Israel and Netanyahu did not finance or create Hamas

لا يتفق المسؤولون ... في تصريح نشرته نيويورك تايمز عام 2009: "إسرائيل لم تمول حماس قط، وإسرائيل لم تسلح حماس قط.....

ونفى نتنياهو مؤخرا الاتهامات بأنه دعم "حماس" من خلال إعطاء الضوء الأخضر للتمويل القطري.

(CNN)—عبّرت السلطات ... الدوحة للفلسطينيين في قطاع غزة نافية تقديم أي مبالغ مالية لحركة حماس....

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, ... sums of financial aid by Qatar to the organization. Several Israeli intelligence officials have cited Qatari money as a contributing factor to the success of Hamas in leading the October 7 attacks in 2023; Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called ...

Netanyahu told him that having ... Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state". Just weeks before 7 October, the head of Mossad told Qatari officials that "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them." On 19 January 2024, Reuters reported that Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said while receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Valladolid that "Israel had financed the creation ...

The Times did not mention that ... by the Israeli military, noting they resembled previous Hamas documents. When Drop Site News asked which documents the Times was referring to, they did not respond. UNRWA spokesperson Tamara Alrifai criticized the story, saying it fed into a narrative of UNRWA being a Hamas front, despite repeated debunking of such claims...

The problem with it was not that ... opposite. But the truces pushed by Obama had made that the default plan. Israel, however, was not financing Hamas....

Under Obama, Hamas attacks and Israeli responses tended to end in “truces” negotiated by Egypt. In these truces, Israel would trade some benefits for an end to the violence. Social media has passed around a claim taken from an article in the ultra-left Haaretz about Netanyahu funding Hamas.

Tony Cordesman, a Middle East analyst ... Al-Mujamma’ al-Islami, established in Gaza by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, came directly from oil-producing countries and from Israel....

Not only does Borrell claim that Israel allowed for Qatari funding to Gaza, but he also implies that this amounted to Israel financing Hamas. This misrepresentation of history is unsubstantiated and misleading. The earliest insinuations of the “Israel created Hamas” myth come from figures close to Israel’s intelligence and military establishment, including Segev and his aforementioned remarks about the Israeli government allocating funds to the mosques during the nascent Islamic Movement’s mosque-building phase.

Josep Borrell, the former European Union foreign policy chief, remarked in 2024: “Yes, Hamas was financed by the government of Israel in an attempt to weaken the Palestinian Authority led by Fatah.” · Not only does Borrell claim that Israel ...

The short answer: Israel did not formally "fund" Hamas as a policymaking intent to create or arm the group, but Israeli decisions over decades—explicitly permitting Qatari cash transfers into Gaza, covertly engaging with Islamist social networks in the 1980s, and tolerating gaps in financial ...