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21-02-2024
JERUSALEM/ RAFAH: Israel’s Prime Minister missed the chance to starve Hamas of cash, years before its murderous attack last October, according to a former senior Israeli intelligence officer.
Udi Levy has told media he advised Benjamin Netanyahu to target Hamas’s finances.
He believes this would have hampered the group’s military build-up, but says the intelligence was not acted upon.
The Israeli prime minister’s office has not responded to the allegations.
Hamas gunmen killed about 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages on 7 October last year, when they crossed into southern Israel. One hundred and thirty hostages remain unaccounted for.
Israel’s military response has killed 29,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.
Levy – who was head of economic warfare in the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, until 2016, says he told Netanyahu many times that Israel had the means to crush Hamas, which controls Gaza, “by using only financial tools”.
Levy says he never got a response to his proposal from Netanyahu.
When asked if he considered there was a connection between Netanyahu’s alleged reluctance to deal with Hamas’s finances and the 7 October attack, Levy is unequivocal.
“Yes, of course,” he says. “There is a very good chance that… we would [have] prevent[ed] a lot of the money” that had gone into Gaza, and that “the monster that Hamas built probably [wouldn’t be] like the same monster that we faced on October 7th.”
Hamas would have needed “billions, not millions” of dollars, says the former spy chief, to build hundreds of kilometres of tunnels underneath Gaza and pay for an estimated 30,000-strong military force.
One specific funding stream, which Levy says he raised with Netanyahu in 2014, was an alleged multi-million-dollar investment portfolio which Israeli intelligence said was controlled by Hamas and managed out of Turkey.
Levy says that Netanyahu chose not to act on the information.
Hamas, which rejects Israel’s right to exist and is committed to its destruction, is much more than just a military force. It’s a political movement with financial support extending well beyond Gaza.
“We spoke about Qatar and Iran as the main sponsors,” says Levy of his conversations with Netanyahu. “Turkey is even, in some aspect, more important because it is a critical focal point for Hamas to manage [its] financial infrastructure.”
Panorama has been investigating documents, which had been acquired in 2020, said to reveal the extent of Hamas’s investment portfolio. They are a snapshot of an eight-month period that ends in early 2018. Israeli intelligence says they show how Hamas makes some of its money. (Int’l News Desk)
