‘Buying quiet’: Israel propped up Hamas with Qatari cash
TEL AVIV — Just weeks before Hamas launched the deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the head of Mossad arrived in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting with Qatari officials.
For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.
During his meetings in September with Qatari officials, according to several people familiar with the discussions, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, was asked: Did Israel want the payments to continue?
Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy so Barnea said yes.
Allowing the payments — billions of dollars over roughly a decade — was a gamble by Netanyahu that a steady flow of money would maintain peace in Gaza, the eventual launching point of the Oct. 7 attacks, and keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting.
The Qatari payments, while ostensibly a secret, have been widely known and discussed in the Israeli news media for years. Netanyahu’s critics disparage them as part of a strategy of “buying quiet,” and the policy is in the middle of a ruthless reassessment following the attacks. Netanyahu has lashed back at that criticism, calling the suggestion that he tried to empower Hamas “ridiculous.”
In interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli, US, and Qatari officials, and officials from other Middle Eastern governments, the Times unearthed new details about the the policy.
The payments were part of a string of decisions by Israeli political leaders, military officers, and intelligence officials — all based on the fundamentally flawed assessment that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of a large-scale attack.
Even as the Israeli military obtained battle plans for a Hamas invasion and analysts observed significant terrorism exercises just over the border in Gaza, the payments continued. For years, Israeli intelligence officers even escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases filled with millions of dollars.
The money from Qatar had humanitarian goals including paying government salaries in Gaza. But Israeli intelligence officials now believe that the money had a role in the success of the Oct. 7 attacks, if only because the donations allowed Hamas to divert some of its own budget toward military operations. Separately, Israeli intelligence has long assessed that Qatar uses other channels to secretly fund Hamas’s military wing, an accusation that Qatar has denied.