https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/11/01/the-blood-money-trail-how-billions-of-dollars-for-hamas-paved-the-way-for-the-massacre-of-october-7/
Sixteen years have elapsed since Hamas took control by force of all the government branches and institutions in the Gaza Strip, and either expelled the Fatah operatives or literally threw them off the rooftops. With the support of international aid organizations, and also to a large extent with the indirect support of Israel, Hamas developed into a governmental terrorist organization.
Various governments in Israel, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the IDF, and Israel’s Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet, saw the blood money trail but were blinded by the conception that Hamas is now an established governmental entity, and as such it has much to lose, and so despite the accumulation of its military capabilities and power – it will avoid the use of them for any murderous purposes. Economic analysts of terrorist organizations with whom we have spoken in recent days have all expressed their deep frustration and anger at this. For years they have been looking at the numbers, and the funding channels, and providing warnings regarding the capital being used to fund Hamas’ militarization. The figures are here for you all to see. In this case, seeing is not believing, but rather “disbelieving”.
The overall annual budget available to the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip amounts to $2-2.5 billion per annum. This is the figure estimated by Yitzhak Gal, an established expert in Middle East economic issues as a whole and the Palestinian economy in particular, who has engaged in comprehensive consulting work regarding the funding of the Hamas regime. This is an enormous amount compared with the size of the economy in the Gaza Strip. It constitutes 65-70 percent of the Gaza Strip’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product = the overall size of the economy). For the sake of comparison, Gal states, the PA’s (Palestinian Authority) budget for Judea and Samaria is slightly over $3 billion, constituting a mere 20 percent of the GDP of that area. And for the sake of further comparison – in Israel, the budget currently accounts for about 25% of the GDP. Following the massacre in the Gaza border communities, in a document published only a week ago by the US Department of the Treasury, the current estimated value of Hamas’ assets is put at hundreds of millions of dollars.
Dr. Udi Levi, a senior analyst at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS), an expert in economic warfare and the person who headed the Counter Terrorism and Proliferation Finance Bureau (which was closed down in 2016), explains: “In the Gaza Strip a portion of falafel costs NIS 5-7, the unemployment rate is at 50% – and so it was clear that the colossal budget run by Hamas was diverted for the purpose of paying workers who built the tunnels, for the procurement of weapons, for training and employing its fighters – and certainly not for the benefit of the civilians there. We saw all the trucks bringing in metals to the Gaza Strip over the years, and all this just to buy a little peace and quiet. I was the one who screamed out against this conception of allowing the money to flow into the Gaza Strip, I claimed that Hamas should have been undermined by facilitating its economic collapse – but none of this worked. But it is still not too late. Even now, by adopting a series of measures that will not harm even one soldier, the Israeli government can economically choke Hamas and Hezbollah, but it needs to take immediate action.”
