Israel asked Qatar to increase the financial assistance it was giving to Gaza one month before the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacre, the Yedioth Aharonoth daily reported Friday.
In September 2023, Israeli officials met at a Jerusalem hotel with Mohammed al-Emadi, the Qatari envoy to Gaza, who oversaw the delivery of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from Qatar to Gaza between 2018 and 2021, the report said. There, they asked him to increase the amount of fuel purchased from Egypt by Doha for the benefit of Gaza’s Hamas government.
Qatar, since 2021, had been purchasing fuel from Egypt, which it would then gift to Hamas in Gaza. The fuel was then sold by the terror group to gas stations inside the Strip, thus bringing money to the regime to pay its own officials and commanders.
Israel was a tacit party to the arrangement, which allowed it to avoid directly funding the terror group’s government while still propping it up to keep the Strip stable.
About a month before al-Emadi’s meeting in Jerusalem, the Qatari diplomat visited the Strip to meet with then-Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar.
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The terror leader, like Israel would the following month, asked al-Emadi to increase Doha’s fuel purchases from $3 million a month to $7 million a month. Al-Emadi told Sinwar that Qatar wasn’t willing to do that, according to the report.
Palestinian rioters clash with Israeli soldiers at the Israel-Gaza border barrier, east of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on September 17, 2023. (Yousef Mohammed/ Flash90)
A month later, however, Israel would also ask the Qatari diplomat to increase the purchases, as part of an emerging deal with Hamas to put a stop to a new round of the “March of Return” riots at the Gaza-Israel border, the newspaper claimed.
Those demonstrations — reminiscent of weekly protests from 2018-2019 that frequently included violence — were interpreted by Israeli security agencies as a pressure tactic by Hamas to force economic concessions from Israel that would bolster the status quo in exchange for quiet, according to the report.
Deepening poverty had led thousands of Gazans to take to the streets over the summer, in a rare expression of popular discontent that was rapidly suppressed by the ruling terror group.
In retrospect, Hamas is understood to have undertaken efforts precisely to lull Israel into complacency ahead of the terror group’s impending murderous rampage and hostage-taking operation.
At the Jerusalem meeting, al-Emadi told Israeli representatives he could not, on the spot, confirm Doha’s willingness to increase the fuel purchases, as Sinwar – and now Israel – had requested, according to the report.
Some time after the meeting and before October 7, Mossad Chief David Barnea traveled to the Qatari capital, where he requested that Doha continue payments to Gaza, according to a New York Times report from December 2023.
People waving Palestinian flags walk toward the Imam Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab Mosque in Doha to pay respects to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh after his killing in Tehran earlier that week, August 2, 2024. (Karim Jaafar/AFP)
Qatar provided tens of millions of dollars in cash to Gaza every month from 2018 until the October 7, 2023, attack, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
The payments were publicly encouraged by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a means to prevent a humanitarian disaster in the Strip.
He has since denied that the money sent by Qatar to Gaza at Israel’s request was used to fund the October 7 attacks, despite having reportedly been warned at least twice before the Hamas onslaught that the terror group’s military chief, Muhammad Deif, was appropriating funds with the premier’s approval.
Qatar’s role in supporting Hamas has become a major issue in Israel since the October 7 attack triggered the subsequent regional war.
The questions have been compounded by an active criminal investigation into alleged illicit ties between Doha and some of Netanyahu’s top aides, who are suspected of spearheading a pro-Qatari public relations campaign during the war.
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