Among other questions raised by the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas should have been how did they pay for it? How did they buy the weapons and supplies? How did they pay for the training? How could they afford to build the huge network of underground tunnels? How is it their leaders can live in luxury hotels far from Gaza?
Jo Becker and Justin Scheck have a devastating report in The NY Times (link through the paywall):
Agents worried as millions poured in. Hamas bought weapons and plotted an attack. The authorities now say the money helped lay the groundwork for the Oct. 7 assault on Israel.
Israeli security officials scored a major intelligence coup in 2018: secret documents that laid out, in intricate detail, what amounted to a private equity fund that Hamas used to finance its operations.
The ledgers, pilfered from the computer of a senior Hamas official, listed assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Hamas controlled mining, chicken farming and road building companies in Sudan, twin skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates, a property developer in Algeria, and a real estate firm listed on the Turkish stock exchange.
The documents, which The New York Times reviewed, were a potential road map for choking off Hamas’s money and thwarting its plans. The agents who obtained the records shared them inside their own government and in Washington.
Nothing happened.
For years, none of the companies named in the ledgers faced sanctions from the United States or Israel. Nobody publicly called out the companies or pressured Turkey, the hub of the financial network, to shut it down.
emphasis added
Read the whole thing.
It’s one more in a series of failures and miscalculations by leaders who were given critical information and failed to understand it and act on it. Everyone was so focused on sanctions on Iran, Hamas was effectively ignored while Hamas pursued terror capitalism. The connections with otherwise legitimate financial actors are insidious — “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints invested tens of thousands of dollars before the company was placed under sanction.”
There’s a year by year account of how the information first surfaced, the growing picture of what was going on, and the missed opportunities to act on the information. It was a question of priorities and fixations that acted to keep effective countermeasures from being implemented.
Following up on this now, based on what’s in the report, is going to be problematic. It looks highly likely that Hamas will continue to be getting hundreds of millions of dollars through this financial network and will use it to rearm.
It’s also worth worrying about how Israel will act on these revelations, given the belated recognition of how important they are to Hamas. It’s doubtful there will be airstrikes on corporate buildings in Turkey, but black ops against the Hamas actors identified in this report are likely.
“Follow the money” will never not be good advice. It’s the perfect terror weapon.
UPDATE: See the related story from 12-10-23: ‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas
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.
UPDATE: One thing is certain. It’s impossible to write anything about this conflict without someone taking issue with it, espousing conspiracy theories, or insisting on their own facts. It’s enough to make a person root for the GIANT METEOR 2024 ticket.
