is unacceptable,” wrote Karlsson. Either way, “this is a national scandal,” he said.
The summons follows the revelation last month by Sweden’s Cabinet minister for development cooperation, Benjamin Dousa, that Sida had funded ICHR, a group established by former PLO chairman Yasser Arafat.
The group “regularly collaborates with and has demonstrated its support for ... Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ),” according to the Jerusalem-based watchdog group NGO Monitor.
NGO Monitor has known for years of Swedish government funding for ICHR, but the issue only recently came up for high-level discussions in the Swedish government.
Granit last month said following the revelations: “We are now reviewing all relevant documentation and previous assessments again to ensure that Swedish aid does not finance terrorism.”
Denmark, Granit added, “is now leading an investigation together with Sida, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway and Switzerland, to assess whether any irregularities have occurred within this support.”
Dousa, the minister, claimed that the money had been paid out to ICHR through Sida during the years 2011–2025, and amounted to about $5.5 million. The money may have been used, among other things, by Hamas to train police officers, according to Dousa. It is also said to have been used to organize panel discussions in which Hamas and Islamic Jihad participated, Dousa told Aftonbladet last month.
“I am responsible and I take full responsibility for this and that is why we will also act. We will not allow any Swedish tax money to end up in the hands of terrorists or in the vicinity of terrorists,” Dousa told the newspaper.
In August 2021, ICHR hosted representatives from several Palestinian terrorist groups for a panel discussion, including Hamas’ Khalil al-Haya, PIJ’s Khader Habib, PFLP’s Kayed al-Ghoul and Zaki Dababish of the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces (PNIF, an umbrella organization that includes these terror groups,) according to NGO Monitor.
In June 2021, senior Hamas member Muhammed Faraj al-Ghoul visited ICHR’s offices to discuss efforts to encourage an International Criminal Court investigation of Israeli officials, NGO Monitor also showed.
