Israel’s Big New Shift in Hamas Policy

Beginning in 2018, Qatar’s envoy traveled with millions of dollars packed neatly in Louis Vuitton suitcases from Doha to the Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv and was escorted to the Gaza Strip by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. Yossi Cohen, former Mossad chief, even visited Qatar to iron out the details of the arrangement and encouraged the Qataris to keep the dollars coming. The cash purchased fuel for the besieged strip’s only power plant, funded infrastructure projects, and provided a monthly stipend of $100 to thousands of impoverished Palestinian families.

Israeli intelligence officials, however, say they knew that Hamas—the Palestinian group that runs a de-facto government in Gaza but is treated by Israel and the United States as a terrorist group—siphoned off the funds. The thinking was that Qatari cash would keep Hamas quiet—that it would essentially buy them off from firing rockets at Israel’s southern cities.

But the policy seems to have backfired, several former Israeli officials told Foreign Policy. “Did the Qatari procedure work for us? We don’t think so,” said Col Eran Lerman, former deputy national security adviser of the country.

In the recent war with Hamas, Israelis were caught off guard by the group’s ability to hit deep inside Israeli cities, with not just Tel Aviv but Jerusalem within their reach. The group fired 4,360 rockets over a period of 11 days, four times more than it did in the 50-day war in 2014. For a brief period, the rockets overwhelmed Israel’s Iron dome missile-defense system. Moreover, despite a rigorous surveillance routine by Israel, Hamas has built a much more intricate maze of tunnels under the coastal enclave to hide its arsenal.

Israelis claim they destroyed much of Hamas’s ammunition and bunkers in 2014. The revival of Hamas’s facilities, assert the Israelis, could only have happened with Qatari money. They suspect that a large portion of the Qatari cash was used by Hamas to replenish the armory and to purchase materials to expand its tunnel network.

Last week Israel refused to allow Qatar’s monthly aid of $30 million to be directly delivered to Gaza. Hamas quickly responded with a threat that they would reconsider the ceasefire. But the Israelis are now determined to rework their strategy. Instead of cash for calm, it’s now planning to use reconstruction funds as leverage against Hamas’s rearmament.

There is support for such ideas among American policymakers, especially since the international community seems fatigued with investing in rebuilding Gaza’s infrastructure if it is destined to be destroyed in airstrikes a few years later. Ambassador David Ross, an American diplomat who has worked on shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East under four presidents including on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, holds Hamas responsible for destruction in Gaza. He said that no one is going to invest in major reconstruction that will be jeopardized the next time Hamas decides it has something to gain politically by launching rockets into Israel. “An equation needs to be created which essentially says: Reconstruction for no rearmament,” said Ross.

He added that Hamas has been redirecting construction materials towards its own purposes at the cost of the donors and the people of Gaza. “The problem with not having control over the material that goes into Gaza, where it is stored, and then how it is delivered to construction sites, is that Hamas will divert materials for its purposes of rebuilding its underground tunnel network and rearming. Look at what it did after 2014,” Ross said. “It increased its rocket-fire by tenfold from 2014 to 2021. It built an underground tunnel network—one so extensive that Israel destroyed 60 miles of it and that is only a fraction of what Hamas secretly constructed. They used enormous amounts of cement, steel, electrical wiring, and wood—all of which was desperately needed for above-ground construction in impoverished Gaza.”

Human-rights activists and aid organizations, however, warned that such a policy might not achieve the desired objective and only end up prolonging the misery of the Palestinian people.

* Anchal Vohra, a Beirut-based columnist for Foreign Policy and a freelance TV correspondent and commentator on the Middle East